Yala Park in Sri Lanka's eastern plains is home to a myriad of wildlife, and Pinnawalle in the centre is a refuge for Sri Lankan elephants, home to the world's first elephant orphanage.
It is rumored that Sri Lanka uses elephant feces as a national gift, and it is "unscrupulous" to make money, what is going on?
The world's first elephant orphanage
Sri Lanka is a beautiful landscape bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Pauk Strait and India to the northwest. It is a country close to the equator, so there are no four seasons, and the year is divided into dry and rainy seasons.
It is said that 6,500 years ago, Sri Lanka and India were connected, and a herd of elephants migrated from India to Sri Lanka to breed. However, it is not known whether this is true or not.
Sri Lankan elephants are one of the Asian elephant subspecies, and they are also found only in Sri Lanka, called Ceylon elephants, which are the largest species of Asian elephants, and the Ceylon elephant herd mainly feeds on plantain and palm plants.
Sri Lankan elephants are different from other elephants in that they are able to see distinct pink spots when they reach adulthood. Most male elephants don't have tusks, and less than 10% of lucky males grow majestic tusks. Ivory is a rarity for Sri Lankan elephants.
The people of Sri Lanka are so passionate about ivory that they regard ivory as a symbol of supremacy, and even set up a temple of the Tooth Relic. In ancient wars, the king would also ride an elephant to go on the expedition, which was very domineering.
It may have been the love of ivory that led to the flourishing of the local ivory trade. Sri Lanka's ivory trade has been going on for more than 2,000 years.
A few hundred years ago, Sri Lanka had a large number of elephants, more than 30,000. After 1505, European countries launched colonial wars, and Sri Lanka became a "cash cow" for European countries.
Tall and dense trees have fallen one by one, vast swaths of forests have been cut down, and elephants have been slaughtered in the process. It is said that the British at that time killed more than 60 elephants in a week!
Although Sri Lanka is now free from European colonization, the elephant population has declined considerably. As a result of subsequent rural development, the elephants' natural habitat became narrower, and during the dry season in Sri Lanka, humans and elephants often competed for food and water, and villagers gradually began to illegally kill elephants.
According to statistics, 85% of the deaths of elephants in Sri Lanka are caused by human activities. To protect elephants, the Sri Lanka Wildlife Department established the world's first elephant orphanage in 1975. It is mainly used to adopt young elephants that are homeless, seriously injured, out of the herd or sick.
The Elephant Orphanage initially adopted seven elephants and has now expanded to more than 80 elephants. The original intention of establishing the elephant orphanage is naturally good, but some people say that Sri Lanka regards elephant dung as a national gift and "unscrupulous means" in order to make money.
Feces as a national gift, "unscrupulous" to make money?
After the establishment of the elephant orphanage, more and more elephants were taken in, and the expenses increased. Baby elephants need to drink milk until they are 2 years old, and a 4-year-old baby elephant can eat 800 kilograms of food a day.
There is so much food to eat every day, and there is a lot of feces that can be pulled out, and the staff are distressed to look at the piles of feces every day. Once, by chance, the person in charge of a paper workshop came to the elephant orphanage and saw the mountain of elephant dung.
Elephants mainly eat plants, 90% of the manure is plant fiber, the remaining 10% is water, and the material of the manure is very similar to that of paper. And the elephant's dung does not stink, and the dung pulled out by the elephant that eats the leaves of the palm tree even has a golden color.
If we could turn elephant dung into paper, wouldn't it not only solve the problem of raw materials for papermaking, but also solve a big problem for the orphanage? The businessman said he would do it, and after proposing his idea to the staff, he carried a large box of elephant dung back.
After a series of processes such as cleaning, filtration, crushing and pulping, and squeezing, a piece of paper made of elephant dung was successfully developed. What's even more amazing is that the paper made from elephant dung does not stink, but has a unique fragrance!
An elephant can excrete more than 100 kilograms of feces a day, and one pound of manure can make 60 sheets of paper the size of A4 paper. Not only is it environmentally friendly, but it is also inexpensive, and it can solve the mountain of elephant manure, which can be said to kill multiple birds with one stone. In this way, elephant dung became the raw material for local artificial paper.
