CAPTIVE ASIAN ELEPHANTS: TRAINING AND MAHOUTS

CAPTIVE ASIAN ELEPHANTS

There are currently around 13,000 tame elephants in Asia, where elephants have traditionally been used in battle, timber extraction, construction, transportation and in religious and cultural activities. In some villages people pay a small fee to be allowed to walk underneath the elephant stomach for luck and fertility. Unlike larger African elephants, which have never been tame in large numbers, Asian elephants have worked closely with humans for millennia.

A mature bull Asian elephant can carry 600 pounds with its trunk and tusks and pull loads of 9,000 pounds with a harness. They can also work in terrain inaccessible to vehicles, and guided log accurately into streams. Elephants at one time were preferred to machinery because they don't trample the forest and damage young trees. The are the prefect vehicle for selective cutting.

Mechanization has reduced the demand for wild elephants. Most of them were used to harvest teak in the forest, but now that most of the forests and teak are gone there is not much for them to do except work at tourist elephant villages and perform at weddings.

Many captive elephants that escape or are set free have no problem, living in the wild. Thailand runs a special program to reintroduce captive elephants into the wild as a way reinvigorating shrinking numbers of wild elephants and giving captive elephants an alternative to begging.

Websites and Resources: Save the Elephants savetheelephants.org; International Elephant Foundation elephantconservation.org; Animal Diversity Web animaldiversity.org ; BBC Earth bbcearth.com; A-Z-Animals.com a-z-animals.com; Live Science Animals livescience.com; Animal Info animalinfo.org ; World Wildlife Fund (WWF) worldwildlife.org the world’s largest independent conservation body; National Geographic National Geographic ; Endangered Animals (IUCN Red List of Threatened Species) iucnredlist.org

Captive Versus Domesticated Elephants

As tamed elephants are predominantly captured wild animals with wild genes, experts are divided about whether to refer to them as "domesticated," a term which usually means an animal has been selectively bred. Some prefer the term "captive" or "domestic" elephants instead. According to National Geographic: There’s an important distinction between animals that have been domesticated and animals that have been tamed. Dogs, chickens, and silkworms have been domesticated because over many generations they have been bred from wild animals to be dependent on humans and live in human spaces. [Source: Brent Stirton, National Geographic Podcats, April, 25, 2023]

Although elephants have been used as war machines and beasts of burden for thousands of years, they’ve never been domesticated for a variety of reasons. For one thing, it’s difficult to breed them in captivity. And if you do manage to get a baby elephant, it takes 15 to 20 years for that baby to grow to a useful size. That’s a lot of elephant food in the meantime. Historically, instead of breeding elephants, it’s been much easier to let them grow up wild. And then capture adults as needed. So even today, nearly all elephants in captivity at some point were captured from the wild.

Filmmaker Jyothy Karat told National Geographic: With elephants, they go through a lot of rigorous “schooling,” as the people in the industry like to call it. But actually, what it is is it’s a lot of beating, basically taming them to obey you as a child. So it kind of learns that they need to obey a human being. And if not, if you don’t obey, then it’s punished. So this is how they are able to walk along with human beings in a very, very crowded street, you know, but a wild elephant captured. I mean, if you have seen this capture, it’s really heart wrenching. It’s very hard to watch. At least this is my — this is my personal opinion. I don’t think they are ever fully tamed because there is always an element of the wild in them. And at some point when you cross the line, they will, you know, bring out the wilderness in them.

There were people who took really good care of elephants, and there were people who, whether intentionally or unintentionally, were really hurting the elephants. And by that, I also mean within the constraints of keeping a wild animal, which is supposed to roam free, in these human spaces.

Mistreated and Bored Captive Asian Elephants

Filmmaker Sangita Iyet told National Geographic: There’s this one beautiful elephant, Lakshmi is her name. And when I met her, she was just swaying side to side and bobbing her head up and down, completely bored stiff. In November of 2015. Her one eye was actually scarred and she seemed blind. I asked around. As it turned out, her mahout, he actually whacked her face with the bull hook and she became instantly blind. This is because she was at the temple and she took his food, apparently, that he had left, like, some fruits or something. And he brutalized her. When I heard of that story, I immediately launched a complaint at the Animal Welfare Board of India, and they fired him within about a few weeks. [Source: Brent Stirton, National Geographic Podcats, April, 25, 2023]

On why captive elephants sway and bob, Iyer said: They are so bored because they have nothing to do with their time. So they sway side to side. They bob their heads up and down. So that’s what she was doing. I think it’s easy when you see the elephants swaying and kind of swinging their trunk back and forth to — it seems like a kind of joyous behavior, right? It looks like they’re dancing a little bit.

