Elephant in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka
Photo: Ishara S.KODIKARA / AFP
Around 180 elephants live in captivity in Sri Lanka - at Buddhist temples, wealthy business people, influential politicians and state elephant parks.
Animal rights activists repeatedly criticize the conditions under which they have to work.
Elephants, which are considered the embodiment of Buddha in Sri Lanka, have to carry relics at religious festivals and walk adorned through large crowds. They also have to drag heavy trees and many people, bathe with tourists or let them feed them. In addition, in the predominantly Buddhist island state in the Indian Ocean, they are considered to be good luck charms for their owners.
Now the government wants to improve their working conditions.
Parliament is to formally approve the following changes to the law in the coming weeks: An elephant should only have to carry trees or people for four hours at a time - and that only during the day and when the weather is nice, a maximum of four people and he should be allowed to ride on his back at the same time should be transported in a vehicle for a maximum of twelve hours and a maximum of 30 km / h.
Elephant drivers are only allowed to work soberly and must complete appropriate training.
Animal rights activists are skeptical about the change in the law
Animal rights activists in the country, on the other hand, are convinced that the government is only using the new rules as an excuse to domesticate more elephants, says the head of the Center for Environmental Justice, Hemantha Withanage.
Animal rights activists also fear that elephants will have to continue to work under difficult conditions despite the supposedly animal-friendly regulations.
They also see a connection between the new rules and a politically explosive topic: under the previous government, Sri Lanka's wildlife authority confiscated 38 elephants allegedly illegally caught in the wild between 2015 and 2018.
The owners of these animals are some of the most influential people in the country and most of them support the current government.
These people want their elephants back, which are currently living in state elephant parks.
Should this happen, animal rights activist Panchali Panapitiya of the organization Rally for Animal Rights & Environment fears that the owners will use a lot of force to train the large wild animals to obedience. Because in Sri Lanka too, brutal training methods are used, as we know them from Thailand or India: young animals are locked in small enclosures for a long time, where they can hardly move, they are temporarily denied water and food, they are beaten and chained. This is the only way people can ensure that they do not offer any resistance.
The return of the elephants is important in order to preserve the tradition of the Buddhist elephant parades, said the secretary of the Sri Lankan Elephant Owners Association, Dhamsiri Bandara Karunaratna.
So far, the owners have achieved partial success: a court recently ordered that 14 of the 38 animals be returned to them.
The owners generally want to keep more elephants in order to breed more.
The Buddhist monk and president of the Association of Tamed Elephants, Magalkande Sudhantha, calls on the government to catch wild elephants and sell them.
In his opinion, animals that harm people could be caught - that would solve a major problem in the country.
Questionable handling of "problem elephants"
People are increasingly settling in the elephant habitat.
The animals, in turn, increasingly destroy fields and houses in search of food, whereupon the residents take revenge on the animals and kill them with firecrackers, poison or shots.
According to official information, 172 elephants and 65 people died in the clashes between humans and animals in the first half of 2021.
The conflicts between people and the estimated 2500 to 6000 threatened elephants in the country are an election issue for which politicians have not yet found an effective solution.
