Unemployed, Myanmar’s Elephants Grow Antsy, and Heavier - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/world/asia/myanmar-logging-elephants-unemployment.html
Dragging giant tree trunks up and down the steep hillsides of sweltering jungles is a tough job. But there is something worse, say owners of Myanmar’s logging elephants: having no job at all.
Shrinking forests and a law enacted three years ago that prohibits the export of raw timber have saddled Myanmar with an elephant unemployment crisis. Hundreds of elephants have been thrown out of work, and many are not handling it well.
“They become angry a lot more easily,” U Chit Sein, 64, whose eight logging elephants now work only a few days a month. “There is no work, so they are getting fat. And all the males want to do is have sex all the time.”
Elephants hold an almost mystical place in Myanmar, home to the world’s largest captive elephant population. For hundreds of years, they helped extract precious teak and hardwoods from jungles that even modern machinery still cannot penetrate.
Now the future of the 5,500 or so wrinkled pachyderms in captivity is a major preoccupation for the government officials who oversee them.
“Unemployment is really hard to handle,” said U Saw Tha Pyae, whose six elephants have been jobless for the past two years. “There is no logging because there are no more trees.”
Myanmar’s leading elephant expert, Daw Khyne U Mar, estimates that there are now 2,500 jobless elephants, many of them here in the jungles of eastern Myanmar, about two and a half hours from the Thai border. That number would put the elephant unemployment rate at around 40 percent, compared with about 4 percent for Myanmar’s people.