Giants of the Monsoon Forest

by Giants of the Monsoon Forest- Living

  While spending time in Dambuk, I noted that the village also has a helicopter landing pad. It is generally used only by VIPs—elites from Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh’s capital city. But a number of people in Dambuk remarked to me that, really, during bad rainstorms, a helicopter is the most dangerous transport option of all. Riding an elephant or rubber raft is safer than navigating midair in conditions of high winds and poor visibility. In general, Dambuk residents preferred to get across by elephant.

  Eastern Arunachal Pradesh has a history of employing elephants not just for routine fords during the rainy season, as at Dambuk’s Sissiri crossing, but also during emergencies. In the early 1950s, Sadiya, the district capital for the Lohit and Dihing valleys, was destroyed by a huge earthquake and subsequent flooding. The earthquake, which measured 8.6 on the Richter scale, was so severe that it caused the Lohit River to shift in its course following the earthquake, deluging the town.2 During the floods, the town’s many elephants, which numbered in the hundreds, carried people and possessions out of the worst-affected areas and toward safety. The town ultimately washed away, replaced by the new course of the great river. In the years afterward, the former Sadiya elephants assisted in the construction of new district capital at Tezu, where the Mithong logging elephant Air Singh was born.3

  A settlement dating to medieval times, Sadiya had been known as a “city of elephants.” British colonists arriving there in the nineteenth century noted the festivals at Sadiya, where the local Hkamti and Kachin duwas would parade on elephant-back.4 During the 1940s, the well-off tribal families in the town each had several elephants. Sadiya’s immediate hinterlands were heavily forested, so elephants would roam these nearby forests at night and do transport work during the day. Logging was secondary, providing only seasonal income. Today the situation in the region is the inverse.5

  Massive rural floods at the scale of the Sadiya disaster still occur throughout South and Southeast Asia, brought about by earthquakes, landslides, and abnormal monsoon rains. A shattered glacial ice-dam can swamp a valley, especially one with diminished ground absorbance due to deforestation. A large force of elephants could provide logistical relief during such crises. But one has to go all the way back to that Sadiya flood for the last time hundreds of elephants were systematically utilized in a large rescue and relief operation.

  The Burmese government, despite its thousands of highly skilled elephants, does not mobilize its logging elephants into flooded rural areas. At most, the elephants might help move supplies in and out of the logging villages during monsoon, when main access roads become flooded (a constant occurrence). A logging village with fifty or sixty elephants might send just three or four elephants for this relatively minor task, leaving the remainder in the village area to drag timber for the day. Timber and forestry officials could send extra elephants to bring needed supplies to neighboring villages full of farmers and hunters who are also stranded by the monsoon storms. Currently, they don’t. The KIA does send elephant brigades to help cut-off communities, but their monsoon-time logistical operations are obviously complicated by warfare with the Tatmadaw.

  But what if countries developed official departments of floodtime logistics that were organized around the abilities of elephants? Such bureaucratic organizations, if developed, could employ large crews of trained elephants and mahouts, perhaps operating in the mode of the Kachin elephant convoys, or of lost elephant “hubs” like Sadiya. This would connect the elephants with the growing human need to live with large flooding events, while also keeping the work elephants located in the forest for much of the year.

  The idea has its limits, to be sure, not least of which is that though elephants are dexterous and mobile in flooded areas unreachable by jeeps or boats, the composition of the floodwaters in certain areas can be hazardous to their welfare. This would be, unfortunately, especially true in most urban areas, where floodwaters often become intermixed with sewage, chemical pollutants, and dangerous debris. During flooding in Ayutthaya, Thailand, in 2011, elephants from a nearby major elephant park waded through flooded urban neighborhoods to high ground, carrying their mahouts and sometimes passengers or salvaged possessions. Photographs show them navigating skillfully along streets submerged in two or three feet of water—too deep for wheeled vehicles but too shallow for boats. But the water was brown with pollutants and full of metal debris, a clear hazard for the elephants.6

