My hosts asked if they could fix a drink for me adding that there may be visitors dropping by later. Seated in the verandah facing the natural expanse of trees and the wilderness, I had already been introduced to Suzette, the single mother who was foraging for her brood. She and Priscilla were the wild boars who roamed the vicinity.
Suddenly my gaze moved to the water tank at the side of the house and there was the visitor, helping himself to lots of drinks. Sometimes he sloshed water out, earning the reprimand of wasting water.
In quiet tones my hosts told me I should be prepared to go indoors should he come towards the verandah. This was not because he posed a danger, but rather because we, human beings, had become a threat and how he had suffered for his trust and affection for them.
But he did not come up close, choosing to walk, in his slow, deliberate way, out towards the bamboo thicket and back into the jungle from where he came.
This was Rivaldo, the iconic elephant of the Sigur region near Ooty (Udhagamandalam), who grabbed media attention for the way he was captured and incarcerated, the campaign for his release and his successful rehabilitation into the wilds. His latest behaviour was vindication of the fact that an elephant can be taught to “forget.”
I was a guest at the Sigur Nature Trust, a private reserve in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, with Dr Priya Davidar, former professor of ecology at the Pondicherry university and one of the first women ecologists in India to do field work, and her husband Dr Jean-Philippe Puyravaud an ecologist. Both head the Trust, established by Priya’s father, E R Davidar. They have published several works on how to manage elephant corridors which enable crucial movement of elephants.
Rivaldo’s story, I learnt, is emblematic of the challenges ecologists face from the impact of increasing infrastructure and development works and unbridled mass tourism.
Davidar spoke of her childhood spent in this wilderness after her father, an advocate turned naturalist, bought the land along the Sigur river in 1964 and built a small cottage. Having been associated with the survey of the Nilgiri tahr (published in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society and Oryx), her father also made groundbreaking observations on how hyaenas brought up their young and on the hunting behaviour of the wild dog or dhole.
He loved the elephants, regular visitors to this forest home and was moved by the plight of these large intelligent animals whose habitat was being destroyed rapidly. As a member of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources Asian elephant specialist group he was involved in the first coordinated census of Asian elephants in south India in 1979.
He drew inspiration in 1971, whilst in Sri Lanka, on the plan to link isolated reserves with corridors to facilitate elephant movement. He understood through his close encounters with animals in the field that free ranging elephants become frustrated and aggressive when confined, leading to increasing confrontation with human beings.
“What amazes me today,” says Davidar, “ is that my father had been capable of identifying links of major importance that were in danger of being damaged—past corridors between Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and also ‘future’ corridors.”
The late Davidar believed that with continuous land use degradation, elephants would make more and more frequent visits to the western plateau of the Nilgiris, looking for food and shelter where they had been rare before. “And all this was on the basis of the actual field experiences of one man, when today you have teams and the Global Positioning System.”
Davidar and Puyravaud, initially trained as plant ecologists, have chosen to venture into research on the Asian elephant. Besides huge respect and affection for this animal, they are also concerned about the demonization of the elephant by the media where it is held responsible for intentionally causing ‘conflicts’ that harm human interests and cause loss of human lives. “Although the destruction of its habitat, increasing human density and expansion into forest areas are routinely mentioned in most publications, interventions to arrest the loss of habitat and population connectivity is rarely considered a mitigation issue,” they have argued.
They work with the Tamil Nadu Forest Department which had identified corridors and sought regulating human activities that hinder elephant movement. They have identified elephant corridors of varying scales, the largest of which ran east to west across a highly human modified landscape. The matter is in the Supreme Court but in the meanwhile the local administration has acted to stop multiple illegal enterprises that were functioning without regulation in the proposed elephant corridors.
One of the corridors, identified by the late ERC Davidar, was Chaddapatti. Worried about what would happen to the elephants if it was taken over by people with no interest in wildlife, he established the Sigur Nature Trust in 2005 to protect this strip of land as a wildlife corridor in perpetuity.
For years, Davidar and her siblings visited this wilderness and her brother Mark lived there for nearly 26 years. After he passed away, her husband and her other brother Peter took up permanent residence. She joined them after her retirement from Pondicherry University.
Rivaldo, she said, was one among the elephants named by Mark after the Brazilian footballer of the late1990s. He and his pachyderm mates Ronaldinho and Cafu would come by and kick around and play with old tires lying around, living up to their characteristic trait of playfulness.
