JUMBO’S GREAT ESCAPE... FROM 50 YEARS IN CHAINS
Blocked by an angry crowd, but rescuers at last put an end to this poor elephant’s decades of suffering
GAJRAJ is 75 years old. He was captured from the wild as a calf, beaten into submission, and has been chained in one spot at the Yami Devi Hindu temple in Aundh, Maharashtra, India, for nearly 58 years.
Yesterday, Gajraj – his name means ‘The king of elephants’ – was finally free from his terrible sentence.
Injured, partially blind, with foot abscesses, his tusks hacked off to protect the mahout handlers who abused him daily and frail from decades of poor food, lack of hydration or movement, he had been abandoned to die, still chained by all four legs.
That was until Wildlife SOS, aided by funds from People For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals, launched a rescue mission. His owner, the Queen of Aundh, had been persuaded to surrender him, but still the ‘Gajraj freedom team’ of 12 – vets, drivers, mechanics and handlers – needed police protection when they arrived on Wednesday. At first, villagers turned out to bid Gajraj farewell but the atmosphere turned nasty. A crowd of 500 tried to block his path, attacking the rescue team with rocks and stones. ‘He’s an icon,’ explained Kartick Satyanarayan of Wildlife SOS.
I first learned of the Asian elephants’ plight when I visited Kerala, southern India, in August 2015.
There are 5,000 captive elephants in India, with 600 in temples in Kerala alone. At Guruvayur Temple, 38 ‘stars’ earn more than £450,000 a year for the temple owners from donations and festivals. Many have been chained in the same spot for decades, released only for festivals where they are controlled by nails that have been driven into their feet and are pressed to keep them still. Later that year, I reported on the dramatic rescue of Suraj, a perilously thin elephant with foot rot and one remaining ear, chained up at the Martand temple for 20 years.
It’s not only temple elephants that suffer. Others are forced to carry tourists all over South East Asia and are driven mad by isolation and brutality.
Gajraj didn’t go quietly to his new home at the Wildlife SOS sanctuary at Mathura, south-east of New Delhi. He found the noise from the crowd terrifying and refused to board his specially adapted ‘ambulance’.
But he was finally persuaded aboard an open truck and, after a journey of 930 miles, arrived yesterday at the sanctuary for specialist geriatric care. His abscesses and a knee wound were dressed. An animal who has known only cruelty stood nicely while treated. What a brave boy.
Gandhi once said: ‘The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.’ India is still in the dark ages. But at least Gajraj, after half a century in shackles, has come into the light.