Three thousand years after King Solomon is said to have bought Sri Lankan elephants to woo the Queen of Sheba, the island’s wealthy inhabitants are lining up to buy the ultimate status symbol: a jumbo for their back yard.
The age of privatization has caught up with the elephant, and a fifth of Sri Lanka’s 2,500 wild elephants are to go under the auctioneer’s hammer in a controversial government plan to domesticate the animal to save it from imminent extinction.
Despite protests from some wildlife enthusiasts and environmentalists, the response has been overwhelming. More than 200 applications have been received in less than a month, and more are coming in steadily.
An elephant is expected to fetch between $1,000 and $23,000.
Most of the bidders are likely to be the new rich, who have been prevented from purchasing the traditional symbol of wealth and class for the past 20 years because of a ban on capturing or killing elephants.
Demand has also come from many Buddhist temples, which use elephants for traditional religious rituals and pageantry.
However, leading members of the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society of Sri Lanka fear that, far from saving the animal, domestication will lead to a greater threat because of the alteration of breeding patterns.
Sri Lanka has no more than 2,500 elephants living in its steadily shrinking forests-a decline from at least 10,000 less than 30 years ago.
In the same period, its forest cover has shrunk from 25 percent to 10 percent.
As more forests are opened for agriculture and industry, hardly a week goes by without an elephant being trapped or killed by farmers protecting their crops-or by ivory hunters-or a baby elephant being found dead in a pit dug by illicit gem miners.
Traditional landowning families in Sri Lanka usually boast an elderly elephant or two, while the worth of a Buddhist temple is judged by the elephants it owns.
Requests for an animal by the larger, more famous temples have been approved by the Ministry of Buddhist Affairs, headed by President Ranasinghe Premadasa.
