The benefit lay not only in their sheer size but also in their concern for their human trainers and in their ability to charge at great speeds. They were trained and used in warfare in India, China and Persia. Over the centuries, elephants have been tamed for three main tasks: warfare, industry and entertainment (in zoos and circuses). The exploitation of the African elephant for its ivory and the Indian elephant for its work capabilities meant that the creatures were studied extensively for many years. The interest in elephants and their taming was however renewed with the colonisation of Africa and Asia by the Europeans in the 17th century. After Caesar’s time, though, the use of the African war elephant died out and with the decline of the Roman Empire, the art of taming the wild African elephant was lost as well. The Carthaginians are known to have been the first to capture and train African elephants (277 BC) when Hannibal used them in his Roman campaigns. The westward course of elephants began with the first contacts between Alexander and the Indians (during Porus’s defeat) and continued after his death in 323 BC. The art of capturing and taming an elephant slowly became a profession in itself, whose secrets were passed down the generations, accompanied by myths, legends and folklore that persist till today. At first, their use was mostly practical - as tanks in wartime, as timber forklifts in peacetime but they soon became symbols of religious and social prestige. The art of taming and training elephants goes back nearly 4,000 years and seems to have developed originally in Asia, from where it is believed to have spread to Africa and Europe. And yet historically, the sheer power, size and scale of elephants have made them attractive to humans as an enormous powerhouse waiting to be tamed.Ī history of elephant taming in India and the world They remain immune to our domesticating attempts by virtue of their long gestation periods, their low birth rates and their large size and appetite (expensive to maintain for the many generations needed for domestication). For thousands of years – from Hannibal’s African war elephants to the modern Asian elephants – elephants are not domesticated but are rather just wild individuals whose ‘will’ has been tamed. A domesticated species is bred in captivity and is different from its wild ancestors so that it is more useful to humans, who control its reproduction, behaviour and food supply. Domestication involves the adaptation of a species to humans and its captive environment through genetic changes that occur over generations. In fact, most of the elephants we come across are actually caught from the wild, whose ‘will has been broken’ as they have been tamed to work with and for us humans.Ĭontrary to what one may imagine based on their timid nature, antics in circuses, and temples, elephants are not domesticated. Despite our familiarity with these pachyderms for centuries, even today most people are not aware that elephants are not a domesticated species. I had seen them as gilded portals of divinity in temples, as practical tricksters in circuses, as indefatigable powerhouses in construction projects and as the sagacious elders in zoos sometimes even in the wild. ‘How to break an elephant’ is not a question I had ever seriously considered even though, having grown up in India elephants were never exotic beings but an inextricable part of our folklore, religion and daily lives. In my wanderings, I also witnessed an elephant in the early stages of taming and that was when I first heard about ‘breaking’ an elephant. I witnessed young elephant calves giving themselves a mud-bath and ambling with long metal-chains trailing behind them leaving tracks of their movement. As I walked around the camp, I witnessed elephants being taken through their morning rituals of a bath in the river and their meal (straw and rice neatly wrapped into fist-sized morsels).
Today, it is mainly a rehabilitation centre where rogue elephants from the wild are caught and tamed to minimise conflicts with villagers. Dubare is a historically important elephant camp managed by the forest department where elephants used in the Mysore Dusshera processions were traditionally captured and trained. These are real world questions that I walked away with on a rainy June afternoon, after a visit to the Dubare elephant camp situated on the banks of the Kaveri river in Karnataka.
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