Is conservation possible without protection of animal rights...?

Every animal has the right to live. Yet the animal cannot survive on its own accord.  

    
         There are visuals of how baby elephants are weaned from their mothers days after birth, and crammed into small kraals to be literally shipped across the oceans to the Americas for entertainment in circuses. The trainers hit the baby elephants whose four legs are tied to chains; they beat the young elephants with batons on their forehead. It moves you to tears when you see the baby elephants trying to duck the baton-wielding trainer’s sharp blows on its forehead. Unspeakably cruel forms of captive training are shown in the film. Elephants are hooked and chained, pierced cruelly only to dent their ego and self respect and get them to obey humans. Does a human trainer’s ego inflate on subjugation of wild animals with unspeakable cruelty? Imagine the hurt and diffidence, the emotion of the baby elephants watching the applause of the circus audience to the trainer who “achieves” the obedience of the wild animals by beating them and their self esteem mercilessly.

A baby elephant being trained for the circus. Photo was used in protests by PETA against the Ringling Bros. Circus in July 2010. 

The wide prevalence of cruelty to animals

Although these elephants in the film are African elephants, cases of animal abuse are not rare in India and Asia either. In India, wildlife activists will vouch for many situations when they have been called in for animal rescues but such incidents escape the attention of the mainstream media because in a TRP-obsessed television industry, wildlife issues are no match for an IPL scandals or analysis of the political morass in the country.

The bears, monkeys snakes elephants and camels rescued by animal rights activists tell tales of unparalleled woe. Snakes used by snake charmers are defanged and their mouths sewn up. They are fed milk and though it is completely alien diet for the reptiles, they sip on milk for three hapless weeks in a desperate bid for survival only to succumb to a miserable death. Anthropologists who defend the rights of tribes or “indigenous people” are unable to answer what makes the snake catchers bury the snakes underground in their urban slums. The fantastic alibi that “the tribes possess traditional wisdom of how to bury snakes alive” does not hold water with either conservationists or in a court of law, especially after raids yielded hundreds of dead snake seizures, in urban slums in places like Bangalore two decades ago.

Bears are rescued from hawkers or circuses in appalling conditions. Bears captured to perform have their jaws sealed in steel traps, or worse, in some cases, their mouths are sewn up without anaesthesia. You feed a dancing bear a fruit, it can only sniff and salivate but cannot open its mouth to eat. Malnourished bears tethering on starvation suffer from skin disorders and low blood count, fatigue and paw injuries apart from the injuries inflicted by the jaw traps. Ropes criss-cross the rear of the throat and nostrils to hold them on leash. Even if the jaw traps are removed for the night, the ropes often prevent food consumption.

Elephants are paraded on tar roads in residential areas where the hawkers seek bananas for the elephants’ feed and end up eating it themselves, starving the pachyderms to death. Elephants are chained right from a very young age to get them to obey, and to earn their food. The chains tear into the flesh on their legs, often causing open wounds and even gangrene. Elephants are subjugated into obedience by being fed jaggery or brown sugar. Enslavement is guaranteed. The hooks used by Mahouts to ensure obedience cause raw wounds behind their ears and the batons slamming their foreheads create headaches and possibly  even internal injuries like clots in their brains. But because these mute wildlife cannot protest in a language we can understand, human beings turn a blind eye to all forms of cruelty being perpetrated.

Chinese obsession with traditional medicine results in cruel torture - for example, in letting a mongoose fight a caged cobra or slitting live snakes to harvest adrenaline for Far East Asian markets, slaughtering pythons for instant soups and the like. China’s private tiger farms ridicule wildlife conservation and mock animal rights at one go. The tiger farms are dedicated solely for harvesting tiger parts like bones, skins, nails, whiskers, flesh, penis etc of the highly endangered tigers. That any poacher of the Giant Panda in China gets death penalty speaks of the forked- tongue attitude towards conservation and the lack of enforcement against wildlife crime in China.

There used to be a morbid defence of tiger farms and captive bred wildlife: because poaching is so widespread and enforcement is so weak, only zoo bred animals and circus creatures will outlive the rapid species extinction that this era is witness to. But captive bred wildlife like zoo animals and circus creatures have had to abdicate all their ecological responsibilities.

A few years ago a tiger roamed into a “human settlement inside the Nagarhole Tiger Reserve”. It was captured and in an attempt to relocate it to Bhadra Tiger Reserve, 300 odd kilometres away, it died. Another handsome adult male tiger was trapped by poachers in the same Nagarhole Tiger Reserve. It was injured; “villagers” in the Nagarhole Tiger Reserve reported the injured tiger, it was ‘rescued’ from near death and rehabilitated into captivity, incarceration in the Mysore Zoo effectively ending its ecological role.

The history of cruelty to animals goes back a long time too. The unspeakable acts portrayed in the film include the surrender of a disobedient elephant for Thomas Edison’s electricity experiment, where its four legs are chained to separate lampposts and its trunk is chained elsewhere and it is singed in seconds by a powerful current passing through it. According to the HBO film, the elephant was disobeying the commands of the trainer and was punished with a cigarette butt. The elephant having burnt its trunk was so enraged that it killed the trainer. The owners immediately announced that the errant elephant had to be put down. Thomas Edison offered to prove his scientific invention on this hapless beast. This was filmed and the footage is used in Apology to Elephants.