With the introduction of elephant dung paper, it has gradually become widely loved, and the country has given it as a national gift to other countries. Sri Lanka's celebrities and dignitaries also use elephant dung paper to make business cards, and many high-end hotels use elephant dung paper to make check-in instructions and menus. The elephant dung also brings a lot of income to the orphanage, which is used to maintain the orphanage's daily expenses.
Elephant dung paper is only part of the income of the elephant orphanage, and the orphanage is "unscrupulous" in order to make money and maintain expenses.
First of all, the elephant orphanage has been turned into a tourist attraction, and visitors from outside the country will need to buy a ticket to visit it. Once inside, you can visit the existing elephant herd and there will also be animal shows.
Here visitors can learn the story of the elephant orphanage, learn the story behind each elephant, and experience the magical experience of riding an elephant, which can be fed to the elephants for 250 yuan (10 yuan).
Here you can also see the "famous scene" of elephants bathing, lying obediently in the middle of the river, waiting for people to bathe them. Visitors can bathe the elephants with coconut shells, and there will be staff next to them to ensure the safety of visitors.
The director of the elephant orphanage said that due to the hot weather in the area, the elephants go to the river every day to bathe, bathing for two hours in the morning and bathing for two hours in the afternoon, and spend four hours a day to cool themselves.
However, many people do not agree with the elephant orphanage. After all, animal performance means that animals have to be trained and suffer a lot to be obedient. Many elephants wear shackles on their feet and feel like they will be bound for the rest of their lives.
Staff at the orphanage say baby elephants under the age of 4 are usually shackled because they are too naughty. When they become adults, most elephants are more stable and do not need to be restrained.
The elephants here have suffered hardship, either killed and injured by humans before they arrived at the orphanage, or they have lost their mothers at a young age, or they have been separated from the herd and cannot survive.
Among these elephants, Raja is the largest elephant in the orphanage, he is over 70 years old, and a pair of tusks is worth more than 20 million yuan. Despite its size, it is the most special elephant, because it is a blind elephant that is blind in both eyes.
When it was discovered, it had more than 30 wounds all over its body, and it was unable to accurately find water sources and eat. Hunger, thirst, and invisibility make it extremely irritable.
When the staff found it, they spent a long time trying to make contact with it, slowly approaching it and helping to treat the wound. It is only then that it begins to open up and try to reach out to friendly humans. Looking at its beautiful tusks and scarred body, you know that it has been brutally injured by humans.
Elephants have an IQ relative to that of 4-5 year olds, and they hold a grudge against those who have hurt them. It is indeed very difficult to get close to human beings again. In 1990, Raja officially became a member of the Elephant Orphanage, and under the careful care of the staff, he is living a good life.
Today, Raja is over 70 years old, and the scars left on his body after healing can vaguely show what kind of painful experience he went through in the first place. Its physical wounds had healed, but those eyes had lost their light forever. Perhaps, it has also missed countless times when it saw the beauty of nature.
Elephants have no natural predators in nature, they are huge, with tusks and long trunks as weapons, and large size and thick skin for defense.
They have had no natural predators for tens of millions of years, and the only natural predators are humans. The elephant's nightmare began when humans brutally slaughtered elephants in order to obtain beautiful ivory, make them into handicrafts, and turn them into works of art.
In fact, in the early years, the Ceylon male elephant herd also had beautiful tusks, but humans carried out endless slaughter of them in order to obtain ivory, resulting in the current Ceylon elephant tusks getting shorter and shorter, and even some of them do not grow tusks anymore, and it is rare to grow a picture of ivory. For elephant herds, having ivory is the recipe for their destruction.
Elephants live between 60 and 80 years without human intervention, and some can even live to be hundreds of years old. However, how sad it is that today's elephants have evolved to lose the tusks that protect themselves in order to survive.
It is not only the Ceylon elephants that are worrisome, but also the current situation of other elephants. In the past, there were a large number of wild Asian elephants on the mainland, but now there are only about 300 left, and the protection of elephants has become one of the important issues of global biodiversity conservation.
If humans continue to slaughter elephants in order to obtain ivory, elephants will soon disappear from the world and become history!