Would a trained elephant be happier than a wild elephant?
Answers
Answer:
Elephants are not domesticated creatures, and the ones we see that appear to have been domesticated have actually had their body and will broken by a gruesome capture and subsequent training processes.
Credit: Suvasini Ramaswamy
These are not metaphors. These are real world questions that I walked away with on a rainy June afternoon, after a visit to the Dubare elephant camp situated on the banks of the Kaveri river in Karnataka. Dubare is a historically important elephant camp managed by the forest department where elephants used in the Mysore Dusshera processions were traditionally captured and trained. Today, it is mainly a rehabilitation centre where rogue elephants from the wild are caught and tamed to minimise conflicts with villagers. As I walked around the camp, I witnessed elephants being taken through their morning rituals of a bath in the river and their meal (straw and rice neatly wrapped into fist-sized morsels). I witnessed young elephant calves giving themselves a mud-bath and ambling with long metal-chains trailing behind them leaving tracks of their movement. In my wanderings, I also witnessed an elephant in the early stages of taming and that was when I first heard about ‘breaking’ an elephant.