Elephant polo

Our recent trip to the south coast coincided with the annual Ceylon elephant polo competition – a four day event that is held under the walls of Galle fort. 

The game is loosely modelled on its equine forebear. Each team has three players and three elephants which are arranged up and down the pitch. Each elephant has a mahout who receives his instructions from the player, who is perched behind him, roped into a Hessian saddle with stirrups. The aim of the game is to hit a hard ball through a goal with a long mallet. Each goal is about 10 metres wide and the pitch is roughly the length of a football field. In practice both the ball and the mallet head are small and it appears very difficult to make a good contact from four metres up on a moving pachyderm.

There is a lot of swinging, scuffing and missing, dust is kicked up and the ball is kicked and squashed under numerous feet. Eventually it runs clear and pursued by the one elephant that had worked out what was going on, it is dribbled slowly and laboriously into a goal. I think one elephant was responsible for 90% of the goals scored and as the teams changed elephants at half time the secret was to try and score as many as you could while you were on her. Human skill was negligible compared to the advantage given by this perceptive animal. 

Human-elephant conflict

I have just got back from a week in the field, shadowing a group of volunteers from the UK and US in and around Wasgamuwa National Park. The volunteers were working with the Sri Lankan Wildlife Conservation Society, a local NGO that is trying to tackle the ongoing conflict between small-scale farmers and crop-raiding elephants. The elephants come out of the park at dusk and traipse through the paddy fields, browsing at will throughout the night before returning to the dense forest in the morning. An elephant weighs several tons and is heavy enough to break down the fragile and complex irrigation systems that sustain paddy fields. With their large appetites they can destroy a small farmer’s annual crop and tip them over the poverty line.

Furthermore, a small number of largely male elephants become particularly malevolent during a period know as ‘must’ – when they come on heat as it were. These rogues suffer from a form of male PMT and are extremely dangerous to humans. We visited a small house in a nearby village that had been damaged by a rogue elephant. The animal had arrived in the dark the night before and had literally put its head through the wall of house, raining down bricks and masonry onto those inside. It was not clear what it was after but it terrified the woman and two children who were living there. Her husband had been up in his nearby tree hut at the time looking out for animals, but was powerless to intervene as the elephant banged into his property. We later learnt that the same elephant came back and completely razed the building – stories abound of vengeance for a previous shooting but this is difficult to corroborate. Fortunately the family escaped, but they have no insurance and there is little compensation available.

“A Singular Wound”

While working my way through one of the old texts I am using to get an insight into colonial elephant hunters, I came across the following extraordinary anecdote – should be of special interest to you medics out there. I quote direct from the original, whose English is a little dated:

Amongst extraordinary recoveries from desperate wounds, I venture to record here an instance which occurred in Ceylon to a gentleman while engaged in the chase of elephants, and which, I apprehend, has few parallels in pathological experience. Lieutenant Gerald Fretz, of the Ceylon Rifle Regiment, whilst firing at an elephant in the vicinity of Fort MacDonald, in Ouvah, was wounded in the face by the bursting of his fowling piece.

On raising him, it was found that part of the breech of the gun and about two inches of the barrel had been driven through the frontal sinus at the junction of the nose and forehead. It sunk almost perpendicularly till the iron plate, by which the barrel is made fast to the stock by a screw, had descended through the palate, carrying with it the screw, one extremity of which had forced itself into the right nostril, where it was discernible externally, whilst the headed end lay in contact with the tongue.

Elephants

There are about 3 000 wild elephants and more than 20 million people in Sri Lanka, an island the size of Ireland. Before the Brits arrived at the end of the eighteenth century there were less than a million people and many, many more elephants. We shot the majority of them, destroyed their habitat for tea and (perhaps indirectly) catalysed a human population explosion.

The increase in the Sri Lankan population and the demise of the elephant are strongly related. Asian bull elephants have a home range of about 380 km² and they’re not easy to contain within neatly fenced nature reserves. Although Sri Lanka does have an enviable area of national park – some 13 % of the country is designated – 70% of the elephants live outside the parks and they increasingly come into conflict with humans. This happens especially in areas where people have been displaced into elephant corridors or the sagacious elephants are tempted out to browse on the appealing fruit, sugar and paddy.