Forget the spin doctors, we've got ourselves a spin vet.
It is well known in the elephant world (I mean the under the underpass, out in the fields, round the sack of homemade whisky world of mahouts not the fine dining five star world of elephant camp owners & followers) that though we look after your elephant well, pay more than most, look after the family & have a genuine and obvious love for all the hangers on in an elephant camp we have certain crazy foreign ideas that must be adhered to in order to gain access to our long, straight sugar cane, our nice housing and our life insurance plans.
Admittedly part of this comes from being attached to a couple of five star hotels and the expectations (& sometimes admittedly romanticised - sometimes by ourselves and sometimes by our Hotel spin doctors in the PR department) visions & expectations of our guests, so the place needs to be clean and tidy, mahouts (& myself) need to be presentable, well dressed, not too smelly & sober (especially me for the latter points).
But part of this comes from our funny ideas about how elephants need to be looked after: give them as much freedom as you can, carry your tools but don't use them, don't make them do silly tricks (especially harmful ones) etc.
As I have said many times though, it is of very little use to the wider community if, once this is all over & the money runs out, our guys don't take their lessons home with them; if we somehow become the mythical, whispered about camp in the North where your elephants can grow strong and your family can live off the milk & honey provided and all you have to do is pretend to agree with the crazy foreigner that runs the place.
Credibility is key, it is key when I talk to you guys, I like to hope you wouldn't donate to a charity or visit a camp unless you had access to the philosophies and working methods behind that camp, but it is also key when talking to our (albeit income earning, stuff to gain) partners in all of this - the mahouts (the elephants, don't ask for credibility but I hope we earn that anyway).
Being six foot tall, blonde (& male) credibility took some earning during my first forays into the mahout world, when starting out its earning cost me many blisters, gallons of sweat, a disturbed digestive system & probably ten years of liver function and that was just with the mahouts living on site. I just couldn't carry on that a'way - besides, real credibility of the sort that also convinces you guys & persuades those guys to consider listening to our ideas doesn't come from proving our personal endurance.
To my mind it comes from having the best & most experienced Thai staff that can help mould my ideas into something less crazy and that can talk to the guys in a language they'll understand, it also comes from access to the best global scientific ideas - & here's where I renege on a promise & let you off the hook, in my last missive about the EU Asia Link Symposium on Elephant Health & Reproduction I threatened to give my thoughts on all the papers for the remaining two days, well, I'm not going to do that (I might, at some point, talk about the Bornean Pygmy Elephant paper as that's fascinating to me) for now I'll just talk about how we'll use the knowledge we gained on that trip practically to explain some of our crazy ideas.
Today's case study comes in the form of a mother and baby elephant and their owner/mahouts request to wean them as soon as possible so training of the baby can begin, there are several reasons they want to do this:
- A smaller elephant is easier to train using the tickle & sing, softly, softly methods we insist upon (& I haven't found a credible way to explain why we like it this way, after all thousands of years of history have developed other, more efficient, methods, so for now this must remain a crazy foreign idea - the best I have got is that we need to be thorough but we have no need of efficiency).
- Once the baby is weaned the Mother can come back into estrous and can therefore be impregnated again (whilst I don't agree with breeding willy-nilly I can see that babies are the future from the mahouts' view point.).
- Other people are doing it far earlier and we can't see the damage (yet).
- Once the baby is weaned they become two elephants and the rent goes up (hmmmm... will have to look into that).
In Thailand human kids start school at two and a half so two and a half to three years old is relatively easy explain on an emotional level. However while I can persuade the mahouts to accept my judgement (& can always play the 'I pay so you do as I say' card) I still feel a urge to explain my reasons, show my workings as it were, and this is where Dr Cherry and her scientific qualifications (& calm voice) come in.
Reason Number 1: Early weaning can lead to health problems later in life (in fact Dr. Khyne U Mar, who I will quote later on, suggests that weaning is done as early as possible for the sake of the mother - but this is in the timber industry where efficiency is required (as I said earlier, slapdashery is almost our creed), she also mentions that, once weaned, supplemental feeding is essential).
