Giants of the Monsoon Forest

by Giants of the Monsoon Forest- Living

  “Mostly we do logging work here,” Mong Cho explained. He had a boyish voice, though he was in his mid-forties. He spoke in a pleasantly relaxed cadence. “Later in the rainy season, the roads in these hills get bad, so at that time of year we also use the elephants to transport people’s things. It used to be that we’d transport a lot of jade from the mining area down below.” He gestured to a large wooden basket resting by a tree that they’d use for moving the gems. “Or we’d transport gold”—likely mined from the Uyu Valley.

  “That was lucrative. But then about a decade ago, the roads to Hpakant were improved. Even so, in July or August, the roads there still flood. I’ll go with Neh Ong to help pull jade trucks trapped in the mud. A lot of the time, we’ll just follow along behind a truck, which will get stuck every few hundred meters. The trucks can’t go very fast on those roads when the conditions are like that, so it’s not hard to keep up. It was more lucrative for us when we carried the jade ourselves, though.”

  Next to us the smallest elephant, the baby, was rolling around playfully in the dirt. The infant would stay extremely still, almost like a cadaver, then twist suddenly and happily into a new position, batting at pebbles with its tiny trunk. The two adult females looked on and ate leaves. The big tusker, Neh Ong, was off to the side facing away from the group, toward the wooded mountain pass up beyond the glen.

  “Recently the logging work here has also been not so good,” Mong Cho continued. “The valuable wood here is teak, but we logged most of the mature timber. A lot of mahouts in the area recently went with their elephants to Shan State, where there’s some logging to do, while we wait for our trees here to grow back.”

  “Who are the other mahouts in the area?” I asked, attempting the question in Burmese. J. had to intervene and rephrase.

  “Owners like me are all Hkamtis or Kachins. The helper mahouts, who don’t own the elephants themselves, are mostly Hkamtis or Kachins too, but there are some ethnic Burmese helper mahouts. There is also a government-run elephant logging village beyond the lake. They have many more elephants than any single owner does here in the hills. But really, a lot of the elephants here are now in the mature logging area in Shan State.”

  Mong Cho described the route by elephant from here to Shan State. First the mahouts would trek with their elephants through the Japi Bum Pass. (I could not locate it on any map.) From there, they’d cross the large Kaukkwe forest, which has hardly any villages or human settlements of any kind. At this point they wouldn’t be far from Katha, the town where George Orwell worked as a police official during the 1920s. Past the Kaukkwe forest, they’d get to the broad Irrawaddy River, which the elephants would swim across, with mahouts and supplies on their backs. Finally they would enter Shan State, which contains the provincial city of Lashio, an important hand-off point on the Burma Road during World War II.

  I hoped to ask more about the routes the mahouts like to take to get to the surrounding regions in search of work—I’d heard about other logging areas in the Hukawng Valley, as well as large amber mines—but just then Mong Cho leaped up, shouting at Neh Ong. The tusker had quietly moved toward the main tent and was about to grab its canvas roof with his trunk. The other mahouts began shouting at the elephant as well. He squinted, then retreated back to eating his leaves.

  “He is a difficult tusker,” Mong Cho confessed as he returned to J. and me. “Very difficult. No one can ride him except for me.” Our attention was now on this huge gray mass of flesh. The tusks on the large male elephant had been trimmed down to roughly a foot, the length preferred by logging mahouts so that the elephant can “scoop” the tusks under a log and hoist it upward, a bit like a forklift.2 The trimmed tusks also provided some supplemental income. Most elephants permitted the trimming to occur, provided their mahouts were seated overhead, muttering words of encouragement into their ears. The important thing was not to cut through the interior nerve, near the base of the tusk.3 Elsewhere I heard stories about forest mahouts who, greedy for an extra few inches of ivory to sell, trimmed the tusk right down to the nerve, which then became infected. Mong Cho had trimmed these tusks expertly. They were growing back at the rate of roughly an inch per year, and a new trimming was still several years away.4

