XPERT

Gentle giant

Sajitha Prematunge

The total figure of elephants in Sri Lanka there are around 6000 (10 percent of world elephant population) using only two percent of the total land area. Protected areas of

Sri Lanka, which adds up to 1.2 million ha, if perfectly managed, has a carrying capacity of around 1200 elephants

A baby elephant flung upon a tree by the raging flood waters is a sorry site. Before this it was an elephant, its majestic life taken by an abandoned well. Stories of gullible baby elephants killed by the inhumane death trap – Hakka pattas – set by villagers for adult elephants who destroy their crops and attack humans are often tear jerking. On top of it only last week another elephant – Neelagiri – died due to injuries caused by his own mahout.

It is quite unfortunate that after so many centuries of sharing each other’s space humans and elephants have failed to co-exist. For the most part this gentle giant has been misunderstood. We – humans – have encroached on their territory, not vice versa. This is probably due to lack of understanding of elephant ecology.

The range of animals living in large herds, like elephants, is known to encompass extensive territories. The home range of a Sri Lankan elephant is 50 to 100 square km as opposed to 500 to 1000 square km of Indian elephants. They rarely deviate from their territory, returning to the same place year after year.

The total figure of elephants in Sri Lanka there are around 6000 (10 percent of world elephant population) using only two percent of the total land area. Protected areas of Sri Lanka, which adds up to 1.2 million ha, if perfectly managed, has a carrying capacity of around 1200 elephants. So where are all the other elephants? Outside the parks. People have been generating favourable conditions for elephants for over 1000 years now. Contrary to popular belief Chena provides them food while the irrigation systems provide them with water they would have otherwise been forced to find themselves. During the wet season people cultivate Chenas and during the dry season – when cultivation ceases and people move out – elephants move in, since there is not enough food for them within the parks.

But the human elephant conflict arises when human territory and elephant habitats overlap. One of the major reasons for the human-elephant conflict is unplanned village structures. Fifty percent of the human-elephant conflicts in Sri Lanka take place in and around Irudeniyaya an unplanned settlement situated between Thabbowa and Thahallapallekele.

Unplanned plantations are another instigating factor. Elephants love sugarcane and the sugarcane fields of Lunugamwehera are an irresistible attraction for elephants, resulting in repeated confrontations.

If humans suddenly take a fancy to elephants’ ancestral lands, building roads, villages, cultivating their lands, how can these creatures be held responsible for the conflicts that are inevitably to ensue, let alone be punished by such cruel methods.

It is like drawing a line across their migration path and expecting them not to cross it! As long as we continue to trespass on their territory no amount of natural barriers or electric fences will put a stop to this conflict.

Physical features

Elephants are the largest land mammals reaching two to 3.6 metres in height and weighing 3,000 to 5,000 kilograms. Their skin is around three to four centimetres thick.

They eat 10 percent of their body weight each day, which for adults is between 170 to 200 kilograms. They need 80 to 200 litres of water a day.

The elephant trunk which is actually a fusion of the nose and the upper lip consists of some 100,000 muscle units, making it very flexible. It can hold up to 8.5 litres of water.

Elephant society

These usually docile pachyderms are highly intelligent and self-aware. In fact considering cognitive abilities, latest studies place them in the same category as great apes. Their closest known relatives are dugongs, manatees, hyraxes and aardvarks.

They have a matriarchal society, and the group – usually consisting of 12 to 20 individuals – is led by the oldest female. An elephant’s life span is 60 years in the wild and 80 in captivity.

The female gives birth to one calf, or occasionally twins. Their gestation period is 18 to 22 months. At birth, the calf weighs about 100 kilograms and is suckled for up to two to three years. They reach sexual maturity at nine to 15 years of age.

Number of elephants

* 1800s between 12,000 and 14,000

* 1900s between 10,000 and 12,000

* 1920s – 7,000 and 8,000

* 1970 – 5,000

* 1999 – 4,000

* 2003 – 3,500

* 2004 – 3,350

* 2006 – 3,150

* 2007 – between 2900 to 3000

Caution

During musth the male elephant is highly dangerous. Rogue elephants and females with calves are to be avoided at all times.

Over short distances they can reach speeds of up to 24 miles per hour.

Elephant charge with trunk tightly curled up, head held high with cocked ears.

January 27 Holocaust victims commemoration day:

The Holocaust

Dilmika Tennakoon

“You hear me speak.

But do you hear me feel?”

Written by German, Jewish poet Gertrude Kolmar who was

murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943

The Holocaust began with Hitler’s rise to power in, 1933 and ended in, 1945. When Hitler’s National Socialist Party seized power, there were approximately 525,000 Jews living in Germany. Hitler quickly created a totalitarian state based on racial ideology in theory, in law and in practice.

Victimization

Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War II. The Holocaust, the genocide was directed primarily at the Jews of Europe. This developed gradually with small discriminatory measures, such as university quota limits for Jews, prohibition of Jewish ownership of German land, deprivation of German citizenship and legally prohibiting them of a variety of occupations and rights.

Laws were redefined expressing what it meant to be a Jew. At the same time laws were passed making sexual relations between Germans and those of ‘unacceptable’ race a new crime referred to as ‘Racial Pollution’. This was punishable by a variety of methods up to death penalty.

