Tuskers in trouble - man and elephant battle for survival (India)
Tuskers in trouble - man and elephant battle for survival (India)
London Telegraph
April 1, 2010
Viscous blood coloured the tender shoots, the stain on the soil like a map. A thin banana farmer stood on a bank of the fast-flowing Kalindi.
'I didn’t want to kill it,’ Chami said in the lurching staccato of Malayalam. 'But what can I do?’ He raised his eyebrows, bony fingers wringing a torn lunghi. 'Three times this elephant destroyed my crop.’ He had tapped a power cable to electrocute the elephant as it returned for a fourth session. Currently out on bail, if found guilty Chami faces a minimum of three years in jail.
In a teak forest less than a mile from Chami’s plot, Mark Shand bent over a chart spread on the bonnet of a shiny jeep. A passionate English buccaneer, Shand, the brother of the Duchess of Cornwall, was planning the next stage of his campaign to preserve a vital elephant migration route. Like Chami (both men are 58), Shand has a long history with elephants.
'The Asian elephant is at an all time-low,’ he boomed, swinging an arm as if it might be a trunk. 'I predict extinction if we don’t do something to secure its shrinking habitat. Can we really allow this magnificent beast to vanish on our watch?’
This is not a story of good against evil. It is more complex. It is about poor people and an endangered species, each fighting for survival in a shrinking environment.
India’s 29,000 elephants compete with 1.2 billion people. First agriculture shrank the forests, then a shifting zeitgeist compelled Congress to ban both hunting and the capture of wild elephants: a double whammy that resulted in more animals and less space.
Elephants deprived of traditional feeding grounds took to crop invasion, hungry farmers retaliated. Elephants kill 200-300 Indians a year. Up in the West Garo hills of Meghalaya I once saw rioting villagers brandishing flaming torches on the streets after elephants had trampled four children to death.
Shand became involved in the late 1980s. On a whim, he bought an emaciated captive elephant, christened her Tara and rode her 750 miles from Konarak on the Bay of Bengal to the Sonepur Mela, the ancient elephant trading fair on the Ganges at Patna. Travels with My Elephant, the best-selling book that emerged from the trip, recounts an unlikely love story.
'My mouth went dry,’ Shand wrote of the moment he first saw Tara. 'I knew then that I had to have her.’ It would make a wonderful film. Producers have come knocking, but Shand is determined to keep control. He and his business partner, Robert Laycock, are in dialogue with Bollywood funders and have a 'fantastic’ finished script by Sooni Taraporevala, who has written for Mira Nair.
An ex-playboy of the Imran Khan set, Shand’s former lovers include Marie Helvin, who wrote that he was in possession of 'the most beautiful body I’d ever seen’. The pecs are a bit saggy these days, but he still has it. Shand was formerly married to Clio Goldsmith, the late Sir James Goldsmith’s niece; they have a teenage daughter, Ayesha. Although he is based in London he travels widely on filmmaking assignments, and fits in as many visits as possible to Tara at her retirement home, Kipling Camp, on the edge of the Kanha Tiger Reserve in central India.
For his next book, Queen of the Elephants, he qualified as a mahout, or elephant-handler, learning the language evolved from Sanskrit and mounting his charge via the trunk. In Travels he had noted that 'The Indian elephant was running out of living space.’ By Queen four years later he was witnessing open warfare.
'It was the first time I had seen these majestic animals reduced to cumbersome thieves,’ he wrote. 'Stripped of their forest and dignity, they ran like rabbits in headlights.’
Horrified at what he had seen, Shand returned to London and founded the charity Elephant Family. 'Actually it wasn’t me who founded it,’ he said. 'It was Tara.’ Hokey anthropomorphism may be cloying, but you can’t blame Shand for using every fundraising weapon in his arsenal.
'Look,’ he said on the first leg of our Indian field trip, 'Elephant Family is the only British charity dedicated solely to the Asian elephant. There are only 50,000 of them, compared with half a million African ones. Yet bigger, uglier African elephants grab all the attention.’
Shand realised that the erosion of migration routes lay at the heart of the problem. Elephants eat so much that they have to keep moving – they are social nomads. Herds have followed the same routes for centuries. If their passage is blocked, they seek food elsewhere – among crops. Preserving the corridors between habitats has become crucial for both sides in the battle for land in India.
The south-western state of Kerala on the Malabar Coast is defined by the Western Ghats, the sinuous mountain range that for centuries protected Kerala from mainland invaders. Top of many human development indices – life expectancy, reduction of rural poverty – and with low rates of infant mortality, the state also boasts the highest literacy rate in India (91 per cent).