  J. was right that Neh Ong appeared to be looking at us “skeptically”—though this might have been an effect of the tusker’s peculiar eyes, which were very small, nearly lashless, and orange. These eyes, combined with the pyramid-like shape of his forehead, gave the elephant an imposing, beastly appearance. He was not a “beautiful” elephant like the female Pwa Oo, who had larger, darker eyes, long lashes, a pleasantly plump trunk, and a mouth that curled upward in the shape of a gentle smile. Some of these features, of course, signified nothing about the elephants’ actual personalities—they merely had shapes, colors, and proportions onto which an observer might project human qualities. Yet other features, the eyes in particular, seemed to reveal something real in an elephant’s personality.

  “He’s a very good work elephant when I ride him,” Mong Cho explained. “He can carry heavy loads, and he’s very good at handling the timber. He’s also very smart and agile when we’re on these slopes”—Mong Cho gestured to the landslide next to us—“getting out of the way of falling logs, boulders, things like that.

  “But he is a killer elephant. Last year we hoped to mate him with a new female, but when she wandered over this way during the night, he became territorial and killed her.” For a male to attack another elephant during the nighttime roaming period wasn’t entirely unusual, but Neh Ong’s hyperprotectiveness of the other elephants in his camp was a bit strange. “They’re his family,” Mong Cho continued with a trace of exasperation, “so when strange elephants approach them, he becomes very aggressive, even when the strange elephant obviously means no harm or simply wants to mate.”

  By now we were back in the tent. The mahouts, who had never had a foreign guest at their camp before, were enjoying their role as hosts. They showed me the various tools they used for disciplining the elephants. There was a metal-tipped hammer-like tool—an ankus—that could be struck into an elephant’s ear. There was also a smaller metal pointer used on an elephant’s back. I’d seen tools like these, in the Moran area of the Dihing Valley, with elegantly carved, decorated handles, but here the instruments were less adorned. A mahout fetched tea for us, as well as a strong alcoholic drink they’d been brewing, a rice wine mixed with wild sun-dried tubers.

  Mong Cho continued to talk about Neh Ong. “It’s more normal for someone like me, the owner of the camp’s elephants, to be able to spend more time down in the valley, in the village with family,” he said, pouring his tea. “So, for a while my nephew was Neh Ong’s mahout instead. But he killed my nephew. That was about a year ago.”

  The revelation was startling, both to J., who had been translating, and to myself. In other conversations with mahouts, I’d heard about the dangers of the trade: about falling off an elephant, or encounters with enraged wild elephants during the capturing process, mela shekar. Sometimes a mahout or fandi would vaguely allude to incidents where an elephant had killed his rider, but he would say very little about it. This was my only field interview where a mahout openly discussed one of his own elephants killing a person. Moreover, the person had been a close relative, and the elephant in question was standing just fifteen feet away. The Hkamti mahout went on: “So now I always ride him, and he has no problem with me. He always obeys me and cooperates with me. But it keeps me up here in the camp a lot of the time. I’m here even more than my helper mahouts. And since I’m the owner, that’s a bit unusual.”

  The dark cloud hanging over the elephant Neh Ong indicated the psychological toll that captive life could take on these elephants, even when they had competent, caring mahouts like Mong Cho. The mahout-elephant relationship, in these work environments in the forest, was not morally or emotionally simple, for either human or animal. I recalled the words of a song that the Moran fandis, like Miloswar, sing
to elephants they’ve caught out of the wild:

  O wild elephant:

  Earlier you were in the mountains eating green grasses,

  But then we fandis caught you to take you farther down into the plains.

  Do not mind when I tie these ropes around your neck and feet,

  They are like necklaces and bracelets in your honor.

  Though sometimes we’ll have a hard time, I will give you the best food,

  And life will be better than before.

  You will change your heart.

  Though once you were in the jungle,

  Now you will adopt the heart of a human.5

  Miloswar sang these words for me in a melancholic, minor key that almost resembled Appalachian bluegrass. He said the song was “something between a lullaby and a love song.”

