India gives elephants its highest level of wildlife protection and reveres them culturally and religiously. Why, then, do we continue to allow them to be owned and to spend their entire lives in captivity?
Earlier this month, Durga, a five-year-old elephant, was transported from Assam to the Meenakshi Amman Temple in Madurai, nearly 3,000 km away.
Her transfer has brought into sharp focus an old contradiction in Indian wildlife law – and raised a new and particularly troubling set of questions about how this young animal came into private custody.
The owned elephant
The elephant is a Schedule I animal under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, receiving the highest level of statutory protection, and is India’s National Heritage Animal. Yet a sub-category of elephants – those already in private ownership before 1972, and their documented, captive-born descendants – can be owned, transferred and kept in captivity for the whole of their lives, six decades on.
The elaborate regulatory framework that has developed around this category seeks to govern captivity without ever questioning it. This produces an obvious contradiction: the same species that the law protects in the wild can become the legal property of a human being outside it.
Durga is only five. If she lives into her sixties, the decision being...
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