 everybody welcome. There will be more people coming in, I'm sure. My name is Michael Charney, I'm the Director for Center for Southeast Asian Studies at SOAS, and we're doing, where we've invited Jonathan Saha to speak on his more recent project. Jonathan is a graduate of, has his PhD from SOAS, a number of years ago, and has been at several universities, including Bristol and Leeds, and is now, his current institution is Durham. I'm not going to spend a lot of time introducing, many of you already know who he is, and without more ado, I invite Jonathan to speak, and when Jonathan's done, we'll take questions. Thank you. Thanks very much, Mike, and thank you all for coming along. Sorry that I only have a limited amount of time to talk today, squeezed as I am between my office hour and some teaching, but this is the nature of the term. The talk I'm going to talk, give today, was originally written for a animal studies audience, and the problematic that it addresses is the attempts to decolonize animal studies, which often takes quite an idealist way of thinking about decolonization as sort of a larger philosophical and political agenda. And I'm picking up on some critiques of that approach within history, which is to point out the often disconnect that is there between attempts to decolonize a field and studies of the actual lived experience of decolonization as it happened in the global south during the 20th century. And the way that I'm trying to bring those two together in this talk is to explore what actually happens to working elephants in Myanmar during the period of decolonization, and to tease out to what extent does that transform or shape their lives, so an animal-centered view of the experience of decolonization itself. So that's what I'm going to be talking about. So the experience of British colonialism as a whole was transformative for Burmese elephants. The two major industries, export industries that exploded in late 19th century and through the early decades of the 20th century, that's rice and teak, both had profound and lasting consequences for elephants. The second half of the 19th century was witness to a dramatic rice boom, particularly across the Delta regions of the south of Myanmar, that resulted in or was based on really a major ecological change as large areas of forested delta commando lands were made way for paddy fields. And this saw a region that was not especially well integrated into the world market become the largest rice producing region in the world by the 1930s. And this dramatic expansion of wet rice paddy fields decimated elephant habitats across huge swathes of the country, increasingly confining the wild populations to forested opulent regions, and here they were enlisted in growing numbers into the timber industry. Now the timber industry in particularly the exports of teak, a hardwood which was in great demand across the British Empire for the manufacture of a range of commodities from luxury furniture to railway sleepers, underwent two significant shifts. The first of these was the rapid expansion of the industry, both measured in terms of its share of the global market and in terms of the areas of Myanmar's forest that was used for cultivation and harvesting of teak. The second was the concentration of the industry in the hands of a small number of British financed and managed timber firms. And both the V shifts, both in the scale of the industry and in its concentration in European hands, were dependent upon the capture and conscription of large numbers of Asian elephants. Now these elephants were mostly enlisted from the borders of the colony, in particular British firms recruited elephants and elephant riders or Uzi's from the Korean majority areas in the east of Myanmar and particularly after the Third Anglo-Bermes War in the Kachin regions to the to the northwest. Now elephants enabled the exploitation of harder to reach teak as no technologies could really compete with the dexterity and strength of these powerful intelligent creatures in navigating the challenging terrain of Burmese forests. The competitive edge, the elephants provided a timber trader amended British firms able to raise the substantial amounts of capital necessary to purchase large herds of working elephants gained an unestalable advantage over smaller Burmese outfits. By 1914, the size of the herd belonging to the largest and most dominant firm, the Bombay-Berma Trading Corporation, that firm alone had 1718 working elephants and they purchased over 500 more captive elephants during the interwar years. Prior to 1942, when Japanese Imperial Army forced the British into a retreat, an estimated 7,000 elephants were working across the industry, the majority being employed by just five British timber firms. Now the lives of these working elephants were commonly described as being semi-captive, mostly due to the practice of releasing them at night to wander the forest, albeit hobbled by fetters and made audible by bells attached around their necks. They required decent accessible fodder and sources of fresh water to wash and drink. The regime for training them was violent, moderated by the need to preserve the physical and psychological integrity of any individual elephant. The aim was to build resilient relationships of trust between the Uzi and the elephant, and we might consider these processes of training as the forging of an intersubjective connection between subordinated Burmese, mostly Karem, wage labourers and captive but not fully domesticated elephants. Now the lack of full subordination of both colonised workers and elephants to the authority of British capital represented in the mostly white management of the dominant timber timber firms was manifest in a perpetual problem that confronted the industry, their theft and smuggling of elephants. And throughout imperial rule, the shifting borders of British Burma were sites of overlapping and unclear jurisdictions where firms struggled to enforce their claims to possession of elephants. This was a continual struggle but it was most pronounced at the establishment of British rule between the 1880s and 1910s and as we will shall see it emerged again as a real serious problem in the period of decolonisation in the 1940s. Indeed the mobility and subversive logistics of elephants movement remained beyond state control in Myanmar today. This then is the baseline from which we might appraise the scope and extent of decolonisation for elephants. So to very quickly recap, the colonial period was marked by extensive habitat loss through deforestation to make way for rice cultivation and through commercial forestry. It was also pivotal in the growth of captive elephant populations. Given the numbers involved in the timber industry by the 1940s, it's very likely that the overall population of elephants tipped over in favour of captive populations over wild populations in the colonial period. This is then entrenched and reinforced by the reproduction of the elephant workforce which was reproduced through regular capture from wild herds as captive born elephants never made up the shortfalls and were ultimately found to be an unprofitable way of replenishing labour requirements. At the same time colonial authority over elephants was incomplete. This is also true in their everyday management where individual elephants were often unruly and restive, but also in their movement over formal borders of the state as I've already indicated. Now in many ways the cracks in this status quo were very apparent by the 1930s. Labour strikes at the timber firm Sawmills