“We want to protect poor elephants from the chaos of city roads. Elephants in traffic are such a sad sight,” Shri Bhagwan, an official representative of the forest department of the Indian state of Maharashtra, told Associated Press.
According to him, the unprecedented ban for India took effect at the end of last month. By that time, there were 14 elephants in Mumbai that worked for their owners, begging and entertaining the public. They could often be seen struggling through the crowds strolling in south Mumbai, or in the suburbs, in popular tourist spots along the coast. The usual work for elephants is participation in religious and wedding ceremonies: in colorful blankets, they must greet the newlyweds.
If the elephant is 'off work,' it is simply chained to a post so that it can hardly move. Animal rights activists, under whose influence the authorities introduced the ban on keeping elephants in the city, emphasize that most elephant owners feed their 'workers' poorly, and hour-long 'walks' on hot, pothole-covered city roads cause skin diseases and foot ailments in the animals.
By now, it seems not a single elephant remains in Mumbai. But animal rights activists believe this is temporary. 'Upon learning of the law, the owners decided to just lay low for a while, and then they will go back out onto the roads,' People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is convinced. And most importantly, activists are outraged that the authorities' actions are completely ill-conceived. 'The ban is a step in the right direction,' said a lawyer from PETA. 'But ideally, before introducing it, the authorities should have taken care of creating a rehabilitation center for elephants.'
On the very first day after the ban took effect, an incident occurred that could serve as a clear illustration of the ecologists' words. Police were forced to release an arrested elephant owner because, while he was in the station, there was no one to look after the animal. After five hours, the police found a way out: the 13-year-old elephant Lakshmi and its owner were released on written undertaking.
Shri Bhagwan claims that the government intends to correct its mistake and build an elephant rehabilitation center in forests about 200 km northeast of Mumbai. But it is still unknown how to solve another problem, because the ban also affects the religious life of Indians. Devotees of the Hindu patron of wisdom and auspicious beginnings, the god Ganesha, who is depicted with an elephant's head and to whom the famous Siddhivinayak temple in Mumbai is dedicated, are perplexed: why, because of a few people who mistreat elephants, do such drastic measures need to be taken?
India has approximately 3,600 domestic elephants, with about a thousand of these animals working in logging in the state of Assam in the northeast of the country, and about 600 in the southern state of Kerala, where they are used mainly in religious ceremonies.
Gzt.ru