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The Three-Legged Elephant Who Can’t Live Without His Human Best Friend
At the Elephant Transit Home in Udawalwawe, Sri Lanka, most elephants receive short-term rehabilitation. For Namal, it’s home.
On a sunny March morning in the southern plains of Sri Lanka, dust cakes the withering foliage surrounding Udawalwawe. This hamlet-turned-tourist-town brims with locals and foreigners, thanks to a national park in the vicinity. At nine in the morning, Namal is awake. He plays with his male friend, Hamu. I learn they are the same age — nine years old. But a set of thin wires separates them and marks their boundaries. The reason: Unlike his friend Hamu, Namal only has three legs.
Meanwhile, behind their residence shaded by a faded green roof, their juniors–four of them in one batch–hurry up for the first bottles of milk in the morning. Once in a while, Namal hears a loud cry from restless hungry youngsters and flaps his large ears. But often, Namal is too bossy to care for his juniors and continues to long for his friend’s playful behavior. Like his juniors and Hamu, Namal is an Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), a species named endangered by IUCN. There are only about 5,500 of them in Sri Lanka now. Inside the Elephant Transit Home in Udawalawe, 66 Asian elephants receive human care. Most of them are orphaned calves. Others were rescued from captivity.
When humans clear forests for their habitats, elephants lose theirs. In dry months when there’s a shortage of food and water, elephants feed on cultivated land which was originally their wild habitat. Farmers view them as pests who raid crops. According to the Department of Wildlife Conservation in Sri Lanka, about 250 elephants every year are killed as a result of the human-elephant conflict. Some…
