OK, you can go but you'd better learn something this time.
...it reminded me of University, the feeling that if I was going to lock myself in an airconditioned room for three days with a bunch of scientists people would expect me to come away with some new and useful knowledge.
In fact it was University, Kasetsart this time around, and unlike previous University lectures for which I knew there wouldn't be a test I learned more than my student day standard:
1, I have a hangover.
2, I need to sleep.
3, I cannot come up with a graffito wittier than those already present.
Perhaps because of the speakers and a subject that held my interest it turns out that I learned a lot during a recent couple of days attending the EU-Asia Link Project Symposium "Managing the Health and Reproduction of Elephant Populations in Asia" in a gloriously graffiti free but over air-conditioned hall in Bangkok.
I had no idea what to expect and the real reason I went was that several of my friends would be presenting papers so I thought I'd go and lend my support and see what the rest of the world was up to.
We were a mix of hard-core sperm counting veterinary scientists, elephant camp managers, Human Elephant Conflict mitigators and a few community folks from all across the range.
Our own vet, Mor Pap, had his name on a paper presented by the TECC vets citing their research to try and freeze and thaw sperm in such a way that it can lead to a stable pregnancy and thus start to build up a viable genetic bank for a time when the population may crash. Our old friend Dr Madhu from elephant family's operations in Rajasthan had his name on a paper presented by another e.f. vet Dr. Khyne U Mar on the eye problems faced in Jaipur.
Dr. Khyne U Mar also presented a fascinating talk on the management of the Burmese timber elephants - over 7,000 of them - which is largely unchanged from the sustainable methods used in the past when the rest of the world's forests were endless and people managed them, and the elephants that plied their trade there, as though they would last forever.
With the market changes of those who deal with Burma's Government demanding ever more timber ever more quickly it is difficult to see this approach to elephant and forest management being adhered to for long but we can hope. Whatever the future holds, the Myanmar Timber Enterprise Elephant Studbook must be one of the largest and most comprehensive databases of elephant knowledge in the world - Khyne U Mar's study alone included all the elephants working in Burmese forests from 1942 to 1999.
Dr Oswin Perrera of the University of Peradiniya told us of the situation in Sri Lanka which has many parallels for that in Thailand, though far greater numbers and concentrations of people and elephants tend to magnify their problems...
...while his colleague R. C. Rajapaksa told us of the captive breeding programmes in Pinnewalla Sanctuary, his talk was followed by another by G. A. Tharaka Prasad detailing activities elsewhere in Sri Lanka to return orphaned and hand raised babies safely to the wild.
...after talks from Sri Lanka, India and Thailand where population pressure and development are contributing to the decline of wild populations and presenting immense Human Elephant Conflict problems it was almost a relief to hear from the ever jovial Bhutanese contingent of life in a country with only 300,000 people and that famously has gross national happiness written into the constitution. (did you know there were only 300,000 people in Bhutan? - in the picture Dr. Sissidet of the TECC announces our collective surprise and desire to visit)
Dr Sumollaya Kanchanapanka gave a talk on many things, including her work to overhaul the Thai Elephant Identification Card, something close to my heart, her ideas were to include photographs and a DNA marker analysis on each card.
Perhaps what should happen is that the Government set a deadline of, say, three years during which all elephant owners must submit their old card and have new ones made including all this data which can be tied to a unique and registered and implanted micro-chip number - a paper copy to be kept with the elephant and an electronic copy to be stored on an electronic database available to all.
After the deadline any elephant without a number or with a number that does not apply to their photographed and DNA'd card would be confiscated.
Two worries spring immediately to mind - firstly, in the four or five years of microchipping we don't yet have a centrally held database of all the numbers in Thailand, secondly, as with all these things, any new laws would easily be followed by everyone present at the suggesting, all of whom are honest and elephant minded, all of whom agree it is a good idea - but who'll enforce it on the owner/mahout who cannot afford the 3,000 baht for the DNA test - or at least claims he can't.
