Nurturing the bond between Elephants & Communities — Integrating Community Livelihoods & Asian Elephant Conservation
In conversation with John Roberts, Director of the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation, Thailand on his journey to pursue a career in an Elephant themed Cam. One that fuels his passion for wilderness & empowers local communities to protect 18,000 ha of Elephant Corridor in the lush green forests of Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia. On driving positive re-inforcemement training for Mahouts, educating the future generation & as part of the Asian Captive Elephant Working Group, establishing guidelines to minimise the traveller’s footprints while immersing them in nature.
From fighting fires and making trails in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park in the desert of West Texas, how did Asian Elephant Conservation in Thailand’s lush jungles come about?
Via Chitwan National Park, where, through Tiger Tops Jungle Lodge, the skills I had picked up working and volunteering in National Parks could be combined with hospitality and showing people the jungle as well as helping out with conservation research. The progression could probably never have been pre-planned but was organic, natural and ended up making sense.
What are your current projects & initiatives involving Elephants at Anantara resorts?
Anantara Golden Triangle remains the only property where we have a camp with captive elephants and the most elephant themed one (though Anantara Kalutara is looking to support a local wild elephant protection project and we’re just doing due diligence now) other projects I help look after for our hotels include coral and dugong protection, looking at a project to help vultures in Oman, marine turtles in Sri Lanka and Thailand. Most recently a new Tented Camp — unbranded, run by partners — on an 18,000ha concession we have been protecting adjoining Botum Sakor & Southern Cardamoms National Parks in Cambodia.
How is the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation contributing towards revitalizing local communities?
For too long our approach to this was to throw money at the problem, particularly with mahout communities, they were begging on the streets or doing inappropriate work with their elephants because they were poor, we aimed make them no longer poor! Now with the price of elephants sky high and tourism on the rise they are no longer poor so we concentrate on working with their kids and in their home villages, providing English teaching, animal husbandry lessons — we also help a project that provides vets for the 300 elephants living still at home — and conservation based field trips. Trying to help the next generation of mahouts to be more elephant friendly and animal aware — or have a choice as to whether or not to be a mahout, we sincerely hope some of them become vets, managers or more.
What are the ancient traditions of mahout’s way of life and how are the mahouts being trained to preserve these yet evolve to improve their relationship with the Elephants?
We have been teaching a positive reinforcement technique to mahouts, vets, camp managers across South East Asia for five years now which helps them use what they already know about positive reinforcement more effectively. As part of a group called the Asian Captive Elephant Working Group — made up of mainly elephant specialist scientists and vets, a couple of us manage elephant camps — we are developing guidelines for mahouts and camp managers to help improve the welfare of the elephants under their charge using this scientific and veterinary consensus as to what does improve welfare of the elephant (rather than, for instance, just produce a positive emotional response in the watching human) as our underlying principles. Several camps are very interested and we’re in the process of rolling them out.
There have been news reports on Elephants being exploited to entertain tourists in south-east Asia, and kept in harsh conditions, have there been any major reforms in regulations towards protecting captive elephants? If yes, what are these?
There is a new elephant law before parliament in Thailand which should help but there is also a lot of confusion around the subject, the recent report by World Animal Protection was pretty damning (though not as damning as their PR made out) but made some sensible suggestions as to how to move forward even if some of the indicators of welfare were pretty subjective. It is worth pointing out that they found the welfare, on average, worse on the sub-continent than in South East Asia, it is the sheer number of captives (10,000 ish in Thailand and Myanmar alone) coupled with the visibility of the poor treatment that gives us the leverage to help mahouts and owners over here improve.
How should Tourists educate themselves on genuine Sanctuaries?
