When
working elephants are displaced in the lumber industry
by modern machinery, they become 'unemployed'. In
countries like India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, there is
a growing surplus of tamed, but now unemployed,
elephants of this type. Their upkeep has become a
financial burden on their owners, and it is not clear
what to do with them. It is argued that such elephants
are too tame to be returned to the wild. So the people
in these countries have begun to recognize the need for
elephant retirement homes.
photo M. Noonan
In an
ideal realization of this concept, the elephants would
still be fed and managed by people. However, they would
also be given the freedom to intermingle with each
other, form their own social bonds, and even interact
with their environment in ways that would allow them to
express many of their natural behaviors. In a way it
would be like a halfway house. The elephants would
pretty much get to behave like elephants. But, at the
same time, it would still be a place where people could
get close enough to take care of them.
In
truth, retirement facilities of this type -- ones
following the purely altruistic mission of serving
elephants who had previously long served man -- is still
more of a dream than a reality in Asia. Even the
facilities that publicly support the notion of
retirement for working elephants often have most of
their efforts (and their elephants) devoted to serving
visiting tourists with 'safari rides', 'logging
demonstrations', etc. Admittedly, this may be the only
way for these facilities to earn enough money to pay for
the necessities of the elephants in their care.
However, it nevertheless just amounts to another form of
obligatory servitude from the point of view of the
elephants.
Interestingly, the idea of an elephant retirement home,
and/or of a domestic elephant sanctuary, has been
gaining recent momentum in the United States. In fact,
two separate facilities, each associated with large
parcels of land, have already been created in Tennessee
and in California. Their stated mission is to accept
retired or surplused elephants from the circus or zoo
communities, and to provide them with semi-natural
conditions in which they can roam.