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.