I have long held (& will long hold until someone can say otherwise) that part of the reason Thai tusks snap for a pass time is that since 1989 many baby elephants have been weaned early to be taken onto the streets, it is my theory that many elephants under the age of 20 didn't get enough access to calcium and while this is shown in the tusks today I wonder what will be the consequences in bones tomorrow.
For today's argument, though, I'll use the extreme case of Khun Chai, a young wild elephant whose mother was shot and who was rescued by a facility down South until it became clear that he had extreme rickets and that the facility couldn't look after him whereupon they sent him to the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre, he has since become too heavy for his brittle bones and broke a leg whilst trying to stand one day. He is now unable to stand at all.
Now, Dr Cherry tells me that I can't simplistically use this case as an illustration of why we don't wean early, after all he would have been forcibly weaned far earlier our mahouts have requested, the case may well not be lack of calcium and may have more to do with a Vitamin D deficiency and the facility that originally tried to raise him had the best possible advice about supplementary feeding so merely having been weaned too young did not directly cause this case.
My answer is, don't lie (we're after credibility) but spin it, let's acknowledge this is an extreme case (though not in the case of some elephants I have seen weaned for the street under the age of one - so in bringing this to the attention of the mahouts we may also be adding to the mahout grapevine (which is an example of efficiency if ever you were looking for one)) but let's get the guys to acknowledge that it is one of the things that can happen if weaning is done too early, so it follows that this is one reason I don't want to allow early weaning - besides, this happened even with supplementary feeding and I will not pay for baby supplements if there is a perfectly healthy and willing mother present.
To move to the second half of the presentation Cherry will give we move back to the symposium and a paper given by Dr Khyne U Mar entitled "Early Reproductive Investment Depresses Age-Specific Survival and Fitness in Female Asian Elephants".
Those of you who can talk boffin need read no longer, the title tells it all, fortunately for me Dr Khyne also climbed on stage and explained in words of one syllable or less. What makes her research so fascinating is that she has access to perhaps the best kept record of births, deaths & marriages of Asian Elephants anywhere in the world The Burma Timber Industry Studbook so she was able to reach back as far as 1941 and take data from females that, though geographically spread throughout Burma, were subject to identical treatment and working regimes.
Among the many things she has found over the years by subjecting this simple looking tome to statistical analysis and, indeed, what she found for this paper was that mothers tend to get better at raising calves with experience (well, we 'knew' that, but not scientifically we didn't), that the increased age of the mother didn't negatively affect calf (so an old lady can produce a calf as well, if not better (experience) as a young lady) but, crucially for this argument, females that had delivered three calves before the age of thirty had a significantly shorter lifespan (fail to reach the age of 54, so we're talking 5 to 10 years on average shorter life).
There are many caveats to this finding, elephants in zoos that have failed to breed early have had trouble reproducing later in life (another paper by Janine Brown from the Smithsonian Institute outlined possible health problems later in life for females who have not bred) and, of course, Dr Khyne was at pains to point out that work related stress and nutrition may also play part in her findings - all the elephants studied were working timber elephants not pampered guest looker-afterers.
So once again I say to Cherry, don't lie, spin. I cannot & will not stop you getting your female elephant pregnant immediately after weaning of her baby, but here are the findings of one in-depth study that suggest giving her a rest between babies may be advantageous to her later in her lifetime, as I know that you love your elephant as part of your family (& this I know) perhaps you might want to bare it in mind?
PS. To all scientists out there (particularly those being spun here) I hope you don't take offence at my (ahem) cherry picking of your results to suit my needs, let's experiment further and prove me wrong, if you come & research here I promise you can present your unbiased results to the mahouts.
Posted by John Roberts at Fri, 18 Jun 2010 08:20:00 GMT 
Categories: Golden Triangle Elephants, Scientific Research in Camp
Categories: Golden Triangle Elephants, Scientific Research in Camp
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