  An even more dramatic example of elephants helping in flooded areas occurred in Banda Aceh, at the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, in late 2004 and early 2005. This city, the one-time capital of the Aceh Sultanate and the current provincial capital of Sumatra’s Aceh Province, was the major city closest to the epicenter of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, which killed a quarter-million people worldwide. In Banda Aceh the tsunami wave reached forty feet in height. A quarter of the city’s population was killed.7

  Banda Aceh’s horrific destruction and the subsequent local, national, and international efforts at rebuilding the city is a vast and multifaceted story of suffering and resolve. The story of the eight elephants who were brought from the Acehnese forests to help in the disaster relief effort is just a small part of that larger story, but it ought to be told, and more widely known, not least because of how it showcases elephants’ abilities and limitations during a massive human emergency. Early in my research, I knew about Banda Aceh’s “tsunami elephants” only from a few newspaper articles from January 2005, which provided very little useful information.8 I went to the city in 2015 to learn more from elephant experts there who were familiar with the episode.

  The city was in far better shape than I expected. Many of its flooded areas had been rebuilt, and some of the worst-hit districts were left (for the time being) as development-free wetlands. Banda Aceh can be scenic, especially along its river harbor, which is lined by fine wooden fishing boats painted in bright reds and blues. Scents of fish and crab fill the air, and mallets clatter as boat hulls are finished or repaired. I wound up spending a long afternoon here speaking with a forest official, Wahdi Azmi, and an elephant veterinarian, Chris Stremmer, an immigrant from Germany. The three of us chatted in Wahdi’s office, drinking Acehnese coffee and snacking on fried sundries.

  A few days after the tsunami struck, one of the Acehnese elephant conservation officials, who had been stranded in the uplands during the flood, returned to the city to find that his home had washed away. He’d lost his wife and one of his children. This official was very close with his mahouts, many of whom had families who lived in the same destroyed residential neighborhood. Many of the mahouts had lost loved ones as well. The official and his mahouts went back to their elephant camp in the uplands and rounded up the best work elephants they had there, eight in all, to come back with them to the wreckage in Banda Aceh.9

  Mostly the elephants hauled debris out of the way: torn-up beams from destroyed homes, smashed cars and motorcycles, twisted sheets of metal, and so on. With the debris removed, tsunami survivors could access the areas where their homes had once stood, to recover possessions or possibly locate the bodies of loved ones. The elephants were in great demand: wheeled relief vehicles couldn’t access these areas, at least not during the initial weeks after the catastrophe. Photographs of the tsunami elephants taken by fascinated journalists convey the unique usefulness of the elephants in this ruined landscape. Everywhere the ground was covered in mud and rife with debris. Even a tank would have become bogged down, but the elephants were mobile.

  Chris Stremmer arrived in the area shortly after the disaster, and as a veterinarian, he was alarmed at the condition of the elephants. Their feet and trunks were getting cut from sharp metal objects or broken glass or huge splinters of wood that were everywhere. The cuts were getting infected from the dirt and grime in the standing floodwater. The elephants also weren’t receiving adequate nutrition, since they were no longer in the forest, and they weren’t getting anywhere near enough fresh drinking water. Nonetheless,
Chris recognized that for many of the people at the scene, who’d undergone such a terrible trauma, the presence of the elephants was both practically and emotionally significant. Despite his qualms about this use of the elephants, Chris decided to help over the subsequent months, mending the elephants’ wounds, treating their infections, and organizing a steady supply of nutrients and fresh water from the major relief agencies camped nearby.