It is quite difficult at the moment as, aside from the absolute worst places where elephants are kept out of their natural habitat and are either working long hours or on a short chain almost every camp is a mix, there are no actual ‘sanctuaries’ by any accepted definition of the word that make money from tourism. All have to impact the elephants’ choices to a lesser or greater extent to ensure elephants are where they are needed to be to provide the experience — this is as true for the ‘observation only’ camps as for those providing a ‘walking alongside’ or ‘bathing’ activity as it is with some of the ‘riding on the neck’ or even ‘trekking in the saddle’ camps. For instance, some of the camps that give the impression of free roaming to their guests isolate elephants in 4x4m enclosures at night while some trekking camps put the elephants on 30m chains in the forest in such a way that they can communicate with one another (and escape one another) for the longest period of their 24hrs — which provides better welfare? We need science to tell us but the important lesson is the activity offered isn’t the best indicator of how the elephant feels about its life! The Asian Captive Elephant Working Group are working with a group called Travelife who are putting together a standard based on that scientific and veterinary consensus and against which independent auditors can mark a camp. Until then use your common sense, take everything you are told by the camp with a pinch of salt, if given ‘facts’ ask for sources and try to avoid camps that buy elephants for any reason as this practice is driving uncontrolled and unmanaged breeding (often of very young mothers) in some countries and wild capture in others.
How are you involving the youth in Asian Elephant Conservation programmes? How do these programme benefit the youth and the Elephants?
At this stage mainly through the programmes with the mahouts’ kids, we have — in the past — funded the development of a conservation curriculum for use in Thai schools through Think Elephants International and continue to work with them to educate groups of foreign & Thai kids who can either visit our elephants or Skype into camp. Our intern scheme with Srinakharinwiroj University in Bangkok helps at a higher educational level and we try to have at least two foreign veterinary or conservation students on site at all times — they help us by giving new ideas to our scientific department and we’re pretty sure it is the closest they’ll get to elephants during their studies.
Any significant learnings from research into Elephant behavior and how these are associated with wild elephant conservation?
At the moment the behavioral research is still at the stage of discerning cognitive abilities, what sense elephants use predominantly — smell, it is turning out, which sounds obvious to all who have watched elephants’ trunks but no-one is designing HEC mitigation projects based on this, even all the ‘intelligence tests’ people had previously undertaken (& often decided eles weren’t that bright) had undergone were sight based where any elephant person will tell you eles don’t rely on eyesight too much. We’re working with Think Elephants International to design an actual wild HEC study based on their findings into the elephants’ sensory perception and intelligence, hoping to start in early 2018.
Thailand’s captive elephant population is up to 4000 what according to you are the challenges of managing the elephants on a day to day basis?
The biggest challenge is finding the balance between keeping them fed and active and keeping them appropriately — I personally feel that we also need to be opening the debate about bringing the population of captives down as I don’t feel this to be sustainable within the above parameters, yes, we can keep more fed but they will have to be kept further from their natural habitat and appropriate conditions. Reducing the number of captive elephants, however, is an unpopular opinion where even so-called sanctuaries are buying retirement age elephants and knowingly creating a market for babies and juveniles to go into trekking camps.
You spoke about the Asian Captive Elephant Working Group at the Eastern Himalayan Naturenomics™ Forum last year, how has the journey evolved in this one year and what goals has the Group accomplished? What are the Group’s future plans?
It has been an interesting year, much of the work we have done has been more about supporting other efforts than replicating them — the TripAdvisor educational pieces, the Travelife Elephant Camp Welfare Standards to name just a couple of instances where outside agencies have recognised the power of this scientific and veterinary consensus and have called upon us to help. At the moment this is probably what the world needs more than yet another website and voice in an already crowded conversation — we are uniquely placed to provide an advisory role, with scientific citation, to those who already have a respected voice and respectable audience. We are also debating amongst ourselves the fine line between helping those that look after elephants look after them better and helping them make money. We want to do the former, not the latter, but, of course we have to acknowledge that a driver in persuading the more business minded among them to do this will be financial reward for good behaviour!
What do you think is the gap between combining efforts towards Asian Elephant Conservation in Asia? How can these gaps be covered?
I have great faith in the newly re-invigorated IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Asian Elephant Specialist Group. The re-invigoration process that started, of course, alongside EHNF last year. At last year’s meeting they were quite clear on including captive elephants into their mandate (it had been a grey area up until that point) and, though I’m not personally a member, I know they have been working hard on exactly this. The drivers and the pressures are different between South and South East Asia but the animals’ needs are the same so, even though the traditions of keeping elephants appear to have grown apart there is more than enough common ground and great work going on within both traditions that we can follow.