Shand and I were headed for the Wayanad highlands in the far north-east of Kerala, a landscape of rosewood groves, rice paddies and misty peaks. Although the region is patchworked with rubber and tea plantations, swaths of deciduous secondary forest remain intact and, as a result, Wayanad hosts the largest single elephant population in Asia.
In the heart of Wayanad, the fertile Thirunelli district is known for cardamom, cashews and multitudinous banana species (Malayalam has as many words for banana as Inuktitut has for ice). The land is pocketed with modest farm holdings and roadside stalls pedalling jaggery (sugar) to pilgrims on their way to the Vishnu temple on the Thirunelli escarpment.
This is the world conjured by RK Narayan, India’s greatest English-language novelist. Often, while I was travelling through those remote settlements, I glimpsed a character from Narayan’s Malgudi: a woman harvesting jackfruit or a youth shinnying up a 100ft trunk to harvest betel nuts with a kukri knife bandaged to a pole.
But Thirunelli, with its dense bamboo groves, is a hot spot of elephant-human conflict, especially around the crucial migration corridor linking the Nilgiri Hills to the south with the much smaller Brahmagiri Hills to the north.
After a serpentine five-hour drive from the coast along a vertiginous slope, we arrived at Thirunelli. There Shand and I met up with Vivek Menon, the founder of the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI). The two men met in India through mutual conservation interests more than a decade back, and Menon is now in charge of implementing Shand’s elephant initiatives in India. Menon had just flown down from Delhi to join WTI field officers working on a long-term project to protect a migration corridor.
As we drove into the jungle, sharp rays filtered through the bamboo hatchings, dappling stands of turmeric. A troop of langur monkeys swung between yellow laburnum blooms, and a mongoose darted behind a termite mound.
'The migration route through here is one of the most imperilled in the country,’ Menon said.
A tall, mustachioed figure, Menon is the son of the engineer who designed the fabled Ambassador car, long a fixture of urban India. ('As a child I rode in one of the prototypes,’ Menon recalled as we bumped through the jungle. 'I said to Dad, “Everything in this car makes a noise except the horn.”?’)
Having trained as an ornithologist, Menon junior worked his way up the hierarchy of the Indian World Wildlife Fund before leaving to found WTI from his spare bedroom. Eleven years later, the organisation employs 150 staff and has more conservation projects on the go than any other NGO in India.
But foreign funding accounts for 80 per cent of revenues, and, as Menon admitted, 'It’s still a hard sell. When people think of India they don’t think of wildlife. They think of swami and the Himalaya.
'The elephant has a totally different cultural role here,’ Menon went on, 'which is partly why we’ve never gone down the culling route like South Africa. In India you don’t sell your mother, your wife or your elephant.’
Reserves, the Elastoplast conservation solution for large, endangered mammals, have a mixed record, and anyway compete for priority: newly discovered coal deposits in Chhattisgarh are currently threatening a planned sanctuary to check rising human-elephant conflict in that region.
Population growth, industrial development, poverty, political incompetence, corruption – everything is stacked against the Asian elephant. Small wonder that hardly a day goes by without a gory story appearing in the papers somewhere in India reporting on hungry, marauding tuskers killing people in their desperate search for food. Small wonder too that farmers such as Chami take the law into their own hands.
The author of half a dozen influential books on the politics of conservation, in the 1990s Menon focused on poaching, going undercover in Japan and China for two years to expose illegal ivory trading. 'Legislation has reduced poaching. So now we are concentrating on conflict-killing, and trying to reduce it by creating a safe space for both elephants and people,’ he said.
Menon suddenly asked the driver to cut the engine. He had spotted pug marks. 'Young male,’ he whispered. The silence of the forest was broken only by the sound of an elephant trunk cracking bamboo. Then we heard the low trumpeting of a ship leaving port, and a tusker crashed through the rosewood, ears flapping with regal indifference. Its horny bulk blocked the sun.
'Mock charge,’ muttered Menon calmly. We watched. A blue-winged Malabar parakeet streaked across the glade in an iridescent flash. After a few minutes, the elephant backed into a glade of lilies, executed a slow three-point turn, and vanished back into the forest.
Elephant Family is working in partnership with WTI to secure the 42-mile Thirunelli-Kudrakote corridor, a vital funnel route for elephants, only half a mile wide at its narrowest point.
'The preservation of an elephant corridor is complex in scope, size and scale,’ Menon said. 'First you have to get the state to declare the land an official corridor, then establish a field office and put men in to get to know the communities, find out what they want. Third, you have to relocate some of the people living within the corridor.’