  “It was fucking hard work,” he remembered, “both for the elephants and for the mahouts. It was basically a war zone, and the elephants were in an area where elephants should not be.” But the official who brought the elephants to the city was “just trying to do something, during such an awful time.” The official (whom both Wahdi and Chris opted not to name) had started out as a mahout and wanted his mahouts and elephants near him for companionship. And the mahouts all wanted to be at the site of their former homes, where they’d last seen their family members. The mahouts kept themselves busy, and two and a half months later, all eight elephants returned to the Acehnese forest, all in reasonably good health. “It sounds absurd, I know,” Chris remarked, “but for me it was actually a good time. I started building a close relationship with the mahouts and the elephants . . . and it was really full-dive-in, yeah? The kind of work I like to do.”

  Wahdi joined in the conversation and talked about the unusual history of elephant domestication in Sumatra. I knew some of this history from books and articles. Historically, Sumatra had domesticated elephants for only two or three centuries, during the period of the precolonial Aceh Sultanate. Under this regime, elephants were caught from the Sumatran forest and trained for logging, transport, parades, and occasionally warfare. In Java too, people had caught and trained elephants prior to the colonial period, but elephants disappeared from Java’s dwindling forest interior during the eighteenth century (whereas elephants persisted on the more heavily forested island of Sumatra).

  After the Sultanate period in Sumatra came Dutch colonial rule, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Elephant capture and taming in Sumatra ceased, partly because the Dutch, unlike the British in India and Burma, were uninterested in investing in elephant-centered methods of extracting forest resources.10 However, the speed with which elephant culture disappeared from Sumatra also indicates that elephant domestication here, while it existed, had been organized primarily by the island’s most powerful rulers, the Acehnese sultans. Once these figures were deposed or replaced by Dutch governors, there were no indigenous social structures to keep the local traditions of elephant domestication in place. By contrast, on the Asian mainland, elephant domestication was organized both by powerful kings and also by forest peoples and hill tribes. So even when local kings and emperors fell, traditions of elephant capture and domestication were sustained by groups on the margins of power, like the Hkamtis and the Morans.

  All of Sumatra’s domesticated elephants were released back into the forest and joined wild herds there, and from the early nineteenth through the late twentieth century, Sumatra’s elephant population was entirely wild. This wild population, though, clashed with farmers who were expanding into Sumatra’s interior. The problem became pronounced during the 1950s and 1960s, as the post-independence Indonesian government encouraged large migrations of Javanese to Sumatra, to relieve the island of Java of its long-standing overcrowding problems. In Sumatra, the Javanese primarily engaged in agricultural work. In turn, conflicts between farmers and wild elephants became more frequent, as elephants wandered through farmers’ crops and farmers sometimes responded by killing the elephants.

  During the 1980s, the Indonesian government tried a new strategy for reducing these farmer-elephant conflicts: turn the wild elephants, or at least a large number of them, into trained work elephants, whose movements could then be controlled. The Indonesian forestry department had in mind something like the Burmese forestry model, where elephants would be captured and trained to do logging work, which in turn would help pay for expanded forest and elephant conservation efforts. The forestry department hired mahouts from Thailand to teach locals how to capture and train elephants.11 Given that the forestry model the Indonesian officials had in mind was the Burmese one, it likely would have been better to bring in Burmese mahouts, but Burma’s political isolation during that period made this difficult.

  Several hundred of Sumatra’s three to four thousand elephants were captured this way, then sent to a network of new conservation camps to engage in logging. But the logging camps never proved especially profitable, as Sumatran lumber was susceptible to global market forces: economic protections were lacking, and the types of timber that proliferate in the Sumatran forests were relatively widely available. In the 1990s, forestry officials repurposed many of the caught elephants for tourism, either by building new elephant parks in the Sumatran forest or, in many cases, by sending caught elephants to the island of Bali, which has a higher concentration of tourists than anywhere in Sumatra. But this strategy also had limits. The camps in Bali generated plenty of revenue but didn’t place elephants near sufficient forestlands. The camps in Sumatra had ample forestlands but couldn’t draw enough tourists.

