India Has a Jumbo Problem

It can take a month to break a wild elephant’s will, and with every day he resists, thick ropes cut deeper into his leathery skin.

This captive is about 13 years old, still a kid. But he weighs more than 4 tons and can easily kill a man. His ivory tusks are a foot long, just enough for the struggling elephant to hook under one of the ropes that bind him to trees in a forestry officer’s compound. When a sharp tug barely nudges the line running from his neck, the beast lets out a long, rumbling growl from deep in the pit of his stomach, and then a shorter one.

“He’s crying,” said Jogen Rabha, chief of the nine-man team that caught him. “He’s missing his folks. We also feel bad, but we’re just doing our duty. Once he’s through all of his training, maybe in two or three years, he’ll be part of our family. But not before that.”

Rabha and his men chased down and lassoed the adolescent on state government orders because it was part of a herd terrorizing local villagers.

The competition for living space between more than 1 billion Indians and the country’s estimated 28,000 Asian elephants often ends in violence. Their forest habitat is shrinking despite decades of conservation efforts, and when herds wander into villages to steal food or dip trunks in clay pots of homebrewed rice beer, people -- and elephants -- can get killed.

Just over 150 people died in elephant attacks in 2001, down from a peak of 203 a decade ago, according to the most recent official figures. India’s government credits the decline to better management, but critics claim officials fudge the figures to protect their jobs.

The elephants damage 10,000 to 15,000 houses and 2 million to 2.5 million acres of crops each year throughout India. People, whether poachers armed with guns or angry villagers poisoning watering holes, kill about 200 elephants a year, by the official estimate.

By bringing Rabha’s crew from Assam in northeast India, Jharkhand state is applying an ancient solution to a modern problem. But many villagers complain that capturing a few elephants to scare off the rest of the herd has no effect, and wildlife conservationists call it a cruel diversion from the crucial issue: the destruction of the elephants’ habitat.

India’s wild elephant population is spread across 18 states, but 85% is concentrated in the northeast and the south, where the Hindu majority reveres elephants as gods.

The country’s elephant population grew by about 3,000 in the decade after the federal government launched a conservation effort called Project Elephant in 1992. But officials concede some of the most important ranges, and the herds roaming them, are shrinking because of farming, mining, illegal logging and guerrilla fighting.

Wildlife laws are poorly enforced and “the overall conservation scenario continues to be dismal,” S.S. Bist, director of the federal government’s Project Elephant, warned in a report last year.

Home to about 5,000 wild elephants, Assam lost 157 of them from 1998 to 2001, with almost two-thirds dying from interactions with humans, such as gunshots, poisoning, train collisions and accidental electrocution, according to state government figures.

“The elephant population continues to drop in the northeast,” said Assamese wildlife conservationist Soumyadeep Datta, whose group Nature’s Beckon has struggled for about 15 years to protect wild elephants. He says corrupt forestry officials undermine the effort by ignoring illegal logging and misusing conservation budgets, among other things.

“If the international community doesn’t demand protection of the habitat, it will disappear, and the man-elephant conflict will grow further and further,” Datta said.

*

A herd of Asian elephants, which spends most of its day eating sugar cane, grass and tree bark and searching for water, typically needs at least 250 square miles for its home range. India lost more than 695 square miles of forest from 1991 to 1999, Bist wrote last year in the journal Indian Forester.

India banned the capture of elephants in 1972, but forestry officials can order them caught to control unruly herds. Although there are no figures on the number trapped each year, a Project Elephant survey in 2000 estimated there were up to 3,600 domesticated elephants. More than 40% work in the logging industry, using their powerful trunks to move felled timber, while others are used in religious ceremonies, agriculture, tourism, circuses and street begging, the survey found.

Rabha is a stern man who doesn’t warm to outsiders easily. He is barefoot, in a cotton sarong and fading T-shirt that says “Surf’s Up” above a map of the Hawaiian Islands. Rabha guesses he’s about 40, but with graying hair and tired eyes, he looks at least 55.

Recently, he squatted in the dirt and spoke cautiously about his world. He has been catching elephants since the age of 10 when he first apprenticed as a mahout, a trained elephant rider. He is now a phandi, the team leader who lassoes the prey. With about 300 elephant captures to his name, and only a few phandis left in India, Rabha is a renowned member of a rare and dying breed.

About 20 years ago, Rabha watched a wild elephant trample a mahout to death. Ever since, he has worked by a single rule: Whatever you do, don’t fall off.

“I was taught to use my mind,” Rabha said. “This is not something where you use pen and paper. You have to think.”

Jharkhand state’s forestry department brought Rabha’s crew about 900 miles from their home base, along with three 10-foot-tall trained elephants, each weighing about 10 tons. They made the six-day journey in trucks.

Every elephant they catch is worth about $4,000 to their employer, Bijoyananda Choudhury, owner of a school, nursing home and tourist resort in Assam. Choudhury, an elephant lover, named his daughter Kunki, the Assamese word for tamed elephant. He pays his men, whether they catch an elephant or not, about $45 a month, with food and lodging.

