Five-day training camp for mahouts

They have been handling elephants for decades without knowing much about the animals. The training will help them to understand and maintain the jumbos better, a senior forest official said.

In an interactive session, an expert handling the session asked how many litres of water a jumbo would drink in a day. One of the participant said 20. But the right answer is 150. There were similar misconceptions over the food intake, sleeping and other habits of elephants among the mahouts. The participants will be told about basic behaviour of elephants, their daily routine, way of bathing, foot care, identifying minor ailments based on their symptoms and other dos and don’ts. The training had theoretical, video and practical sessions by forest department officials, veterinarians and expert mahouts. MTR Field Director, Srinivas R. Reddy told DT Next that this is the first such training program for non-department mahouts. He said recently the High Court asked the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department to train temple elephant mahouts about the art of handling captive jumbos. “The program organised by the forest department is sponsored by the HR&CE department and private companies,” he said. 

Reddy observed that captive elephants are different from those in natural habitats. “They (captive ones) are confined to a place. Their feed is monotonous. Here we are training them on the dayto-day care that would help maintain the elephants in sound health,” he said. This programme is different from the annual rejuvenation camp for temple elephants at Mettupalayam, in Coimbatore. While mahouts also come there for the camp, no such specific training program was organised so far.