  Many elephants clearly do wind up “adopting the heart of a human.” But an elephant’s instincts and loyalties then become caught between two worlds. A fandi in the Trans-Patkai told me about an elephant who had been caught only recently and was still “rogue,” in the sense of being very difficult to control. He was a tusker, and as with Neh Ong, mahouts had died while working with him. The job of handling him was eventually divided among several mahouts, all brothers. One day this rogue elephant angrily shook and jerked his head to free himself of the mahout on top. The mahout fell. He wheezed in pain, and the other brothers gathered around to help him. The rogue elephant, seeing the rest of the group’s concern, immediately perched himself over the fallen boy to shade him from the sun. Then the tusker picked a broad leaf with his trunk and began fanning the young mahout, who was catching his breath.

  And yet this elephant had already killed several people. “The elephants are amazing creatures,” the fandi said to me. “Even when they are rogue or raw, they still have kind hearts.”6

  This story spoke to a core confusion at the heart of that elephant’s life. In some ways the lives of domesticated elephants could be grim. Getting caught could itself be traumatic for the elephants. “Mela shekar is like war,” another fandi once remarked to me.7 Usually mela shekar marks the last day an elephant ever sees its parents, offspring, or anyone else in its original herd. The targeted elephant finds itself surrounded by imposing khoonkies and tangled by rope. Then a sometimes-brutal training process begins. Training can last for many months, and during part of the time, all four of the animal’s legs are fastened with ropes to nearby trees.8

  The government-run logging camps in Burma tend to have gentler training methods, built more on positive reinforcement—food treats and the like—though this approach takes longer.9 The Trans-Patkai fandis more often mix positive with negative reinforcement. Thwacking the elephant over the forehead with the blunt edge of a machete seems to be a common disciplinary device. The higher-quality fandis and mahouts do this gently, so as not to injure the elephant or leave a mark. But in the Trans-Patkai, I saw a number of elephants with several parallel machete scars on their foreheads. To relax or reinvigorate their elephants, the Trans-Patkai mahouts sometimes give them marijuana, rice beer, or opium. Again, the more skilled elephant drivers know how to do this in moderation. But sometimes the elephants become addicted to the opium, which has long-term consequences for their physical and psychological well-being.

  Add to this the pressures of the work itself, and the physical frustrations caused by the nocturnal fetters. And add the slow march of modernity that everywhere fills the elephants’ lives with the roar of engines and deprives them of their forestlands. All this can result in a number of macabre behaviors. An elephant at a government camp in central Burma had a reputation for charging off to the nearby human graveyard during his period of musth. He would maniacally dig up graves and chew on the remains of human bodies. He preferred the more recent graves. Families in that village had learned that if they held a funeral immediately before the onset of this male’s musth season, he had to be watched, even chained if necessary. Nonetheless, during most of the year, the elephant was a fine work animal, with a close relationship with his mahout.10

  I heard an awful story of another elephant, a mother, found dead one morning. She was still standing, her forefeet crushing her own trunk. Evidently she had committed suicide. I didn’t understand how this was possible. Surely, as she lost consciousness from lack of oxygen, she would involuntarily breathe through her mouth, or the trunk would jerk free. Maybe this was just a story the mahouts tell to convey, both to the listener and to themselves, their mixed feelings about the work they do.11

  James Howard Williams tells a story from the Shenam Pass evacuation during World War II. He was walking along the path toward Imphal with the elephant convoy, when he suddenly saw a “riderless elephant, with its pack gone, coming up the slope towards me at a fast stride. Her ears were forward, and she had an expression on her face that, I thought, meant that she was off back to Burma.” Mahouts scrambled behind her to grab her chain. To dodge them, she took a running start and jumped over a ravine—“an action I had never seen an elephant make”—injuring her legs in the landing. Investigating the affair, Williams discovered that her mahout had tried to get her to cross an especially rickety bridge. The elephant had snapped, kicking the bridge down in anger, and this motion had thrown the mahout and saddle from the elephant. Then she fled: “Like a convict making a bold bid for liberty, she had stampeded up the hill, hoping to the return from the barren hills to a land of bamboos.” But having injured her legs in the jump, she was easily caught. “She stood quietly to be saddled”—but after that point, she walked with a limp.12