Rabha’s latest hunt began near Bero, a town about 20 miles from the state capital, Ranchi. He quickly caught a female elephant April 1, a small, submissive animal, but her herd still caused trouble. So on May 17, Rabha went after a more dangerous young male, hoping to scare off the others.

With two of his mahouts riding trained elephants to block the flanks, Rabha pursued his quarry on the back of an elephant he caught 30 years ago and named Baglal Bahadur: Baglal the Brave. They chased the younger male for about an hour. When the tired animal stopped to eat, Rabha quickly roped him in.

His team’s three elephants dragged him about three miles. They bound his legs and neck with heavy ropes of sisal fiber and lashed him to three eucalyptus trees. They wrapped the rope six times around each hind leg and tied them back at a 45-degree angle, forcing most of the trapped elephant’s enormous weight forward. Day and night, he is always off balance.

When he struggles against his bonds, the eucalyptus trees creak, like ship timbers against the sea. The ropes rub his oozing wounds, and his whooping captors hit him with a stick and then gently stroke his trunk.

It is tough love, and the torment won’t end until the elephant submits to the men who pull the ropes, wave fire in his eyes each night and sing to him of past glory.

The order to capture the elephants came from Ajit K. Malhotra, Jharkhand state’s chief wildlife warden. There was little choice, he said, because the animals are becoming bolder and more difficult to scare away. They no longer fear villagers’ beating drums, firecrackers or burning rubber tires, Malhotra said.

As the wild elephants have made a habit of raiding villages for food, many also have acquired a taste for fermented rice beer, called hadia after the clay pot in which the traditional brew is stored.

“Elephants get addicted to it,” Malhotra said. “It’s very, very common. There’s a scientific reason for it, which is that the size of the elephant’s brain, compared to the body weight, is small. When he has hadia, he feels as if he’s flying.”

An elephant with an alcohol problem can smell what he craves from two miles away and have been known to kill anyone who comes between them and their drink.

Capturing a few is the best way to deter the rest, Malhotra said, and he insisted the captives are handled humanely, including regular treatment of their wounds with disinfectant.

Rabha’s mahouts use cotton balls and a basting brush to disinfect the rope burns, as the elephant stands tied to the trees. He also gets bathed each day in a pond a short walk away, under the close watch of a trained elephant.

Malhotra says he knows of only two elephants killed in Jharkhand during his two-year watch, both shot on his orders. “One had killed 32 persons; the other, 12 persons,” he said.

The just-captured elephant will likely be trained to carry tourists on tiger safaris or taught to help capture others, Malhotra said.

He thinks the younger female may do well paired up with a lonely male in the Tata Steel Zoological Park in Jamshedpur, a company town that advertises itself as “a model for the harmonious coexistence of industry and environment.”

*

Caught between the city and the shrinking wilderness is Kamargora, a village of 50 people without electricity or running water. Elephants killed 11 villagers in the area last year and are still rampaging.

Chothu Singh Sardar’s one-room home of mud, brick and thatch was no match for the elephant that broke in before dawn May 31. Singh, 35, was asleep, as was his mother, mother-in-law, son and daughter. The elephant approached quietly and smashed the front wall, killing Sardar’s mother, Rajni Singh, 60.

The government offered Sardar a little more than $2,100 in compensation, a large sum for a man who earns only $25 a month loading transport trucks. It is just over half what the state pays to capture a wild elephant.

Sardar wants much more, and like many poor villagers, his neighbor Kamla Karmarkar wonders whether elephants are more valuable to the government than people.

“We cannot sleep at night,” said Karmarkar, 45, a mother of four. “The elephants have forced most of us villagers to seek shelter on the rooftops. Almost every house has a door broken or something else damaged.

“There should be electric fencing in this area to protect us. In fact, we are most worried about our children. By killing any child, the elephants also kill the parents and the family in the same blow. Such is the sorrow.”

Ethwa Oraon’s three-room house was ruined by elephants in two attacks less than a month apart. More than two weeks after Rabha captured one of the herd nearby, others still were returning at night.

“The forest department’s claim that capturing the small elephants would end up scaring the bigger ones is all crap,” said Oraon, 35. “If it had been true, why is it that the elephants -- even after the capture of two members of their herd -- still come back to trouble us every night? Why, the elephants, the same herd apparently, even came last night!”

Terror also comes to the captive elephant each night.

At 8 o’clock, one of Rabha’s mahouts climbs on the trapped elephant’s back, while another strokes his trunk, and a third thrusts a flaming torch toward his bulging eyes.

They want the elephant to overcome his fear of fire, and obey the men who control it. To soothe him, they sing a song. It is a medley of words from two languages, Assamese and Bengali, verses that have been passed down through generations of mahouts from the 16th century, when Muslim Mughal conquerors invaded India.

“Let’s all take the name of Allah,” the mahouts chant. “Let’s all take the name of the guru who passed on the art to us. We have taken this elephant away from his parents, and now he should listen to us.”