Expensive and high maintenance, baby elephants have become the ultimate status symbol for Sri Lanka’s wealthy elite — a trend that has horrified conservationists and prompted a government crackdown.
Elephants are venerated in mainly Buddhist Sri Lanka and capturing them is illegal.
Yet, more than 40 have been stolen from national parks over the past decade and are being kept as pets, authorities said.
“The new rich wannabes want an elephant at home for prestige,” said Asian elephant expert Jayantha Jayewardene, recalling an old Sri Lankan aristocratic tradition of keeping herds of the wild beasts. “This is for social climbing.”
Earlier this year, the gift of a baby elephant to the visiting New Zealand Prime Minister John Key sparked anger from animal rights activists who said it was cruel to separate her from her family, and the incident has not been repeated.
Worse, Jayewardene said elephants are almost certainly dying to fuel the illegal trade.
“The maternal instinct in elephants is very, very strong,” he said. “Poachers can’t get at a baby without the mother putting up a fight, and it usually ends with the death of the mother.”
Guns are used to scare off the mothers, and sometimes to kill them, Jayewardene said.
Elephant calves have also been known to be killed by the tranquilizer drugs used to make them more docile for capture.
Species Conservation Center director Pubudu Weerarathna has been involved in a number of rescues and remembers one young elephant succumbing to an overdose of tranquilizers.
Another story had a happier ending — in 2014 he confronted a group of men transporting a baby elephant on the back of a tractor trailer near a wildlife park. The calf had been sedated, but it made a good recovery.
Intentionally killing an elephant is considered such a serious crime in Sri Lanka it is punishable by death — though no one has been prosecuted in decades.
Two years ago a group of activists reported catching rustlers red-handed with a baby elephant, but no action was taken against them.
In 2013, wildlife activists raised suspicions of a cover-up by some in the administration of former Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapakse after a registry of domesticated elephants disappeared. The document later re-appeared with entries doctored — the case is being investigated by police.
Rustlers are prepared to take such risks because of the huge sums involved — the Species Conservation Centre said baby elephants sell for as much as US$125,000.
Some of the country’s most powerful have been implicated. Last month, judge Thilina Gamage was arrested following intense pressure from wildlife activists, who accused him of illegally keeping a baby elephant as a pet.
He is now on bail awaiting trial, and has been suspended by the Judicial Service Commission.
That followed the arrest in March of Buddhist monk Uduwe Dhammaloka for keeping a two-year-old elephant at his temple in Colombo, though he says he was unaware he was acting illegally.
“I did not capture the elephant, it was left at my temple,” he told the court during a preliminary hearing. “I treated it like any cat or dog people leave at temples when they can’t afford to feed those pets.”
Now out on bail, Dhammaloka faces charges of stealing state property, which carries a possible jail sentence of three years.
Sri Lankan Minister of Sustainable Development and Wildlife Gamini Jayawickrama Perera has told parliament he is determined stop the illegal trade.
The government has stopped the tradition of gifting animals from its elephant orphanage in Pinnawala to Buddhist temples after activists raised concerns.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS