Science tells us that elephants, the beautiful noble gentle giants of our forests, have a much evolved social structure and (my deduction) are more human than we will ever be. In our quest to reach the top of the food chain we humans have forgotten the very basic ingredient which once defined our ilk “humanity” and have over time become animals. Not the gentlemen animals as we understand them today but the beasts that we believed them to be before research altered our views. Laws which were made for gentlemen humans are now surely invalid for the cocktail of greed, corruption and inhumanity has destroyed the very term “gentlemen”. How can the old law be valid in a country where criminals become monarchs and the more one plunders India the more respectable and powerful they become? For us humans, gone is the golden era of our culture, it’s now all about the money and that’s where the elephants, our enviable giant neighbours can teach us a trick or two. They live for the day by the day. They know no greed yet they love deeper than us and grieve maybe more for their bonds are ever lasting. Did you know that elephants feel happiness, pain and joy? That they are incredibly intelligent? That they are more socially conscious than many a human? That they shed tears when their near and dear die? Whilst we are busy fighting for our inheritance, stabbing our siblings in the back, burn the wife for dowry, bury the female child, elephants protect their own with their lives, all the time every time. Unlike us they take care of their orphans, the mother and daughter never leave each other’s side and the sisters are but a call away.
Humans have a marriage ceremony which many believe prepares the girl for the final act of procreation. Elephants have a similar ceremony. There are recorded instances wherein a matriarch has taken aside the nervous virgin in estrus and calmed her by putting her trunk in her mouth, thereby passing hormones which act as sedatives, then whispered sweet tidings to her to ease her nerves in order to get her ready for the pain and joy of her first coitus. And then she has directed the male to mount her but only after she has satisfied herself that it is the right male and she is ready for the final act. The little bride-to-be has the right to reject the proposal at any time. There is no force. And then through the act the herd stands silently with their backs to the romancing couple.
After copulation the entire herd rushes in and caresses the young female welcoming her into adulthood. Then they celebrate by throwing sticks and doing the floppy run of happiness, rumbling in both infra sound and audible rumbles, informing the nearby elephants of the marriage.
The others then, pass on the message till the entire forest knows about the incident. I have actually witnessed cousins rushing in from far, temporal glands secreting, and hugged the bride and her family.
Humans spend much time and effort on our diet. We spend large sums of money to figure out what suits us best, which gives us the maximum energy for the minimum of intake. Elephants are much the same. Even they know the foods which have maximum levels of energy for minimum work done.
The matriarch works out the best diet possible to enrich her herd from season to season, which is easier said than done. The problem for her is enormous. Her lot have such terrible digestive systems that they digest but 50 per cent of their intake. In order to satisfy the needs of their enormous bodies they have to eat nearly 10 per cent of their body weight every day. Now for a three to four tonne animal, living in closely knit extended families, this is a lot of food. Year after year this becomes harder to find considering the forests are dwindling. Under such trying circumstances even a human will be hard pressed and beg, borrow and steal to feed his own. The matriarch does exactly that except that she neither begs nor borrows but she steals. Come evening she leads her family to the crop-laden fields attached to the forest. She knows that a good six-hour munch in the fields is equal to 16 hours in the forest. She also knows that villagers bring cattle into the park to feed and she uses the place where the elephant trench has been levelled out by them and the electric fence cut down to accord access.
Once out of the forest she is wary for now she has to contend with wires that kill, wires that are strung up from the mains and then attached to a naked binding wire that runs around the field. She carries a log to throw on such traps. She knows the villagers will be up and about, their dogs warning them of the presence of elephants. She floats like a ghost and the herd feeds for around 20 minutes on each field.
If she is discovered she holds her ground for she tries to take her family to places where the poor farmers don’t have the dreaded firearms. Sometimes she is wrong and gets peppered by nails and ball bearings fired from a locally made muzzle loader. She might even charge and kill the puny human if he makes too much of a fuss. Before the night is through she has destroyed the entire crop of many tribal families put together. She shows no remorse for the human is capable of killing her and her family in many ways than one.
As long as our tribals were part of the forest and remained hunter gatherers one hardly ever heard of “man-animal conflict”. I am not saying it wasn’t there but just that since they have been brutally and unceremoniously thrown out of the forests without proper reasoning the entire forested cover of India has come under turmoil.
Be it with animals or humans. Naxalites have flourished because with the tribal, the eyes and ears of the forest were removed. Worse still they drafted many a tribal into their dalam’s by offering them hope. Whilst earlier many buffer areas rich in browse though not under the forest department, used to act as buffer zones but now these were given to the displaced tribes as compensation and consequently cut down to make way for frugal cultivation. The tribes never managed to get their meagre land holdings to pay. They suffered along with the animals. And with the disappearance of the buffer the man-animal conflict went completely out of control.
We are so busy pleasing our industrialists that we forget our poor and needy, the tribal and the elephant. The few additional acres to a greedy corporate will barely do India any good. The few additional acres of land in the forest will not do the tribal any good.
Today the tribal is being given back land from part of the existing forests as compensation for displacing him. Home to the tribal was the entire tract of jungle in which they roamed freely and hunted and gathered food for existence. Home will never be another acre of land or two.
Many question the wisdom of compensation given to these poor people. They ask: how does one place a price on the home of a nomad to whom the entire forest was his house since Adam and Eve? They argue that giving these displaced tribals more land in the forest will only result in reduction of forest cover and further aggravate the man-animal conflict. The truth is that both our tribals and our elephants have been dealt a losing hand. Let’s put that right and make them winners.
If the government truly wants to put an end to the man-animal conflict then help the animals and the tribal together. Either increase the forest cover and give both back their nomadic way of life connected by corridors or give contiguous belts of forest to the animals and give the tribal substantial land holdings around prospering towns and cities; land holdings with substance and value, lands which can actually help in rehabilitating them. Surely throwing more titbits of forest land their way will only further the woes of all.