Cruelty Against Elephants
Ownership of elephant is considered as a feudal status symbol and around 700 elephants are owned by people and temples. These elephants are rented out for more than 10,000 festivals and processions in which a single elephant may generate revenue up to $5000 a day according to their status. These animals have to endure long and noisy parades, loud firecrackers, may need to stand near flames, travel long distances in open shabby vehicles and walk on tarred roads in the scorching sun for hours, denying even food, water and sleep, in the name of religion and tourism promotion. They are often abused by drunk and brutal mahouts. Around half of the mahouts are found to have drinking problems. January to April are the cruelest months for the captive elephants in Kerala when the places of worship celebrates various annual festivals.
Read more about this topic: Elephants In Kerala Culture
Famous quotes containing the words cruelty and/or elephants:
“To abolish a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable class of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West-Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)