India: A month-long holiday camp for elephants has opened in southern India where the animals will socialise over good food and under expert veterinary attention in order to soothe tempers ruffled by work-related stress.
Around 55 elephants are attending the government-run camp on the edge of the Madhumalai forest in southern Tamil Nadu state which was inaugurated at the weekend.
The stressed animals at the rest and recreation encampment come mostly from temples where they perform ceremonial roles.
A handful are employed by the forest department to clear jungles and help with logging. Possessing elephants is a symbol of prestige for temples in southern India where the animals are frequently taken out in processions. Many individuals also own elephants, but are increasingly finding them a financial burden and handing them over to temples that are duty bound to look after them.
But even these temples are facing financial problems tending to the elephants. The Guruvayur Devaswom Board in neighbouring Kerela state which administers the popular Sri Krishna temple in Thrissur district, for instance, is caught in a bind over the regular offering of elephants that it cannot refuse and the money it is hard pressed to find to maintain them.
The resource crunch is especially acute these days when the temple's 42 elephants undergo their annual, month-long "rejuvenation" treatment during which they daily consume vast quantities of food.
For the entire herd this includes 5,000 kg of rice, 1,830 kg of greens, 600 kg of a herbal tonic and 62 kg of a powder specially prepared for the animals from an ancient Hindu recipe. The temple also pays an annual premium of 942,000 rupees (€17,400) for the animals, who are insured for 913 million rupees (€16.8m).
Officials in the state capital Madras, also known as Chennai, said chief minister Ms Jayalalitha Jayaram mooted the idea for the elephant holiday camp following reports that many had started behaving badly by attacking their mahouts, because of overwork. Some of them were also being utilised by their owners to beg on the streets, an activity that was contributing to substantially raising the animals' tension levels.
But attendance at the camp is around 30 elephants less than what the organisers had originally planned, as many had refused to be loaded onto trucks to transport them there. One elephant had to be off-loaded after it began trumpeting loudly and rocking violently when the truck began to move, while another had to be hastily removed after it suffered a paralytic stroke.