And that’s one of the things that many handlers even believe that, oh, this elephant is enjoying the music and the trumpet and the dancing of people and the crowd because they are swaying side to side and, you know, they’re shaking their heads, etc. And they’re distressed to an extent that they’re threatened.

Mahouts

Mahouts are people who take care of, ride and command elephants. They often spend their entire lives with the same animal and develop an deep bond with it. The main rule of mahout is to dominate and control the elephants. They relationship is based on trust, feeding and punishment if the elephants are out of line. Elephant can cause considerable harm or damage if the are spooked or get angry.

Mahouts mount elephants by holding on to its ears with his hands and climbing up the trunk with his feet. They sits behind the animals neck. Mahouts take naps on top of mounts, usually taking of their sarongs and using at as a sheet. After decades of riding elephants senior mahouts end up with bow legs and ducklike gaits. One experiences mahout told the Los Angeles Times that when he was younger he say another mahout get trampled to death. He said he learned on important rule that day; never fall off.

It is said that elephant form a dog-like attachment to their human keepers. Or maybe it is the other way around. Indian mahouts sing songs about the love between a man and a woman is almost as great as that between a mahout and his elephant and songs how life is dark and full of trails and happiness only strikes briefly like lightning. When they are in the forest, mahouts sleep with their elephants on mattresses of leaves and use fires to keep wild animals away. In India, locals tell the story of one mahout, who used buy his elephant a bottle of rice liquor every payday. When the mahout himself got too drunk to stand up the elephant picked him like a log with his two tusks and carried his drunken friend home.←

Hard economic times has changed the equation somewhat, at least in some cases. Describing the situation in Thailand, Douglas H. Chadwick wrote in National Geographic, The bond between a mahout and his elephant is among the strongest, most complex unions ever forged between Homo sapiens and a fellow mammal---the only one that can last a human lifetime because elephants also live to be 70 or older.” But as cases with abuses elephant show “the bond is badly in need of repair. Many Thai mahouts are not the elephants' owners but simply men who hire on with tourist camps or rent the animals to panhandle on the streets, drawn by what looks like easy money. These keepers have no emotional ties to the elephants and little experience in how to care for or control them. The consequences can be tragic for both parties. By one estimate, perhaps a hundred mahouts are killed by elephants in Thailand every year. [Source: Douglas H. Chadwick, National Geographic, October 2005]

Mahout and Elephant Communication

Mahouts control the elephants with verbal commands and barefoot nudges and kicks to the back of the ears and occasional jabs with a stick or devise that looks like a conductors baton with a hook . Mahouts constantly move their feet to guide the elephants. One kick might tell an elephant to stop. Another rtelssl it rollover in the mud.

Asian elephants can understand a wide range or verbal commands from their mahouts. Usually a mahout can control with a few shouted words. Trained elephants can understand bout 30 compounds. such “Chai!” (Circle), “Pichu!” (Backward), “Chai!” (Circle), “Tere!” (Sleep), “Utha!” (Lift one leg), “Biri!” (Lift with the trunk), “Dhar!” (Catch with the trunk).

If an elephant doesn't respond, the mahout may deliver a few carefully placed pokes with a stick, a metal prod with a sharp hook or a wooden spear. "A sharp jab in a sensitive place, such as the ear, the belt can cause even a tough bull elephant to squeal in pain." Ankle chains that sometimes have inward spikes and are attached by ropes to the howdah if an elephant really get out of line.

