Enslaved Asian elephants

Elephants carrying wood for people in Southeast Asian countries is nothing new. Spurred by the high price of wood and furniture on the market, countless loggers have been moving into the primeval forests of the Mekong Basin in recent years, openly logging and even illegally logging. But the roads in these rainforest areas are rough and muddy, and transportation is very difficult. All the wood that is cut has to be carried from the mountains to the river, and then transported by cargo ship to the dock on the road, so the domesticated elephants are the main means of transportation. Throughout the dry season, hundreds of domesticated elephants carry heavy logs from virgin forest to river-side beaches, a painstaking process.

【 Mistreated elephants will quietly cry 】★

The elephant that is driven to pull wood is usually an Asian elephant, for the Asian elephant is gentle and easy to tame.

Elephants are regarded as "living cranes" in Southeast Asia, with each elephant equivalent to a labor force of 20 to 30 people, but they work in difficult conditions. Elephants can hardly walk in dense rain forests. Because the wood is too long to turn in the forest, elephants often get stuck in the trees when they drag. At this time, the owner of the elephant will keep giving instructions, so that the elephant back and forth and left and right, the elephant is hot and hungry, unwilling to move forward, or misunderstand the master of the command, will immediately be the back of the machete, the club hit the elephant ear, the elephant screaming.

In order to make elephants work well, their owners usually feed each elephant a piece of rice ball before starting work. During the process of hauling wood, elephants are deprived of water and food for almost all day. An adult elephant can eat between 30 and 60 kilograms a day. Often working in this state of hunger, elephants never recover their strength.

With a life span of only 70 or 80 years, domesticated elephants typically start working in their teens and can only retire in their 50s and 60s when they run out of energy. The happiest time of the year for the wood-pulling elephants is at the end of the logging season, when their owners clean and feed them and release them into the mountains to fend for themselves until the next dry season, when they are picked up and reshackled.

★ Domestication has affected elephant reproduction

Asian elephants can only give birth to one calf per litter, but gestation is very long, ranging from 600 to 640 days. Asian elephants also mature later, with females reaching sexual maturity around 12 years of age and males even later. Once domesticated and enslaved by humans, they are forced to live a solitary life, with no chance to freely meet the opposite sex they like, which leads to a decline in their fertility.

The number of elephants living in the wild is declining as the overall environment deteriorates. According to the world wildlife fund in the 1980 s, about 35000 Asian elephants live in South Asia, in Burma by 6500 is life, there are 4800 head is used to carry wood, the other in places such as Thailand and Laos, Thailand elephant is given priority to with tourism performance, while Laos was domesticated elephants are mainly used for carrying heavy things. In 1997, the Asian elephant was listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

In addition to low fertility rates due to domestication, human encroachment on land and loss of habitat are seen as the biggest threat to the survival of Asian elephants, experts said.

A man who had seen elephants pulling logs wrote a poem: "There are so many elephants/tamed and enslaved/skinny and stuffed... No one has ever seen their graveyards/even the free hills... The pasture where they live/becomes a execution ground or prison.