  Though forest-based work puts elephants in a better position to mate than elephants in tourist camps or in zoos, sometimes the stress and situation of the work can undermine healthy mating patterns. I encountered a tusker elephant in the Trans-Patkai, who, I was told, had mated with his own daughters. This was an area where there were few wild elephants left.13 I met the offspring. To my nonveterinarian’s eye, they seemed healthy enough, but such cases of inbreeding are obviously not what mahouts hope for, and a male elephant in a psychologically and environmentally healthy situation would be unlikely to engage in such behavior.

  Thinking through such stories and scenes, it’s hard not to wonder whether the practice of keeping elephants as work animals is defensible. Animal rights proponents concerned for the elephants’ welfare may argue that these elephants really ought to be released, to join or form wild herds. To be sure, this idea holds a strong moral appeal. But such an idea also misses the real danger facing the elephants, which is not the stresses of working life but rather eradication of forest cover.

  Advocacy of expanding forest preserves, and improving legal protections, is another morally intuitive rallying cry for outsiders hoping to see the elephants (as well as other animal and plant life) here flourish. But effective protection of forest ranges requires economic resources, and the more developed countries inside the Asian elephant’s natural range—Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia—have all developed to a point where forest cover is scarce. Indeed, this is a large part of how such countries became more economically developed: by stimulating agricultural output through expansion of farms into former forest. Less developed countries—Burma, Laos, much of India—have more forest area but fewer financial resources to establish and sustain wildlife preserves.

  The situation of elephants in South India provides a counterpoint to that of the work elephants in Burma and northeastern India. In South India, elephants are almost entirely wild, and they are relatively numerous: roughly a quarter of the world’s Asian elephants live in South India. (Together, Burma and northeastern India have about a third.) They live primarily in forest preserves that are reasonably well protected. And there are official “elephant corridors” that, at least in theory, allow elephants to migrate from forest to forest. In reality, these forests are isolated from each other, enveloped by areas of incredible human density.14 Indeed, no other region on earth has significant numbers of Asian elephants and human density
levels even approaching those of South India. South India’s system of wildlife preserves exists only with support from tax revenue generated through intensive human settlement and development in surrounding areas: that, in turn, constrains the size of the parks and fills the intervening elephant corridors with towns, villages, roads, and farms.

  The Trans-Patkai forest is far less fragmented than the remaining forestlands in South India, and it is well positioned along major surviving elephant migration routes. There appear to be several major “trunks” in this system of natural migratory corridors: one is a north-south route following the Patkais, from the Rakhine and Chin hills in the south to the Kachin Hills around Putao. Another begins around the Kaukkwe forests near Katha. From here, the wild herds proceed along the Kumon Range past the Hukawng Valley, then into the Patkais in the Chaukan area. Two major routes branch westward from Chaukan: one along the foothills of the eastern Himalayas toward Bhutan; another straight along the Lohit River toward the Brahmaputra River. Some wild elephants migrate all the way to Kaziranga National Park, hundreds of miles away in central Assam, either directly along the Brahmaputra’s floodplain or by a southern route across the Naga Hills and then the Karbi Hills. During the wet season, the elephants tend to stay in high areas, drawn to salt springs there. During the dry season, as the hills run out of water, the elephants come into the river valleys, where there are fresh bamboo shoots. This alternation between highlands and lowlands happens annually. Mahouts in both Burma and India told me the wild herds sometimes cross the international border, but nobody was sure how often.15

  Some of these migration routes are becoming disjointed. I learned of a herd of wild elephants in the Patkais whose males were “all mokona”—that is, all born tuskless. This indicates that the herd had become isolated and was deprived of the tusker gene over time (likely due to poaching, but perhaps also due to loggers’ heavy demand for tuskers to hoist beams of wood).16