Assam stumbles in rewilding elephants  

A trial in Manas National Park showed 33% success rate in rehabilitating rescued and hand-raised jumbos

GUWAHATI

About 33% of the rescued and hand-raised elephants get rewilded, a trial in the western Assam’s Manas Tiger Reserve has revealed.

Assam has more than 5,700 elephants, the highest after Karnataka in India. A few of them get orphaned every year primarily due to human-animal conflicts and floods.

A majority of the rescued calves under 2 years of age are hand-raised at rehab centres, specifically at the Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation (CWRC) run by the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) and the Assam Forest Department near the Kaziranga National Park in eastern Assam.

Vaibhav C. Mathur, the field director of the Manas Tiger Reserve said an experiment a few months ago resulted in only two out of six elephants getting rewilded. This, he said in a letter to the State’s Chief Wildlife Warden, worked out to a 33% success rate.

The elephants that could not be released in the wild were hand-raised since infancy for a substantial period of time. Three of these elephants – Murphulani (6 years, 3 months), Hoji (3 years, 8 months) and Tinsukee (3 years) – were females while 2-year-old Sonaram was a male.

“It can be observed from the data provided that significant imprinting, habituation and conditioning would have occurred in these hand-raised elephants which will make their rewilding difficult besides resulting in substantial expenditure and consumption of man power for their monitoring,” he wrote in the letter.