Founder’s Briefs: An occasional collection the place Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares evaluation, views and story summaries.
Bangladesh has launched into an bold plan to finish the centuries-old follow of retaining elephants in captivity.
The federal government has begun retrieving privately owned elephants and goals to rehabilitate them within the wild. The initiative follows a 2024 Excessive Court docket order banning cruelty to wildlife and unlawful use of animals for labor or leisure, reviews Mongabay’s Abu Siddique.
The nation’s elephant inhabitants is small and fragile. In line with a authorities report, solely 268 wild Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) stay in Bangladesh’s southeastern forests, alongside 96 in captivity. As soon as used for logging and transport, captive elephants at the moment are illegally exploited in markets and cities, typically in harsh situations which have led to deaths from heatstroke.
The venture will survey elephant populations, purchase animals from house owners, and put together forest websites for rewilding. Two potential sanctuaries — Rema-Kalenga and Chunati — are underneath evaluation. Officers acknowledge the difficulties forward, from illness dangers to the lack of wild instincts amongst long-domesticated elephants. But they insist that ending captivity is important for each welfare and conservation. As one adviser put it, “the elephants won’t ever be again in captivity.”
If profitable, Bangladesh’s experiment might develop into a mannequin for different Asian nations struggling to reconcile custom with the ethics of conservation.
Learn the total story by Abu Siddique right here.
Banner picture: A teenage mahout and his elephant in Bogura, Bangladesh. Picture by Rocky Masum through Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
