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By Alex Robertson
3:00 PM Wednesday Oct 8, 2014
How do you tell a male from a female elephant?" our guide Amiter asked, with a glint in his eye, as we bumped our way toward the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage in Kegalle, central Sri Lanka.
"The male has longer legs at the front - to make it easier when he mounts the female!"
He tossed his head back and roared a toothy laugh, before telling us that the length of an elephant's front legs is twice the circumference of its footprint, that Asian elephants have small ears (their natural habitat is in cooler forests in the highlands and they don't have heat issues, unlike their African cousins) and that their trunk has only one finger at the end, compared with two for an African elephant, because of the abundance of food.
Elephants are revered in Sri Lankan culture: their image adorns temples across the country and, to Buddhists, represents birth. Hindus worship them in the form of the deity Ganesha. The British Christians, however, saw elephants, which sometimes destroyed farmland and buildings, as a problem and encouraged their destruction.
In the mid-19th century, Major Thomas Rogers claimed to have shot 1500 elephants - one a day for four years.
Wild elephants gradually lost their highland habitat to coffee growers, then tea plantations, and moved to lowland areas where they became more of a problem to farmers, who regularly trapped and killed them.
The population dwindled from an estimated 14,000 in the early 19th century to less than 2500 by 1969.
Conservation is now the aim and by 2011 the population had increased to more than 5000. The Sri Lankan Government set up the Pinnawala orphanage for young and injured elephants at Kegalle in 1975; it is popular with tourists and locals - there were two school parties the day I visited.
more and source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/travel/news/article.cfm?c_id=7&objectid=11337919&ref=rss
3:00 PM Wednesday Oct 8, 2014
How do you tell a male from a female elephant?" our guide Amiter asked, with a glint in his eye, as we bumped our way toward the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage in Kegalle, central Sri Lanka.
"The male has longer legs at the front - to make it easier when he mounts the female!"
He tossed his head back and roared a toothy laugh, before telling us that the length of an elephant's front legs is twice the circumference of its footprint, that Asian elephants have small ears (their natural habitat is in cooler forests in the highlands and they don't have heat issues, unlike their African cousins) and that their trunk has only one finger at the end, compared with two for an African elephant, because of the abundance of food.
Elephants are revered in Sri Lankan culture: their image adorns temples across the country and, to Buddhists, represents birth. Hindus worship them in the form of the deity Ganesha. The British Christians, however, saw elephants, which sometimes destroyed farmland and buildings, as a problem and encouraged their destruction.
In the mid-19th century, Major Thomas Rogers claimed to have shot 1500 elephants - one a day for four years.
Wild elephants gradually lost their highland habitat to coffee growers, then tea plantations, and moved to lowland areas where they became more of a problem to farmers, who regularly trapped and killed them.
The population dwindled from an estimated 14,000 in the early 19th century to less than 2500 by 1969.
Conservation is now the aim and by 2011 the population had increased to more than 5000. The Sri Lankan Government set up the Pinnawala orphanage for young and injured elephants at Kegalle in 1975; it is popular with tourists and locals - there were two school parties the day I visited.
more and source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/travel/news/article.cfm?c_id=7&objectid=11337919&ref=rss