Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Veda We arrived in Bangalore yesterday. I was here 5 years ago, but only for a couple of days. I wanted to come back again because I knew that this time I’d have excellent hosts—Suparna Ganguly and Sandhya Madappa of Compassion Unlimited Plus Action (CUPA), an animal welfare organization in Bangalore.

Today, Suparna took us to the Bannerghatta Biological Park, which is home to several elephants. Although the elephants are restricted to a small area where they are on view to the public for a couple hours a day, the rest of the time they are free to roam and forage on two hundred square miles of national forest land. Sort of. Unfortunately, their mahouts don’t always let the elephants roam as far as they’d like, as the mahouts don’t want to travel great distances to bring the elephants back to the park for their showing to the public.

Even though their living situation is not completely ideal, these elephants—Veda, her little brother, her mother Vanita and grandmother Suvarna, and Veda’s two aunts and step-father—are much better off than they would be in a zoo or circus. In fact, Veda was recently at the center of an international campaign to prevent her from being presented as a state gift to the Yerevan Zoo in Armenia. Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh not only decreed that Veda stay with her family in Bannerghatta, but also banned animals as diplomatic gifts.

TensionMost importantly, since elephants are highly social animals, these at Bannerghatta are living with their families. As with the lions and tigers at the rescue center in Vizag, I don’t think I have spent much time looking at elephants up close. They are really quite odd-looking creatures and their trunks are so versatile. The elephants were in close physical contact, huddled up and touching, the entire time we were there.

Saleem HameedAfter the Biological Park, we headed to the Bannerghatta Rehabilitation Centre. As we drove up to the gate, we were greeted by a very handsome, barking dog, Tension. His pal Sunjan (who I later put into a doggie trance by rubbing her belly) was also happy to have visitors. Then we met Saleem Hameed, who is at the Centre every hour of every day and who has devoted his life to rescuing and caring for orphaned and injured wild animals.

We visited some of the animals in his care. First a snake (I don’t know what kind) who lived in the room next to Saleem’s bedroom, along with an injured cobra. Saleem took the snake (not the cobra) out of his enclosure and let me pet him. I don’t think I had ever petted a snake before.

Macaques rescued from a laboratoryOutside, we visited the primate enclosure, which held macaques that had been rescued from labs. Like Auschwitz victims, they had their lab numbers tattooed onto their chests. Saleem told us that a very young monkey was just introduced into the primate cage and, luckily, she had bonded with the older monkeys and they with her.

We took a walk beyond the Centre enclosure, where Saleem said that he sees a small herd of wild elephants from time to time. Later, as we were leaving, Saieem was up on the roof of one of the buildings, hand-feeding a Brahminy kite and other raptors. These were birds that he had rehabilitated and released, but they still came back to visit him and mooch some food.