If an elephant sticks his handler with its tusk or trunk the handler hits back with a sticks. If the elephants are disturbed, mahouts whisper sweet words Describing a Thai mahout at work, Douglas H. Chadwick wrote in National Geographic, Pasuk strolls over to rub the elephant's tummy and, in the Suay language, mumbles something like, "Hey Sonny Boy, how ya doing?" "Boon Num is quite gentle," Pasuk insists. "But he needs the sweet talk to soothe him. You have to have confidence in yourself and pay attention, know how he thinks, what he is feeling. When he doesn't want to be ridden, he will turn his back on you and growl." [Source: Douglas H. Chadwick, National Geographic, October 2005]

Mahout Training

Douglas H. Chadwick wrote in National Geographic, “I try my hand at mahout work at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in the northern town of Lampang. Recruits enroll in a lengthy program that covers the essentials of daily maintenance, diet, and medical care. They learn a long list of commands and ways to gauge an animal's emotional state and are advised on when to enforce control and when to ease off. While they're trained in use of the ankus to apply pressure to sensitive points such as the base of the ear, they're also taught that a skilled rider uses this sharp-tipped goad less as a club than as a wand, scarcely touching skin. [Source: Douglas H. Chadwick, National Geographic, October 2005]

“My lessons come from Shinakorn Phongsan, nicknamed Jawn, who shows me how to order Prathida (Princess) to kneel so I can mount. But even using her foreleg as a step, I can barely reach her back with my hands. "Try this," Jawn says. Commanding Prathida to lower her head onto the ground, he runs up her trunk and leapfrogs straight over her forehead onto her neck. As I practice the move, stumbling around on her huge face, her patience eases my qualms about what it will be like to actually ride her.

“Rising a dozen feet off the ground astride Prathida's neck, I feel the stiff hairs on her skin prickle my legs as I practice steering by wriggling my toes behind her ears while calling out ben (turn), soc (back up), and other commands from the more than 40 to which she responds. Like a proud father, Prathida's mahout basks in her accomplishments. Jawn was a groundskeeper at the center before deciding he liked elephants so much that he wanted to sign on as an apprentice, then train to become a full mahout. "The best part is getting over your fear and making a friend," he says. Now if he visits his family for several days, he returns to find Prathida acting mopey. "The funny thing is, I miss her too," he says. "I think about her a lot when I'm away."

Taming Wild Elephants

Asian elephants have been hunted, captured, and trained for use in war, commerce and transport for around 4,000 years in countries such as Thailand and India. When the capturing elephants was still practiced in Thailand, subdued elephants were sold at market or entered into government service, depending on their abilities. Traditionally handsome tuskers were reserved for war training, and strong, steady elephants were trained as baggage and transport animals.

Working elephants are rarely breed in captivity. Wild herds are the primary source. It has traditionally been much cheaper, easier and more efficient to catch elephants in the forest and train them than to allow adult elephants to breed and wait 22 months for a calf to born and wait an additional 10 years for the calf to grow to working size. Elephants raised in captivity have no fear of their human handlers and thus could became dangerous when full grown. More importantly an elephant out of commission during the 22 month gestation period and two years of nursing as not a very profitable elephant. Working elephants often don't reproduce so well anyway because they are too tired.

Breaking a Wild Elephant

Elephants are one of the few wild animals that can be trained as an adult. Even so as rule, the younger an elephant is the easer it is to train. Breaking a wild elephants taks about a month. They more he tries to resist the deeper the ropes cut into the elephant’s skin. Watson wrote: “When he struggles against his bands, the eucalyptus trees creak like ship timbers against the sea, The ropes rub his oozing wound and his whipping captors hit him with a stick and then gently strike his trunk...It is tough life, 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,”

At night one of the mahouts “climbs on the trapped elephant’s back, while another strokes his trunk, and a third thrusts a flaming torch towards his bulging eyes...They want the elephant to overcome his fear of fire, and obey the men who control it. To sooth him, they sing a song” with “verse passed down through generations of mahouts from the 16th century.”

As the captured elephant tugged on his ropes and let out rumbling growl a mahout told the Los Angeles Times, “He’s crying. 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.” Animals rights advocates and environmentalist have criticized the practice as being unnecessarily cruel. The elephant’s captors says they try to be as humane as possible,. They said the rope urn and wound and tend with cottons balls and a basting brush and the elephant are given daily baths with trained elephants looking on.

Training Tamed Elephants

Elephants in the wild live in hierarchal groups and are used to taking orders from other elephants. Captive elephant readily adapt to commands from humans. Training takes six months to a year and the elephants learn about 30 commands.

Elephants are trained using a combination of food, affection, rewards, discipline and punishments with goads and hooks. By the time they are three says Dinerstein they can respond to commands such as lie down, roll on your side, stand up, lean forward, break a branch, look with your trunk, bring feet together, stand still, sit still, trumpet, attack, drink, squirt water over the head, drop it, quit and stop. They are also taught to march in single file.

