Pinnawala to Give Out 4 Elephants

Due to continuous requests, Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage will release four elephants in near future. Two elephants will be given to Dalada Maligawa through Asgiriya & Malwathu temples and the other two will be donated to Iran and Armenia. 

Dalada Maligawa together with Malwathu Asgiri temple owns the largest herd of captive Elephants after Pinnawala and Dehiwala Zoo. In total there are XX elephants including tuskers donated by India and Thailand. Diyawadana Nilame of Dalada Maligawa several times stressed the urgent need of having new blood to their Elephant herd to carry out the traditions. The biggest Cultural event of the country, the Dalada Pageant traditionally includes Elephants. This year’s event will be hosted on 08th July at Kandy with XX elephants including the XXX who will carry the casket. According to the Captive Elephant Association, there are XX elephants in captivity. But most of them are above XX reaching their retirement age. Catching elephants from the wild is banned in XXXX and the sole legal way of obtaining a local Elephant is Pinnawala Orphanage. Some argues that releasing some of the Pinnawala elephants are nothing to do with conservation, as Pinnawala is no more housing orphaned elephant babies, but continuing an inhouse breeding program. 

Started with 7 orphaned elephants in 1975, Pinnawala population has grown upto 89 elephants today. Orphaned found in wild are now directly send to the Elephant Transit Home at Udawalawa to be released to wild after rehabilitation. But Pinnawala continued to breed its elephants and the 50th elephant baby was born last month. Elephants need a lot of space to live on, so space will also be an issue in Pinnawala, if the breeding program continues. Giving out elephants will also help to ease the space pressure. 

But environmentalists often opposed releasing of Pinnawala elephants to private owners. They fear the welfare of elephants that needs lots of attention. “Most of the elephants given out previously to private owners were not looked after properly” said an elephant expert who prefers to be anonymous. He pointed out that some of these animals even ended up doing labor intense jobs. ‘Sinharaja’ one such elephant donated to XXX temple died by lightening when chained to an iron pole at an open field ignorantly. On another occasion, the villagers and animal activists protested against giving out another elephant. 

The attempt to donate an elephant to Armenia caused lots of controversy on XXXX. An Animal Rights group lodged a court case against sending out Asokamala. It was argued that the climate conditions in Armenia are not favorable to Elephants. A court decision blocked this attempt. Asokamala is now pregnant and another elephant named XXXX has been singled out to be shipped to Armenia. 

While Brigadier. H.A.N.T. Perera was the director of the Department of Zoological Gardens; there was an attempt to train a group of Pinnawala Elephants to perform in traditional events like perahera. They had cleared an area for elephant arena in Wagolla and planned to train a group of elephants at night time to walk under coppara torches and prepare to tolerate the sounds of drums. Even they had a series of discussions with the officers of Dalada Maligawa and maha nayaka theros who agreed to support the idea of having a common pool trained elephants for cultural events instead of giving out permanent. In this way, the elephants can be centrally monitored at Pinnawala. But this suggestion which was hailed by the environmentalists had gone to the hamas pettiya after changes of ministers and zoo officers. 

What about Crying Whales - EARTH SONG - the Global Environemtal Anthom

Al Gore – the American Vice President was honored with the Nobel Prize for his effort to raise awareness on Environmental issues in 2007. His greatest work was the documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” that had showed the damage mankind has done to the earth. But Gore was not the first to raise awareness on the need to ‘protect environment’. It was Michael Jackson who disseminated this message to millions of world inhabitants through his major musical hit ‘the Earth Song’.

The song starts with a long tracking shot through a lush rainforest that then cuts to a scene showing a somber Jackson walking through a scorched, desolate landscape. The environmental emoting then comes thick and fast: dead elephants, evil loggers, belching smoke stacks, snared dolphins, seal clubbing, and hurricane winds. MJ asks about elephants – whether they lost their trust to humans, pays attention to crying whales due to the man who ravages the seas and talks about forest trails that are destroyed. Then he throws the plea to reverse the harmful acts committed by mankind. It was creatively presented in the video by playing the scenes in reverse order. ‘Earth Song’ is indeed a very rare hit with a powerful message about humankind’s impact on the environment and plea to everybody to start acting to reverse the damage.
The songs effectiveness is testified by its sales records. More than a million copies of the Earth Song were sold and it had become the biggest selling UK single standing ahead of MJ’s popular albums Thriller or Billie Jean. But it wasn’t only the English fans that song reached out. ‘Music’ has no cultural and lingual barriers and the 6 minutes video interprets the song to everybody – even to those who do not understand English. Most of the local Environmental forums I attended had played the ‘Earth Song’ which proves this fact. It has become the Global Environment Anthem.

I enjoyed the song since its release in November, 1995. But I never bothered to find out who had done those sensitive lyrics until yesterday. Such a sensitive masterpiece could be written by an Environmental sensitive person. I was shocked that the Lyrics too were done by Michel Jackson. How a punk like MJ could have done the Greatest Environmental Song..? But it was enough for me to realize that MJ was more than a punk or simply a King of Pop - He was an Environmental Sensitive man.

This is what MJ said about his ‘Earth Song’ which testifies his love to mother earth – “I remember writing Earth Song when I was in Austria, in a hotel. I was feeling so much pain and so much suffering of the plight of the Planet Earth. And for me, this is Earth's Song, because I think nature is trying so hard to compensate for man's mismanagement of the Earth. And with the ecological unbalance going on, and a lot of the problems in the environment, I think earth feels the pain, and she has wounds, and it's about some of the joys of the planet as well. But this is my chance to pretty much let people hear the voice of the planet.”

Though MJ is no more, his earth song will echoes the need to heal earth’s wounds.. MJ will be there forever asking mankind “Did you ever stop to notice; The crying Earth, the weeping shores?”

click the link for lyrics
http://www.lyrics007.com/Michael%20Jackson%20Lyrics/Earth%20Song%20Lyrics.html
Watch the video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqeADZgjtpY

Keeping Animals Hostage for People's Demands

Last week, zoo staff organized a strike refraining from feeding the animals. Their demands included removal of some salary differences and reestablish farther-to-son recruitment system where son get the chance to join zoo, after father retires. The demands may be valid - but how fair is it to keep the animals hostage for their demands..?