An elephant’s social life, in many ways, revolves around breeding and raising of the calves. Humans selfishly take away these very calves from the live wild herds to train and tame them for safari use. Hopefully these new rules will be a thorn in the side of South Africa’s dishonorable elephant-back tourism industry and put a dent in there notorious activities.
The draft rules, released for comment last week, proposed stopping the capture from the wild of anything other than genuine orphan elephant calves.
Southern Africa director of International Fund for Animal Welfare, Jason Bell-Leask said:
It is callous and greedy in its demands for young elephants, forcibly removing animals from their wild herds and subjecting them to training that is wrong, cruel and exploitative. Ifaw has long been calling for better legislation to manage the elephant safari industry, and it seems that government is finally going to get tough on this awful blight on South Africa’s tourism landscape.
Humans have always wrongly intruded on elephant lives. African ivory hunters, by killing only tusked elephants, have given a much larger chance of mating to elephants with small tusks or no tusks at all. Tusklessness, once a very rare genetic abnormality, has become a widespread hereditary trait.
In fact some believe that the wild instincts of male elephants can not be truly tamed. Therefore, they might turn dangerous even towards humans. Well I think that elephants are the gentlest of creatures and it is cruel to segregate young calves from mothers.
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