Sloth bears have been used for human entertainment for years. They have been captured, their teeth and claws removed, chained, and forced to ‘dance’ with whatever instrument will enforce it.
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We have seen this in India, a thoroughly nasty business and there is absolutely nothing we could do about it. We saw it in Turkey too, but that was probably an Asian black bear.
Anyway, farmers in the south western Indian state of Kanataka are now faced with an extraordinary dilemma, bees or bears? It is now common practice among more advanced farmers in Africa and Asia to use beehives as security against wandering elephants in their lands.
It’s quite simple, really, the elephants hate the troublesome bees and their hives set up on the periphery of the lands and just keep away. Now, however, comes another dimension.
Beehives are attracting sloth bears, otherwise known as honey bears – for obvious reasons.
The bears are obviously attracted to the beehives and are coming out of the surrounding jungle in numbers to take advantage of the situation. Now the farmers have an influx of bears, rather than elephants and have some difficult decisions to make.
Coming back to animals forced to be entertainment for humans, and elephants in particular, we saw a most distressing performance in Sri Lanka of all places (Sri Lanka is predominately Buddhist).
We saw working elephants being bathed in a large river pool and the affection and care shown by the mahouts was obvious.
However, another day we went to the zoo in Colombo where we were supposed to watch elephants standing on their hind legs and even standing on their fore-knees and heads. It was awful and when we returned home I wrote to the World Association of Zoos and Aquaria in Switzerland about it, but I never received a reply and I doubt anything was ever done about it.
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Moving on, you will recall that recently in this column I reported on the stripping of ivory keys on an antique piano imported by a university professor emigrating from England to New Zealand. He is not a happy professor.
And now, the famous London auction house, Christies, has on its list a classical commode, but there is a problem. The commode was made in about 1766 for the London residence of Sir Rowland Winn, it was a very luxurious affair, complete with elephant ivory inlays.
On close examination Christies discovered that the inlays had been removed and replaced with so-called ivorine, a celluloid material often used instead of ivory, the swap taking place almost certainly before the commode was recently brought back to England from the United States.
Christies had valued the commode at anything from £3 to £5 million, that would be between R55-million and R90-million – a very expensive toilet indeed.
Because of the controversial ban on elephant ivory sales, the United States is applying strict regulations when it comes to the movement of ivory inlays on musical instruments and firearms, both antique and modern, and commodes too, of course.
Sources: Save the Elephants News Service. and The New Encyclopedia of Mammals, editor David Macdonald, Oxford University Press, 2001.
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