“It was in 2013 however that Rivaldo lost 30 cm of his trunk, possibly due to human action. The injured animal was visiting this residence and so the Forest Department was able to treat him from this very verandah without having to restrain him because he was such a gentle tusker despite his size. He started getting sugar cane and water melon during this treatment to distract him.”
Davidar recalled those days, “My brother Mark was in a diabetic coma in the hospital whilst the veterinarian team and others were treating Rivaldo here. He became an attraction and a kind of tourist tamasha began with all people, including the police officials, etc dropping by. Eventually Rivaldo’s wound healed, he was weaned off feeding and went back to the forest.”
Sadly, says Puyravaud, Rivaldo’s inherently friendly nature meant he kept coming back to neighbouring villages where people began feeding him. Some even climbed atop his back to gather branches from a tree.
There was another threatening element. The mass tourist invasion, he explained, without any concept of eco-tourism degraded the environment and created great pressure on the wildlife.
“We have new settlers and mushrooming of illegal resorts. Precious water is being diverted to them and not to the tribal villages. These settlers have no concept whatsoever of sustainability. They do not want to compromise on any aspect of the luxurious lifestyles they enjoyed in the suburbs of the cities. They have swimming pools, manicured gardens and music parties.”
In 2018 a narrative was floated that Rivaldo needed to be incarcerated. It came about after he began to visit some of these settlers’ gardens and broke flower pots and damaged the plants after he got used to being fed.
“It is amazing how people want to make a pet out of a wild animal and then get angry because it has strayed in. They could have put up a simple elephant fencing to prevent that but instead they suddenly made him into a monster.”
Even more insidious was the way the narrative was then scripted, in particular by a woman settler, reportedly to be from the SPCA, that Rivaldo, blinded in one eye by a stone and with an injured trunk, needed to be put away for his own good and that he could not survive in the wild.
There was talk of how the Forest Department wanted to send him to the Theppakuddu Elephant Camp where mahouts would be employed to “tame” him. Several wildlife activists have pointed out that the taming process whereby dominance over the animal is sought through fear and deprivation of food and water is inherently cruel.
A kraal or enclosure made of teak wood, alleged to run into the sum of Rs 45 lakhs, was built. Rivaldo was enticed inside and made captive at Vazhaithottam in May 2021. A heated debate began in the media with a campaign for his release with politician Menaka Gandhi and environment secretary Supriya Sahu pitching in.
Armed with data and videos, Puyravaud and Davidar provided crucial information on how the elephant was not blind, the injury to his trunk had healed and he had adapted to his handicap. He could breathe easily, could drink water and easily live in the wilds. They affirmed that if people would stop feeding Rivaldo, the elephant could “unlearn” the practice of begging for food in the nearby villages. His dependence on villagers would be reduced.
Three months after being imprisoned in the kraal, the Tamil Nadu forest department made an important decision to release Rivaldo into the wilds.
Taking the crucial step Shekhar Kumar Niraj, Chief Wildlife Warden of that time told the media he had learnt from the veterinarians that no treatment could be given to improve Rivaldo’s health condition. There would be no purpose in keeping the elephant inside the kraal, breaking his natural spirits.
Moreover, it is very important to preserve genetic diversity of the older males in the population by allowing them to breed freely. Puyravaud told me that removing elephants from the wilds was akin to culling. If the animal cannot breed, it is as good as dead.
In response to a public litigation plea by an activist who wanted Rivaldo to remain in captivity, the Madras High Court announced that having seen videos supplied by the Forest Department they were convinced that Rivaldo should always be encouraged to go back to the wild unless it is a question of his survival.
After Rivaldo’s release in the Chikkala forest, some kilometers away from his old haunts, the Forest Department urged people not to feed him, pointing out how it was an offence to do so. Over the months although Rivaldo returned to his original habitat, he no longer begged for food and had been de-habituated, going back to his old feeding pattern.
Davidar and Puyravaud say the successful wilding of Rivaldo is a good study on how elephants can successfully be reintegrated into the wilderness even after captivity.
He visits the Sigur Nature Trust off and on as I witnessed but doesn’t demand food. He has learnt to forget and his gentle nature holds a lesson for us humans. An elephant is not a pet, it is a wild animal. We, human beings, need to be as respectful and live in harmony with these living representatives of the largest land animals that formerly roamed the earth.
Freny Manecksha is an independent journalist
