How demand in temples distresses elephants, fuels wild captures

Kerala alone lost 24 captive elephants in 2024, and a total of 154 in the six years since 2019. On the other hand, domestic elephants killed 196 people, mostly at festivals, in Kerala between 2011 and 2023.

Last month, the Supreme Court invoked the principle of volenti non fit injuria (to a willing person, injury is not done) to say that devotees willingly take the risk by attending festivals where elephants are paraded.

Judicial wisdom

Taking up the cause suo moto, the Kerala High Court in November 2024 asked festival organisers to maintain a minimum distance of three meters between two elephants, five meters between an elephant and flaming torches, eight meters between an elephant and the public or any percussion display, and 100 meters between elephants and fireworks.

This in effect limited the number of elephants that can be paraded, making it a factor of the space available. Notably, this came in the way of the Thrissur Pooram, Kerala’s largest religious festival which was started by Sakthan Thampuran, the Maharaja of the erstwhile Kochi state, at the Vadakkumnathan Temple in the late 18th century.

The festival organisers approached the SC, arguing that the HC order hampered the conduct of the festival as the requirement to maintain a 3-metre distance between elephants was “impracticable”. The apex court agreed that “courts should not get into law making”, and effectively stayed the Kerala HC order by limiting the precautionary requirements to what was prescribed in the Kerala Captive Elephants (Management and Maintenance) Rules, 2012.

“Unfortunately, the 2012 Rules are routinely violated. On January 5, for example, five elephants were paraded inside the closed compound walls of Thrissur’s Thiruvambady temple,” pointed out Alok Hisarwala Gupta, founder of the Centre for Research on Animal Rights, and a trustee at the Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organisations.

No choice for elephants

Unlike the devotees, who the SC felt took the risk of being around elephants willingly, the elephants have no choice. Pakkath Sreekuttan, the elephant involved in this week’s tragedy, is a highly stressed animal that injured its keeper and others during a temple festival at Koyilandy in Kozhikode in January 2024. But the animal was reemployed after a short break.

A 2019 study by researchers from the Hyderabad-based Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) found that participating in long, tiring religious ceremonies put elephants under extreme stress, which can lead to hyperglycemia, suppress immune responses, delay wound healing, and neuronal cell death.

The study analysed the concentration of stress hormones — glucocorticoid metabolites — in 870 dung samples of 37 captive elephants to conclude that the concentration was higher in elephants which were chained and made to work longer hours, than their counterparts at the zoo or forest camps.

Even to untrained eyes, the repetitive and monotonous motion of head bobbing, weaving and swaying are the most commonly noticed behaviour in captive elephants that display the extreme stress they are under due to noise and light exposure, overexertion, strain caused by repetitive actions such as kneeling or lifting their trunks, and also the lack of exercise due to long hours of standing at one spot.

Supply from the wild

In September 2021, hearing a petition on the ill-treatment of elephants at the Srirangam temple in Tiruchy district, the Madras High Court ordered that no elephant be taken into captivity, except for treatment in case it is found unable to support itself in the wild.

This was a reiteration of the ban imposed on capturing wild elephants for trade in 1977. A decade later, trading in captive elephants was banned in 1986. However, the law allowed people in legal possession of captive elephants to gift these animals to anyone capable of their upkeep. Experts say that is how elephants from the wild continued to feed the demand from temples, primarily in the southern states.

Breeding elephants in captivity is not easy since the males in musth (heat) turn violently aggressive and are usually contained in isolation. The strategy of letting loose captive females in oestrus in natural forests in the hope that wild bulls in musth will find them is not very productive either.

“The bulk of the young captive elephants are still sourced from the wild and, in the absence of effective scrutiny, passed on as captive-bred elephants,” a senior forest officer in Assam told The Indian Express. In some cases, microchips meant to identify domestic elephants are removed, and planted in wild-caught elephants to dress them up as domestic.

Growing man-elephant conflict also offers opportunities. “When the Wildlife Amendment Bill came up in Parliament for discussion a couple of years ago, several members prescribed a silver bullet to end the conflict — capture and send the problem elephants to temples to make both villagers and temple trusts happy,” a member of Parliament from Kerala said.

Finding a middle ground

In 2022, the amendment itself threatened to undo the gains achieved through multiple corrections made in the Wildlife Act since 1972. A proviso in the Act now leaves it to the central government to frame rules for the transfer of elephants for “religious and other” purposes.

On the other hand, the Centre decided to guard against the blatant misuse of microchips by accepting DNA tests as the only solution to detect captive bloodlines in elephants. Launched in August 2022, the effort to map the genotypes of all captive elephants in the country profiled 270 animals in the first six months.

As opinion remains sharply divided in Kerala, it is unlikely that elephants will be taken out of festivals any time soon. Activists and experts bank on the state’s long and deep cultural association with elephants to find a middle ground. It may not be for the courts to frame laws, they say, but the recent directions of the High Court showed the way to make elephant participation in festivals safer for all.