At least once a day the wild elephants were carefully taken to the river for a bath. The mahouts talk to them constantly and sing them lullabies during their feeding and bathing time. Three kumkies were needed to surround the largest wild elephants and they had to watched every second to make sure they didn't escape. In the evening after they have been fed and bathed, kumkies are shackled like camels to keep from wandering to far away and released into the forest to forage for food.

Mahout also receive training, Peeci, a small town in Kerala, is the home o the world's only elephant driving school. Perspective mahouts enter a months-long course and large to control the elephants through foot movement and verbal cues. A sign outside re school reads: "BEWARE! Elephant driving school nearby. No thoroughfare allowed."

Training Tamed Elephants, Torture and Animal Rights

Some methods used to train elephants are quite cruel. A videotape secretly shot by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) by animal rights activists in Thailand showed villagers training an elephant for a show by beatings its head and body with metal hooks while the animal screamed in pain.

Mike Snow wrote in the Washington Post: “Most complaints of elephant abuse focus on the way the animals are tamed.” Some places employ “a humane but time-consuming "tickling" method, but many camps still use phaajaan (the Thai word for "crush"), a method of domesticating baby elephants that has been practiced in Thailand for thousands of years. This ceremony involves separating youngsters from their mothers, tying them up in a confined space, jabbing them with knives, heated irons, burning cigarettes and bamboo sticks embedded with nails, pummeling them with stones and other projectiles and depriving them of food, water and sleep. It lasts for up to six days, until a shaman senses that the elephant's spirit is broken. Afterward, the animal is never again permitted to see its mother. [Source: Mike Snow, Washington Post, May 4, 2008]

”Phajaan“ was documented by journalist Jennifer Hile in her award-winning film, “Vanishing Giants“. According to National Geographic it “depicts villagers dragging a four-year-old elephant from her mother into a tiny cage, where she is beaten and deprived of food, water, and sleep for days. As the teaching progresses, the men yell at her to raise her feet. When she missteps, they stab her with bamboo spears tipped with nails. The prodding continues as she learns to behave and accept people on her back.”

Snow wrote: “Animal rights groups condemn not only the phaajaans but also "imprisoning" the animals and training them to perform tricks. "Elephants don't have to dance, paint pictures or roll logs," says Ashley Furno, senior campaign coordinator for PETA. "We're interested in protecting them so that they can remain in the wild, free to spend their days foraging for food, bathing and interacting with their families and other elephants." In 2003, PETA mounted an ongoing Asia-wide ad campaign protesting elephant abuse that has garnered attention in Germany, Sweden, Singapore, the United Kingdom and other countries that have traditionally contributed to Thai tourism. [Snow, Op. Cit]

Video Shows an Asian Elephant Biding Farewell to His Beloved Mahout

A heartbreaking video shows the moment an Indian elephant bid farewell to its long-time trainer — Damodaran Nair, who took care of elephants in a village in Kerala and died of cancer in June 2021. “The elephant paid his last respects to his master by waving his trunk and bowing his head.[Source: Sophia Ankel, Business Insider, June 12, 2021]

Business Insider reported: “Damodaran Nair was a so-called "mahout" who took care of elephants in the district of Kottayam for more than six decades. Before his death on June 3, the 74-year-old wanted to see his favorite elephant, Brahamdathan, one last time. According to the elephant's owner, Rajesh Palattu, the two had been inseparable since meeting 25 years ago, and Nair treated the elephant-like his own son. “"The bond and love between the two, Damodaran Nair and Brahmadathan, was one to watch and emulate," Palattu said, according to Gulf News.

“Footage posted on social media captured the emotional moment, which shows Brahmadattan walking up to Nair's wrapped-up body, which appears to be lying at the entrance of a house. A crowd of teary-eyed onlookers begins to weep as the elephant touches Nair's body with its trunk before raising and lowering it as if the animal is waving goodbye. "We were all moved with tears rolling down our cheeks. It was one of the most trying parting moments one could witness," Palattu said, according to Gulf News. “Traditionally, a mahout receives an elephant early on in its life and trains to keep it by his family. The mahout and elephant remain bonded to each other through their lives.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Animal Diversity Web animaldiversity.org ; National Geographic, Live Science, Natural History magazine, David Attenborough books, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Discover magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, Wikipedia, The Guardian, Top Secret Animal Attack Files website and various books and other publications.

Last updated December 2024