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Elephant
Handlers
The work
of
elephant
handlers, also called mahouts in many Asian countries, has ancient
traditions. WEPA promotes combining their skills, accumulated
during millennia, with new ways of handling elephants that are in
accordance with their values. This has resulted in improvements in
work safety and satisfaction of mahouts.
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Elephants
and the
occupation of elephant handling have an important role in many cultures
across central and southern Asia. The tradition of working elephants
goes back deep in history: the oldest written records of using captive
elephants for work date back to more than four thousand years ago.
New Methods in Accordance with Traditional
Values
Mahouts often do have a deep and genuine care for the well-being of
their elephants. This is seen especially often in those mahouts
background is in a tradition of working with elephants for generations,
but there are also first-generation mahouts with excellent
understanding of and care for elephants.
According to our experience at WEPA with the traditional mahout culture
of the Tharu people in southern Nepal, the elephant-friendly approach
of our training and handling methods fits well together with
traditional values of the Tharu culture. The Tharu are known as a
people with a strong bond to nature and animals, and many of their
mahouts have good skills in gentle handling of elephants. The new
training approach that enables elephants to be trained without hurting
them has been received well in Nepal, because it provides a practical
solution to training elephants in a way that is in harmony with the
traditional values.
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Improving Safety and Work Satisfaction
Elephant training and handling is widely known as a dangerous
occupation. For example in India, in the state of Kerala alone, about
sixty mahouts per year get killed by their elephants. Many of the
deaths occur during the musth, or arousal period, of a male elephant,
when the elephant has a lower threshold of letting its aggressions out.
However, a significant part of that aggression originates from the
painful experiences that the elephant has had with its trainers and
handlers.
A painless way of training and handling elephants results in the
elephant being a lot safer to work with. It also results in a deeper
relationship between the mahout and the elephant. This, together with
the ability to control the elephant with no need for inflicting pain,
result in an increase in work satisfaction too, in addition to the
improved safety.
Interconnected Well-being of Mahouts and
Elephants
The well-being of elephants and that of mahouts are interconnected in
several ways. One of the most significant of them is that a mahout’s
self-esteem, stress level, general satisfaction in life, and other
aspects affecting his mental state tend to have a profound effect on
how he treats his elephant in everyday work. They also tend to have a
significant impact on how well he can or cannot read and understand
nuances in the elephant’s behaviour. This in turn affects his
capability of preventing problem situations and capability of guiding
the elephant without resorting to violence.
An improved well-being of mahouts, combined with the mahouts having a
good understanding of the underlying reasons of elephant behaviour and
the elephant’s motivations and emotions in various situations, is thus
an important contributing factor to the lives of the mahouts themselves
and their families as well as the elephants.
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Above:
A mahout and his child in southern Nepal.
Across Asia, there still are cultures in which the mahout starts
learning the skills from early on, growing up as part of the tradition.
Above:
If a mahout has a good and trusting
relationship with the elephant, the result is an improved well-being on
both sides.
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