REPORT ON ILLEGAL CAPTURE, TRADE OF WILD ELEPHANTS IS RELEASED.

REPORT ON ILLEGAL CAPTURE, TRADE OF WILD ELEPHANTS IS RELEASED.

Sri Lanka, Nov '20: Per the Daily News: Report on illegal capture, trade of wild elephants is released.

The report documented 55 cases where elephants were illegally traded. The researchers think this is an underestimate. Most elephants were found to be stolen from the wild in 2014 and 2015. This is when former president Rajapaksa was president. Please remember that there are only about 4,000 wild elephants (a classified subspecies of Asian elephant) remaining! 55 newly born elephants represents a huge portion of births during this period.

Near this time, SavingGanesh.org witnessed an elephant theft, detailed below. We also created a film about this issue, and the events, in real-time, of finding and confiscating a stolen elephant from the backyard of an extremely wealthy family. Please view via the link below.

When President Sirisena began his new presidency we determined he would clean up the corrupt actions of the former president Rajapaksa. Part of Rajapaksa's legacy is his disrespect of the environment, including elephants. In fact, Sirisena did just that...his administration located many stolen elephants. Many of the criminal cases are still winding through the courts.

Unlike what is described in the attached article, we learned through confidential informants, that it was Rajapaksa at the heart of the thefts. He would essentially request wild elephants from certain corrupt rangers and gift them to his favorite benefactors, family and friends. Over 40 such thefts occurred in those 4 or 5 years before Rajapaksa unexpectedly lost his presidency in 2015

Sirisena's administration offered about $4,000 for every recovered elephant found by the wildlife department. The funds were split equally between the department's regional office and the ranger who "found" an elephant. Not surprisingly, with this impetus up to 40 elephants were "discovered" within months! It's suspected that the same ranger made big money both in first stealing the elephant, and then later in recovering it.

In a previous year, our own crew witnessed the slimy actions of rouge "rangers" based out of an outlying Wildlife office. An orphaned elephant that was known to be in the proximity and went missing - the ranger crew refused to tell us where the elephant disappeared to, but we knew they had stolen it, likely at the behest of a local politician doing Rajapaksa's bidding.

We were pleased that those types of actions ended when Sirisena took the presidency. It appeared to be low-level ranger "helpers" that stole the elephants, and not organized by officials of the larger Wildlife Department and their veterinarian teams. We learned this from highly placed wildlife officials.

Ranger helpers, thru their local networks, had access to Wildlife department resources, and are very privy to the movement of elephants and can easily snatch one.

Our video of the recapture of a stolen baby elephant: https://www.facebook.com/elephantsnow/videos/344134926427170 (video quality hindered by field conditions)