The above was not all I learned from learned folks and I came away with many new ideas and thoughts for the future, I hope I'll re-visit the subject in future blogs and let you know the positive results of any experiments the Symposium leads us too - one piece of very good news was that the official Thai domestic elephant population is now up to 3,456 (an easy number to remember but apparently proven) from 3,381 in 1985 and the quoted figure of 2,500 from three years ago with around 2,000 wild.
Whatever the veracity of these numbers it would seem that the population of domestic elephants in Thailand is stable and that there is no need for any 'breeding to protect the species' programmes, indeed with elephants on the streets or competing for work in cheap and under paying camps, it would seem the only justifiable conservation reason to be breeding elephants would be as part of the AI experiments to create a viable insurance policy - the sperm bank.
We should love our babies but not try too hard for more.
In fact it was University, Kasetsart this time around, and unlike previous University lectures for which I knew there wouldn't be a test I learned more than my student day standard:
1, I have a hangover.
2, I need to sleep.
3, I cannot come up with a graffito wittier than those already present.
Perhaps because of the speakers and a subject that held my interest it turns out that I learned a lot during a recent couple of days attending the EU-Asia Link Project Symposium "Managing the Health and Reproduction of Elephant Populations in Asia" in a gloriously graffiti free but over air-conditioned hall in Bangkok.
I had no idea what to expect and the real reason I went was that several of my friends would be presenting papers so I thought I'd go and lend my support and see what the rest of the world was up to.
We were a mix of hard-core sperm counting veterinary scientists, elephant camp managers, Human Elephant Conflict mitigators and a few community folks from all across the range.
Our own vet, Mor Pap, had his name on a paper presented by the TECC vets citing their research to try and freeze and thaw sperm in such a way that it can lead to a stable pregnancy and thus start to build up a viable genetic bank for a time when the population may crash. Our old friend Dr Madhu from elephant family's operations in Rajasthan had his name on a paper presented by another e.f. vet Dr. Khyne U Mar on the eye problems faced in Jaipur.
Dr. Khyne U Mar also presented a fascinating talk on the management of the Burmese timber elephants - over 7,000 of them - which is largely unchanged from the sustainable methods used in the past when the rest of the world's forests were endless and people managed them, and the elephants that plied their trade there, as though they would last forever.
With the market changes of those who deal with Burma's Government demanding ever more timber ever more quickly it is difficult to see this approach to elephant and forest management being adhered to for long but we can hope. Whatever the future holds, the Myanmar Timber Enterprise Elephant Studbook must be one of the largest and most comprehensive databases of elephant knowledge in the world - Khyne U Mar's study alone included all the elephants working in Burmese forests from 1942 to 1999.
Dr Oswin Perrera of the University of Peradiniya told us of the situation in Sri Lanka which has many parallels for that in Thailand, though far greater numbers and concentrations of people and elephants tend to magnify their problems...
...while his colleague R. C. Rajapaksa told us of the captive breeding programmes in Pinnewalla Sanctuary, his talk was followed by another by G. A. Tharaka Prasad detailing activities elsewhere in Sri Lanka to return orphaned and hand raised babies safely to the wild.
...after talks from Sri Lanka, India and Thailand where population pressure and development are contributing to the decline of wild populations and presenting immense Human Elephant Conflict problems it was almost a relief to hear from the ever jovial Bhutanese contingent of life in a country with only 300,000 people and that famously has gross national happiness written into the constitution. (did you know there were only 300,000 people in Bhutan? - in the picture Dr. Sissidet of the TECC announces our collective surprise and desire to visit)
Dr Sumollaya Kanchanapanka gave a talk on many things, including her work to overhaul the Thai Elephant Identification Card, something close to my heart, her ideas were to include photographs and a DNA marker analysis on each card.
Perhaps what should happen is that the Government set a deadline of, say, three years during which all elephant owners must submit their old card and have new ones made including all this data which can be tied to a unique and registered and implanted micro-chip number - a paper copy to be kept with the elephant and an electronic copy to be stored on an electronic database available to all.
