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Friday 18th July 2003 The Island

Opinion

www.island.lk

 

Opinion

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The wretched of Pinnawela

 

Here is another perspective to the Pinnawela elephant stories that have been

getting so much prominence in your publication.

 

The situation at Pinnawela is that there are far too many elephants for the

limited extent of land. Furthermore, there are more bulls (male elephants)

than cows. This leads to very aggressive (sometimes uncontrollable)

behaviour during Musth. Therefore, Pinnawela is a time bomb waiting to go

off. The Minister is looking at various alternatives to diffuse this

situation. One is to move some of the elephants to another location.

 

Another is to train some of them to participate in Pereheras which would

then remove the necessity to donate elephants to the temples for this

purpose. These trained elephants can be hired out to the temples under

supervision from Pinnawela for the duration of the perehera. There is also a

need for well trained monitor elephants to participate in the capture and

trans-location of seasoned crop raiders. This type of monitor has not only

to be carefully trained but must have the correct behavioural

characteristics. Selecting and training monitors is a task that the

Pinnawela heard is ideal for.

 

The current practice of winching tranquilized elephants onto lorries by

steel cable can then be stopped.

 

The main aim of this thinking is to hand over some elephants to suitable,

experienced private individuals (whilst retaining state ownership) to train

them properly, get them healthy and use them for the above jobs. There was

also a plan to facilitate breeding in captivity, something that has been

completely neglected in this country and something that certain Ayurvedic

veterinarians have generations of experience in. To think that you can

simply leave fully grown elephants who cannot due to excessive interaction

with man, be released to the wild, to wander around in a very constricted

space....is rubbish. Something must be done and this Minister is the only

person who has shown the courage to try. Of course, the big deterrent is

uninformed criticism from " greenies " who mean well but have no constructive

input to offer.

 

With all due respect to the " well meaning " people both within and outside

this country, please look at the whole picture before you jump to

conclusions. Frankly if those people base their decisions to visit countries

and buy their produce on half baked and biased evidence, good luck to them !

We certainly don't need them patronizing our country.

 

 

 

R. A. Ranawana Madinnagoda

Rajagiriya

 

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