Using the tools of science, theorists wrongly claimed that the Jews and other Middle Eastern ethnic groups and cultures such as the Arabs, constituted a separate biological category or race. Jews were the most visible minority in Europe, discribed by many Europeans as a ‘Jewish problem’.Exclusion

Jews were excluded from society as an ‘inferior race’. The Nazis believed that Germans were ‘racially superior’ and Jews were a threat. They strongly believed that they had the moral right to wipe out Jews. In movies, plays, cartoons and other forms of propaganda, Jews appeared as rodents, a defective pollutant that must be eliminated from German society. These illustrations from the Nazi period are evidence of the fact that scientists and schools teachers used to spread racial prejudice. The posters “the Jews as bastard” claimed that Jews were not pure, but came from a mixed breed of inferior races, such as ‘negroes’.

Similar to the experience of blacks in the US, Jews in Nazi Germany faced segregation laws, physical harassment and limited economic opportunities that drove them into financial ruin and personal despair. In every country invaded by Nazis, the Jews were forced to wear badges marking them.

Pogrom

As a result of a nationwide ethnic cleansing in 1938, nearly 20,000 Jewish men were arrested, brought to concentration camps, tortured and placed in labour ‘chain gangs’. Some men were castrated, others were crucified.

Hitler started World War II in 1939. Jews were forced to live in concentration camps crammed into buildings and shacks with little sanitation or running water and meagre food supplies. Diseases were widespread and nearly 5,000,000 people died. Jews were transported to death camps where they were sorted and classified by the camp physician. The young and the old were murdered immediately while healthy adults were worked nearly to death. They were fed less than enough for survival. Eventually even those who had been strong grew weak and then were gassed. Millions of Jews and other victims of the Holocaust kept as forced labourers died from illnesses related to exhaustion and hunger.

As the Nazis expanded their boarders; they killed Jews, mostly in mass shootings. For those remaining in other parts of Europe, the Germans constructed six killing centres, such as Treblinka. The primary purpose of this centre was murdering of Jews with poisonous gas. The largest of these killing centres and slave labour sites was Auschwitz Birkenau where an estimated 1.2 million Jews died.

Liberation

The mass murder, which wiped out two-thirds of all European Jews, was called the ‘Final Solution’ by the Nazis.

During the final months of war, Allied forces moved across Europe in a series of offenses against Germany. The concentration camp prisoners were liberated gradually. In 1945 German armed forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. Finally World War II officially ended.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many of the survivors found shelter in displaced persons camps put up by the Allied powers. Between 1948 and 1951, almost 700,000 Jews emigrated to Israel, including 136,000 Jewish displaced persons from Europe. Other Jews emigrated to the United Sates and other nations.

Sundog: the scientific name for sundog or sun dog is parhelion, from Greek, which means ‘beside the sun’. This is an atmospheric phenomenon that creates bright spots close to the sun

*Stalactite : a mineral deposit of calcium carbonate, in shapes similar to icicles, that hangs from the roof of a cave

Stalagmite : a cylinder of calcium carbonate projecting upward from the floor of a limestone cave

* Onychophagist: person who bites their fingernails

*Jwalk; walking across a street outside of crossing, against a signal light

*Arête: a sharp-crested ridge in rugged mountains.

Devil theory : a theory of history which proposes that political and social crises arise from the deliberate actions of evil or misguided leaders rather than as a natural result of conditions’

* Photosensitivity: or sun allergy is an abnormally heightened response, especially of the skin, to sunlight or ultraviolet radiation. Often caused by certain disorders or chemicals, this condition is characterized by a toxic or allergic reaction. Some people are sensitive to sunlight. Photosensitivity may produce a rash, which is known by the general term, photodermatosis. Itchy eruptions or areas of redness and inflammation on patches of sun-exposed skin can be observed.

These reactions typically resolve on their own. Patients may not associate their skin complaint with exposure to light. Very sensitive patients may even be affected by fluorescent lamps indoors.

*Forest dieback: known by many names such as canopy die-back, forest decline, species level die-back, cohort senescence and stand level dieback, forest dieback is a condition that has become a major problem for the forests of countries like North America, Hawaii, Croatia, Germany, Russia and New Zealand as well as Sri Lanka.

As indicated by the names, when afflicted with this condition forests lose their vivacity, trees cease growth and leaves discolour and fall off leaving a bare framework of branches. Other than in Horton Plains and Haggala, Pidurutalagala ridge, Kobonilgala near Corbet’s gap in Knuckles have been pronounced as affected by forest dieback. Explanations range from predisposing factors like other diseases, fog and damage done to the bark by Sambur and led poisoning.

1905 World’s largest diamond, Cullinan - 3106 carets, found in South Africa
1915 Alexander Graham Bell in New York calls Thomas Watson in SF
1918 Russia declared a republic of Soviets
1924 1st Winter Olympic games open in Chamonix, France
1955 Columbia U scientists develope an atomic clock accurate to within one second in 300 years
1961 Walt Disney’s “101 Dalmations” released
1974 Christian Barnard transplants 1st human heart without removal of old
1980 Paul McCartney is released from Tokyo jail and deported
1980 Dutch Government demands boycott of Olympics
1992 Hubble space telescope optics finds NGC3862/3C264
1994 U.S. space probe Clementine launched
1994 U.S. space probe Clementine launched
2010 One year after thousands of children became ill from melamine in milk, new traces of melamine in milk products is discovered in China