After the deadline any elephant without a number or with a number that does not apply to their photographed and DNA'd card would be confiscated.
Two worries spring immediately to mind - firstly, in the four or five years of microchipping we don't yet have a centrally held database of all the numbers in Thailand, secondly, as with all these things, any new laws would easily be followed by everyone present at the suggesting, all of whom are honest and elephant minded, all of whom agree it is a good idea - but who'll enforce it on the owner/mahout who cannot afford the 3,000 baht for the DNA test - or at least claims he can't.
The above was not all I learned from learned folks and I came away with many new ideas and thoughts for the future, I hope I'll re-visit the subject in future blogs and let you know the positive results of any experiments the Symposium leads us too - one piece of very good news was that the official Thai domestic elephant population is now up to 3,456 (an easy number to remember but apparently proven) from 3,381 in 1985 and the quoted figure of 2,500 from three years ago with around 2,000 wild.
Whatever the veracity of these numbers it would seem that the population of domestic elephants in Thailand is stable and that there is no need for any 'breeding to protect the species' programmes, indeed with elephants on the streets or competing for work in cheap and under paying camps, it would seem the only justifiable conservation reason to be breeding elephants would be as part of the AI experiments to create a viable insurance policy - the sperm bank.
We should love our babies but not try too hard for more.
Asian jumbo project gets underway
By L.B. Senaratne
A project called "Managing the Health and Reproduction of Elephant Populations in Asia" was recently initiated by the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Science of the University of Peradeniya, together with partners in Universities of Thailand (Kasetsart and Chiang Mai), the Netherlands (Utrecht) and the UK (Royal Veterinary College) with funding from the European Union "EU-Asia Link Project".
Preservation of the domesticated and wild elephant will be the focus of the three-year programme, to bring clear and lasting benefits to the participating countries. Research will be focused on methods for increasing the breeding of domesticated elephants through natural as well as artificial breeding technologies. The project will also study methods for the control of "musth", aggression and breeding in wild elephant males through immunization procedures, which will have applications for reducing the Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC) in selected areas.
Six specialists in the reproduction and management of elephants in Sri Lanka - Dr. (Mrs) Niromi Jayasekera, Prof. B.M.A. Oswin Perera, Dr. Anil Pushpakumara and Dr. Aruna Amerasinghe from the University of Peradeniya, Dr. R.C. Rajapakse from the Pinnawela Elephant Orphanage and Dr. Lasantha Perera from the Dehiwala Zoological Gardens attended the inaugural symposium and workshop held in Bangkok recently:
The project's objective is also human resource development in the Asian Institutes. This will be achieved by academic training of staff and students, strengthening the links between the institutions, and dissemination of knowledge acquired by the Asian participants within their own and neighbouring countries.
Prof. Oswin Perera presented a paper on "The status of elephants in Sri Lanka and the Human-Elephant Conflict" at the symposium, in which he highlighted several aspects. He revealed that estimates of the wild elephant population in the island published by various authors over the past two decades range from 1,500 to 6,000. At present the Department of Wildlife Conservation considers the population to be between 3,500 and 4,000. Thus Sri Lanka, which has a land area of 65,000 km2, appears to carry the highest number of elephants per unit land area compared to other Asian countries inhabited by wild elephants.
In addition to the above numbers that inhabit Protected Areas, more than 1,500 elephants are found predominantly outside such areas, in clumps of forests that are now fragmented by human habitation and cultivation, he said.
The number of captive elephants in the country was around 650 in the 1970s, but has now declined to around 160. During the last decade alone, 1,369 wild elephants were killed, with gunshot injuries accounting for 56% of them.The number of people killed by wild elephants in Sri Lanka between 1992 and 2001 was 536.
The above findings show the need for scientists and those involved in elephant conservation to get together and undertake studies on the appropriate methods that can be applied to mitigate the HEC in areas where it has become acute. Such methods should involve the affected communities and ensure that the wild elephant comes to be regarded as a valuable resource rather than a pest, Prof. Perera concluded.
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