GUWAHATI
About 33% of the rescued and hand-raised elephants get rewilded, a trial in the western Assam’s Manas Tiger Reserve has revealed.
Assam has more than 5,700 elephants, the highest after Karnataka in India. A few of them get orphaned every year primarily due to human-animal conflicts and floods.
A majority of the rescued calves under 2 years of age are hand-raised at rehab centres, specifically at the Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation (CWRC) run by the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) and the Assam Forest Department near the Kaziranga National Park in eastern Assam.
Vaibhav C. Mathur, the field director of the Manas Tiger Reserve said an experiment a few months ago resulted in only two out of six elephants getting rewilded. This, he said in a letter to the State’s Chief Wildlife Warden, worked out to a 33% success rate.
The elephants that could not be released in the wild were hand-raised since infancy for a substantial period of time. Three of these elephants – Murphulani (6 years, 3 months), Hoji (3 years, 8 months) and Tinsukee (3 years) – were females while 2-year-old Sonaram was a male.
“It can be observed from the data provided that significant imprinting, habituation and conditioning would have occurred in these hand-raised elephants which will make their rewilding difficult besides resulting in substantial expenditure and consumption of man power for their monitoring,” he wrote in the letter.
He suggested that these elephants be provided for routine management duties to Raimona and Dehing Patkai, the two newly-notified national park.
Mr. Mathur attributed the difficulty in rewilding hand-raised elephants to their trait. “Being a social animal, it is difficult (to reintroduce such elephants). But even some success will prevent an elephant from spending a life in captivity,” he told The Hindu.
A CWRC attendant said they had advocated a second chance for the rescued animals. “Our primary goal is to send rescued elephants and other animals back to the wild. If they don’t go back after a few efforts, the elephants can live in captivity in the Forest Department’s care,” he said, declining to be quoted.
He said wildlife officials and experts were divided into two schools of thought – one advocated life-long captivity of rescued elephants and the other sought their rehabilitation in the wild. He also said one could not draw an inference for all rescued elephants from the Manas trial.
“One has to see if a rehab centre replicates the wild considerably. Elephants have to be completely kept away from human interference after being hand-reared to a certain period of time,” a Guwahati-based wildlife expert said.
“It is also important to note that elephants are wired for a hierarchical social structure. The rehab centres do not have an adult or sub-adult female to take the orphaned calves into her fold and regimentalise their actions enough to be ready to go back to the wild,” he said.
