Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
name, which means “million elephants,” was bestowed by its founding king
Fa Ngum. His goal was to terrify his enemies with the possibility that a mil-
lion elephants were about to crush them.
There were certainly plenty of elephants in Laos during the empire,
though perhaps not a million. There is also no doubt that the numbers of
wild elephants have plunged since the time of Fa Ngum. Present-day esti-
mates lie between as many as 2,000 or 3,000 down to as few as 200.
At the same time as wild populations of elephants have declined, the
meaning of wild has changed. In the course of numerous attempts at domes-
tication, elephants have repeatedly been released or escaped back into
the wild. Many of their progeny have been recaptured, often with the aid
of tamed elephants trained to act as lures. As a result, in India, Myanmar,
Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, elephants have become a mixture of feral
and domesticated. After thousands of years there are unlikely to be any truly
wild elephants left.
The English and Australian researchers C. M. Ann Baker and Clyde Man-
well have suggested that the result of all these attempts at taming has been a
in from the wild can immediately be reversed when the penned elephants
escape. The result is an equilibrium between wild and tamed behaviors,
like a chemical reaction that fails to go to completion. But partial though
these repeated domestications have been, they must have had an impact
on the Asian elephant gene pool. The elephants that could be tamed most
successfully survived and had of spring, while those that were intractable
were driven to the furthest forests or killed.
Despite millennia of association with humans, and despite repeated
attempts at selection for tameness, Asian elephants remain dauntingly dan-
gerous. In Bandipur National Park in southern India I saw a huge tusker strid-
ing down the side of the road. He had been giving himself a dust bath, and
his back was still covered with reddish earth. He looked neither to the left
nor to the right as he moved swiftly along. Six weeks earlier he had killed an
incautious tourist from Bangalore, who had stepped out of his car to take his
picture. I snapped the elephant's picture too, of course, but without leaving
my vehicle.