  Perceiving the weaknesses of both the logging and the tourism strategies, Wahdi Azri and other officials initiated a third utilization for the caught elephants: for “patrol” work. Wahdi explained the concept: “In many areas the issue with farmer-elephant conflicts is that there’s no ‘buffer’ between the two, and the farmer communities only see elephants as a negative in their lives. To address this issue, we move along the forest periphery with our patrol elephants, and when we hear of a farmer-elephant conflict, where a wild elephant has wandered onto a farmer’s land, we go to that area and pressure the wild elephant back toward the forest. Sometimes we need to use sound cannons to do this, but usually what happens is that the moment the wild elephant sees our patrol elephants, it understands it has to go back in the other direction, toward the forest.”

  He continued: “The farming communities get used to the patrols and start to see them as a benefit to the community. Sometimes they get very attached to the patrol elephants, which is a completely different cultural mentality than a decade ago, when most local people just saw elephants as a nuisance.”

  “It happened recently,” Chris cut in, “that a community in South Sumatra learned that their favorite patrol elephant was being sent to another area, to a park. And they became so enraged that they threatened to burn the park headquarters down if they didn’t get their elephant back!” The German grinned.

  Wahdi seemed a bit embarrassed by the story but clearly appreciated its implications. “The main problem with how the elephant domestication program was designed here in the 1980s and 1990s,” he went on, “was that for the forest officials, it wasn’t a ‘trained work elephant’ that had value. No, it was a ‘caught elephant’ that had value: the value of no longer presenting a nuisance to the farmers.” This meant that this earlier generation of forestry officials had never entirely thought through the question of what to do with the elephants once they were caught. “The legacy of that mindset is still very much in the forestry department today,” Wahdi explained. The patrols had much potential as a model, but they couldn’t give all of Sumatra’s caught elephants, of which there were many hundreds, something to do. “And if they don’t have something to do, they don’t receive good care,” he added. Chris nodded in agreement.

  I knew there was another major restraint in Sumatra’s young, or “relaunched,” tradition of elephant capture and mahoutship: in Sumatra they do not let their trained elephants roam the forest at night. That practice, so key to the elephant cultures in Burma and northeastern India, would require people who were willing to spend a large portion of their lives in the forest—and a government, or some other funding source, willing to pay for that kind of commitment. This limits the elephants’ usefulness for logging and closes off the use of elephants for transportation during the monsoon season, a task which Sumatra’s trained eleph
ants don’t do at all.

  Hearing about these challenges within Sumatra’s elephant conservation programs, I wondered whether the official who had brought the elephants to Banda Aceh after the tsunami was aware of this ongoing problem, of finding a “use” for the caught Sumatran elephants. Perhaps, in some way, he was trying to demonstrate a value that his fellow officials had not yet perceived: the elephants’ value during floods. Banda Aceh was likely not the best place to demonstrate that worth, due to the dangerous conditions left in the tsunami’s wake. But Banda Aceh wasn’t the only tsunami-hit area where elephants aided relief efforts. In southern Thailand, elephants from some tourist parks were brought into destroyed sections of a beach area called Khao Lak. There the working conditions were better for the elephants than in Banda Aceh, as the scale of the wreckage was not as severe.12

  THE REAL LIMITATION in deploying elephants for relief work in places like Banda Aceh is not so much that these places are cities as that, infrastructurally, they are not designed to flood “cleanly”—that is, to keep floodwaters unpolluted as they surge in. To some extent, this is a problem in all flood-prone cities. But it’s far more severe in cities, which, due to poverty or age, can’t easily engineer a hydraulic infrastructure that quarantines the sewage system during a flooding event. To expect relatively poor places like Banda Aceh to have such sophisticated infrastructure in place, when even many developed cities don’t have anything like this, would be unrealistic and unreasonable. But what about wealthier cities within the Asian elephant’s natural range? Singapore is a pocket of incredible wealth located at the southern tip of mainland Southeast Asia—but at this point the tiny city-state has almost no forestland, which is also true of the portion of Malaysia adjacent to Singapore.