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THE ELEPHANTS AT VANTARA
Raman Sukumar is an honorary professor at the Indian Institute of Science, he is the India’s leading elephant ecologist, architect of Project Elephant, former chair of the IUCN Asian Elephant Specialist Group, the author of several books and scientific papers, and member of the standing committee of the National Board for Wildlife.
Raman Sukumar has expressed his concerns about the elephants and Vantara.
“With the enormous financial resources available, Vantara could potentially have been a game changer for captive and perhaps wild elephants in the country if they had adopted a more all-encompassing vision. To me, bringing 200 or 1000 elephants to Jamnagar makes no sense.
The main problem is the concentration of a large number of captive elephants, I see no purpose in that. The real role of captive elephants is for them to be integrated with management and conservation of the wild population. I would have favoured Vantara in investing in different models of welfare of elephants in captivity across the country.
The role of captive elephants cannot be reduced to singularity, the welfare of elephants in one location and by one person.
The rescued captive elephants are used by forest department veterinarians to travel through the jungles or are trained to drive away wild elephants from human habitats. These roles would be lost if these captive elephants were kept at a facility like Vantara. It is important to understand the different regions and nuances of diversity of elephant cultures and situations and not feeding all elephants with high protein. It does not work like this. We need a broad and practical vision of how we improve the conditions and determine the future role of captive elephants. There is a lack of focus on what should be done to captive elephants and their welfare management.”
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