There has always been a debate on rewildling captive elephants. What are your views on it?
I think it is an answer for some of our captive elephants, perhaps not totally wild but certainly, as practiced by the Elephant Reintroduction Foundation where a vast area of land was found, elephants carefully and systematically released but monitored in order to reduce Human Elephant Conflict risks and provide veterinary care (this also gives their erstwhile carers a continued income). They seem to have remained captive, trained elephants but living freely in a forest and performing biological services. It is a management system that is not so very different from the old logging days when elephants were commonly released but monitored for months at a time during the down seasons. Of course we need to do a lot more scientific study to refine the techniques and, a lot of work needs to be done talking to communities who might not be unhappy that they can enter forests for NTFP or whatever without the risk of bumping into elephants. Unfortunately, for South East Asia at least, there are too many elephants in captivity and not enough forest for us to stop looking at better ways to keep elephants fed and exercised in closer captivity but I believe some form or ‘rewilding’ provides a happy answer for some elephants AND forests.
How do we connect the corridors between Thailand & India to protect wild Elephants?
At the risk of stating the obvious? Myanmar! It is a grand idea and one I think the world would thank us for, not only because of elephants but securing a vital watershed & carbon sink. To achieve it we need to start reconnecting smaller regional habitats, learning where elephants used to travel and building our corridor concepts on these — not necessarily geographical straight lines. Learning from places, even African places or China — India as well, where elephants seem to pass large distances through human dominated landscapes. Most importantly, it seems, we need to have backing of ministries, lending banks, policy makers in charge of infrastructure and industry. It is all very well having the backing of environmental ministers and departments but some how we also need to stop mines, golf courses, monoculture plantations popping up in places that have been identified as elephant habitats.
What are your expectation from the Eastern Himalayan Naturenomics™ Forum this year?
As usual a multidisciplinary sharing of ideas, this is what makes EHNF unique among the similar symposia I visit, the sheer breadth of skills and expertise talking and listening.
Could you share some insights on the relationship between Elephants & Thais? How has it evolved over the years? What is the future of Asian Elephant Conservation in Thailand?
While I am still not sure on Thailand’s relationship with her wild elephants and wildlife, we do still meet sympathetic villagers who are victims of Human Elephant Conflict but on the whole I do not see the sympathy for wild places and wild life having an intrinsic value that I see in South Asia. Captive elephants certainly hold a place in the Nation’s heart — by enabling the teak industry I think they had a far greater influence on creating modern Siam and then Thailand than the elephants that carried Kings (& Queens) into battle, but those are the elephants every Thail kid learns about in school and can name & by knowing the names of ancient war elephants they know if the captive elephant’s importance in Thai history. The future is interesting, new laws before parliament, a 20 year conservation strategy being discussed, re-introduction experiments all happening under official auspice. The public too, particularly the urban public, are beginning to take more of an interest in how elephants are kept — I think street begging with elephants, normal 10 years ago, would not be tolerated nowadays, certainly in several recent cases a social media storm has forced otherwise reluctant authorities to take action. For me, though, the key is to decide how many captive elephants the country can sustain and look after well and design and enforce a breeding programme to get there, the current system where the market encourages the owners to breed without any controls and authorities embrace a ‘more is better’ attitude is not the best path; yes, there were possibly 10,000 more captive elephants in Thailand in 1950 but there was work for them to do in the forests and forests for them to relax in overnight — this is not the same as a short chain on bare earth next to the beach in Pattaya. Unfortunately for wild elephants, though the National Parks Department and others do great work within the boundaries of their powers agro-industry is still a large driver of rural income and so habitat destruction for monocultures — even if just one crop the soil is destroyed, washed away, in one good wet season once the trees are gone — seems to be actively encouraged. I am not sure these points are being seriously addressed in the conservation action plan.
All photos were shared with us by John. If you would like to contribute to our publication “The Himalayan” or join us in our endeavor to build a knowledge resource on Asian Elephants through the Asian Elephant Secretariat on www.elephantcountry.org, I would love to hear from you at varsha.wadhwani@baliparafoundation.com
