Elefantasia

ElefantAsia

Founded	September 2001 Paris, France
Founder	Sebastien Duffillot Gilles Maurer
Type	Non-profit Organisation
Focus	Asian elephantconservation
Location	Paris, France and Vientiane, Laos
Area served	Xaignabouli Province Laos
Method	Veterinary Care, Breeding Programs, Environmental Education, Ecotourism
Key people	Sebastien Duffillot Gilles Maurer
Revenue	$150,000USD/year
Volunteers	Approx. 10
Website	www.elefantasia.org

Who they are

ElefantAsia is a non-profit organisation dedicated towards the protection of the Asian elephant, Elephas maximus. This organisation operates in Laos PDR (Laos) where today there are only 1500 Asian elephants remaining, 560 of these domesticated and working with their mahouts.

Created by Sebastien Duffillot and Gilles Maurer, ElefantAsia has been working in Laos, the Land of a Million Elephants since 2001. Much of their organisation’s work is conducted in the Sayaboury, or Xaignabouli Province of Laos, which is home to an approximate 75% of the country’s domesticated elephant population.

What they do

If economic pressures and changing ways of life continue unchanged, the Asian elephant and its habitat will disappear from Laos within only a number of years. ElefantAsia is hoping to reverse this current trend by concentrating conservation efforts in three main areas:- veterinary, educational and economical support. ElefantAsia has developed a highly specialised veterinary care unit while continuing to carry out public awareness campaigns and environmental education.

Projects in Laos

The Elephant Festival

In cooperation with the National Tourism Authority, ElefantAsia has organised the Elephant Festival each year since 2007. The first Elephant Festival was held in the Xaignabouli Province and attracted more than 10,000 people in celebration of this endangered national treasure. In 2008 over 50,000 people crowded to attend the festival, evidence of the resurgence in awareness and support of this incredible culture that links man and elephant.

Mobile Veterinary Unit

ElefantAsia created the Mobile Veterinary Unit to provide ‘house calls’ to domesticated elephants working in remote areas. Operating in the Xaignabouli province of Laos, the Mobile Veterinary Unitis especially designed to dispense medical care to domesticated elephants. ElefantAsia’s veterinary team visits logging sites, tourist camps and villages where elephants are employed to ensure they are receiving adequate healthcare. This is necessary as vaccinations are not available, medical treatment is rare and medication dosages are hardly ever adhered to.

Breeding Program

Today in Laos the domesticated elephant population only has 2 births for every 10 deaths. The main cause for their decline is that they are rarely given the opportunity to reproduce. ElefantAsiais implementing an incentive scheme for Lao mahouts to voluntarily enter their elephants into a reproductive breeding program.

The aim of ElefantAsia’s breeding program is to understanding the problems which discourage elephant owners from breeding their elephants, and finding alternative methods of income for elephant owners and their families.

The domesticated elephant

Laosis home to an approximate 560 domesticated Asian elephants. Most are engaged in timber harvesting operations and sadly contribute to the destruction of wild elephant habitat. Yet these elephants are very valuable as they contribute to the national economy. A community of approximately 12,500 people directly depend on revenue generated by their work. Traditionally elephants from wild populations were captured and domesticated by skilled mahouts. Since capture from the wild has been banned by the government, the domesticated population has plummeted. With an increase in demand for elephants by the logging industry, the animals are made to work at a furious pace. They are overworked and exhausted and therefore do not reproduce. As the age of the average domesticated elephant is rising, the self-perpetuation of the population is at jeopardy.

Lao culture and the Asian elephant

Asian elephants have played an integral role in Lao cultural traditions and practises. They even hold a role in the ancient Baci ceremony. According to traditional Laos animist beliefs, the souls of a human being or animal normally occupy and vitalise specific areas of the body, but sometimes leave in times of strong emotion if tempted away by another being or an attractive place, or if captured by a malevolent spirit. Their absence is likely to cause danger, disease, or even death. To avoid such disaster, the souk khouan ritual (‘calling back the souls’) is organised and family, friends and neighbours invited. A celebrant appeals across various different worlds, calling for the absent souls to return without delay. To attract them, delicacies are placed on a round plate below a pyramid of flowers: eggs, chicken, rice, cakes and so on.

After repeated calls, the souls are presumed to have returned to their host body and the celebrant ties white cotton threads to the patient’s wrists (or ears or legs in the case of elephants and buffalo, the only animals that this ritual is held for). The souk khouan rite is practised at times of disease, before departures, on arrivals, at marriages or professional promotions - in short, on any occasion likely to cause the souls to leave, and such events are numerous in Laos.

The mahout

The mahout, or elephant keeper, is usually from a family line of mahouts that have amassed knowledge about these animals over the centuries. Mahouts possess the skills to control elephants and the knowledge of how to care for them on a daily basis. They also understand the habits of the wild animals; how to diagnose diseases; how to judge an individual elephant’s character, abilities, and relationships within a domesticated herd; what traumatic memories an elephant has and how they might affect its behaviour; how to make and use a harness, how to read tracks in the jungle, and a thousand other details. As the life expectancy of a man and an elephant are more or less equal, a young mahout is usually chosen to train and raise a young animal. Ideally the mahout will become very personally involved so that when a 15-year-old animal begins its career with a mahout of the same age, several decades together await them. At forty years, when both reach their peak, their relationship will be extremely close.

How to help

By contributing to ElefantAsia’s activities you will be supporting the protection and survival of one of the world’s most iconic species. The extinction of the Asian elephant would constitute an ecological tragedy of global proportions, and would be an irreversible loss of one of the founding pillars of Asian cultural heritage.

• Donate. ElefantAsia accepts kind donations of any amount.
• Become a member of ElefantAsia. Join ElefantAsia and receive the latest information and invites to ElefantAsia functions.
• Sponsor an elephant. Sponsoring a baby elephant is an incentive aimed to provide a mahout with an income while his female elephant is on “maternity leave”. Visit ElefantAsia’s website for further information on how you can help both the elephant and local Lao communities.