Relocating is notoriously difficult, painstaking and expensive; but it is possible. Although a family or group of families will be moved only a few miles, each unit is methodically assessed for up to a year to ensure an official will be met in the new environment. We visited one of the first successful Malayalee relocations: a community of families who four years ago, with WTI assistance, shifted from Thirulakunnu, which was in the middle of the elephants’ route.
On the front porch of a tiled bungalow, a carpet of coffee beans lay drying under a satellite dish. Inside, Kaliawa, the chatelaine, pointed out amenities, her tough hands closely patterned with henna.
'I like it much better here,’ she said, 'though I miss the moving water [the river]. Our new house is nearer the market where we sell our crops. And we got three bullock-loads more coffee this year.’ She eyed her four unmarried daughters sashaying in the yard for the Telegraph photographer. 'We work with each family to design the accommodation, also to provide social facilities, such as clinics or schools,’ Menon said later.
At the relocated Valiya Emmadi community five miles away, a sequence of more compact bungalows sloped between neat rows of amaryllis. Coffee bushes and pepper vines extended up the hill behind. As we sipped tiny glasses of sugary ginger tea, I asked Menon why such a small settlement had two wells.
'Tribal and non-tribal,’ he said. 'They won’t share a well.’
Malayalee talk proudly of their state’s religious pluralism, omitting to mention the plight of its economically disfranchised tribal peoples. After Bihar and Orissa, Kerala has a larger tribal population than any other state (1.1 per cent of almost 32 million). 'It’s hard to break down taboos,’ Menon said as we moved off. 'A recent dung-fuelled biogas project failed as the two groups refused to share the other’s animal dung.’
Two years ago Congress passed an act to protect tribal communities by granting each adult a hectare of land. (Some environmentalists said the legislation represented 'the end of the elephant’.) But as Shand said, tribal peoples gained little, as, to garner more votes, Congress altered the terms of the act to make it apply to all forest dwellers. 'Misuse of this law is a disaster,’ Shand said.
'Only five per cent of those who apply for protection are tribals. The rest are forest-dwellers and chancers.’
On the way back to camp I asked Menon how he managed to focus on animals when Oriya mothers were feeding their babies roasted mud so they didn’t cry out with hunger as they died. His face twisted in the late afternoon light. 'With grave difficulty,’ he replied. Later, he told me he found solace in the Hindu concept of acceptance.
The success of WTI relocations have made an impact in the Indian media. But sustained funding is crucial. 'A relocation is a five-year project, minimum, and you can’t stop halfway through where people are involved,’ Shand said.
As his most ambitious fundraiser to date, he is about to stage Britain’s largest ever public art exhibition. In May 250 60in tall fibreglass elephants will stand on plinths across London, only to vanish mysteriously overnight later in the summer in a cunning representation of extinction. Each animal will be decorated by an artist or celebrity – Jack Vettriano, Diane von Furstenberg and Lulu Guinness have signed up, as have Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. The models will later be auctioned.
Major donors include Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and Joanna Lumley, and business sponsors include Lalit Modi and the Indian cricket Premier League.
The organising committee reads like Shand’s top toffs address book, from the Duchess of York to Zac Goldsmith via Lord Frederick Windsor. It puts one off, somewhat; but the elephants aren’t to blame. The project was inspired by a similar event in Rotterdam in 2007. The Dutch organisers, Mark and Mike Spits, father-and-son marketeers, auctioned the models to the tune of almost £750,000. 'That success proves people are insistent on keeping the elephant in this world,’ Mike Spits said.
Meanwhile Chami, the banana farmer who electrocuted the elephant he found tearing up his livelihood, is still awaiting trial. He will plead guilty. He is the sole breadwinner in a family of nine.
On the long drive back to camp, Menon, Shand and I discussed the prospects for Chami’s wife and children if, as seems likely, he gets banged up. Was it really possible to protect the likes of this farmer, and to allow the wild Asian elephant to thrive unmolested?
At that moment, I had my doubts. But as Shand said, can we let this majestic animal become extinct on our watch? In the last westering rays of sun, a matriarch and her calf were chewing bamboo. On the other side of the road, a few hundred yards off, a man led a bullock through a freshly harvested paddy field. We stopped. An air of unearthly calm overlay the scene. The elephant raised her head, the profile of the trunk sharp against the setting sun.
'No need for words here,’ Menon said. 'The landscape speaks for itself.’
And it did.
• Elephant Parade takes place across London from May-July (elephantparadelondon.org).
• Mystic India offers an 'Elephant Parade Tour’ to India from £2,395pp (020-7931 8273; mysticindia.co.uk)