and Docks brought frequent stoppages. The Siasan peasant rebellion that engulfed the colony between 1930 and 1932 exposed the timber firms to the limitations of the protection provided by the colonial state and in this instance they mobilised their own levees of Korean fighters to protect themselves against the perceived threat of the rebels and elephants were also used to try and protect their interests in a military fashion. Furthermore the growth of nationalism pushed the firms into recruiting more Burmese staff into the higher echelons of their management structures as well as to attempt to cultivate ties with Burmese nationalist politicians but this was a piecemeal and ineffectual strategy for staving off nationalist ire at their favourable position and these minor fishes if you like in the edifice of the imperial order were exposed and became open fractures during the Second World War. So the ignominious collapse of British authority in Southeast Asia during the war has been well documented as has been the human tragedy of the forced displacement of particularly Indian Anglo-Indian and white communities barely ahead of advancing Japanese forces. Now this retreat is also now infamous for the racial logic behind the prioritisation of relief efforts. The heretics of working elephants in carrying refugees over the punishing mountainous terrain to the relative safety of British India is also justly a well known story what has been immortalised in a range of media but the fate of the working elephants that remain in Myanmar is less well documented even in the years that followed immediately after the British reoccupation in 1944 it was not precisely clear to many authorities what had happened to them. Saved save for the few elephants engaged in the arduous retreat to India or those who had been conscripted by the British army the large timber firms left their essential animals their most valuable assets in many instances in the care of their Uzis until they returned. The rewards that were apparently verbally promised to these workers for the task of looking after these elephants a task that was not without considerable personal danger later became a source of considerable dispute within the timber firms as we will see in a moment. In any case the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation's 1,972 working elephants before the retreat was reduced down to around 900 remaining in the care of Uzis when the British reoccupied. A further 200 had been identified as being owned in the regions of Thailand that bordered British Burma and it was optimistically hoped by the corporation that they could be recovered. There were two likely outcomes for the remaining 800 elephants some would have perished in the brutal fighting and exhaustive total war effort on the front on this front line between two collapsing empires certainly the Japanese military sought to mobilize elephant power for themselves although it would appear that they did so with with little success. Other elephants with more luck would have been able to use the opportunity of chaos in the realm of human affairs to liberate themselves and return to the forest although the traumas of captivity may have made this a difficult transition. The impact of this loss of elephants was devastating to the rate of timber extraction in the industry which by 1946 two years after reoccupation was half of what it had been prior to the onset of hostilities in the colony. This was in spite of the weight plan put in place by the returning British government to rehabilitate the timber industry. This arrangement indicative of the hubristic belief held by some inclinial officialdom that assemblance of the old order could be reconstructed post-war saw the state take on responsibility for providing capital to the timber firms the European timber firms as well as shouldering the risk of unprofitable sales while extending the leases to Myanmar's forests at the five largest timber firms had enjoyed prior to Japanese rule. The inability of the firms to recover their working herds meant that this plan had limited success in rebuilding productive capacity and nevertheless there were two innovations in the weight plan that were later to provide the basis for the partial nationalization of the industry. First the establishment of a state managed timber board that worked closely with commercial firms indeed was a major investor and stakeholder in the industry and the second was the formalization of a close relationship between the big five firms into a consortium. The plan was envisaged as an ad hoc interim one which would hold the colonial which would which would hold until the colonial government was in a place to resume working with the firms on the basis of long-term leases however it very quickly became apparent that this was not a transitory arrangement enabling British recolonization but was a step towards decolonization. The weight plan was pilloried in the Burmese nationalist press as the resumption of the exploitative extractive imperialism would drain wealth from the country into the pockets of British capitalists. The newly formed consortium lobbied Westminster and Whitehall to renew their lapsing longer-term leases to enable them to better fight the nationalization of the industry that their intelligence on Burmese politics informed them was imminent. As independence went from being a political likelihood to a rapidly approaching inevitability their correspondence with London became more clamorous and desperate. There was little however that colonial authorities were able to do. On the ground things had irrevocably changed indeed colonization was already well underway. These colonial plans for rehabilitating the timber industry along the lines that had been run via to the Second World War failed to factor in the situation on the ground. The countryside was under British rule in name only in many parts. The nationalist forces who had turned on the Japanese and supported the British reoccupation in 1944 were effectively a shadow bureaucracy at local level in many parts of the country. In other parts territory was in the hand of communist fighters who in 1946 had broken away from the largest and most popular nationalist political force the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League headed by the charismatic general Aung San. The rest of the communist party split with the AFPFL a year later dissatisfied with negotiations with the British government. Political power was not in the process of a managed transfer was being seized from the colonial state from below ahead of formal agreements. In combination with the everyday problems that the timber firms faced re-establishing their labor processes in this context The recovery of their elephants from Thailand was a drawn out and diplomatically fraught endeavour. The borders were restive and Thai authorities were seemingly uncooperative. At the same time new legislation was being passed restricting and regulating the movement between Myanmar and Thailand including laws seeking to control the trade in wildlife. Throughout the colonial period timber firms used their operations in Thailand to transfer elephants into Myanmar all the time so this was a real barrier to their redevelopment. On current of these changes Korean nationalists launched a rebellion that brought timber operations to a standstill in some parts of Myanmar forcing the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation to abandon some of its forests in Pin Manah in central Myanmar with their elephants in 1947. One productive way of framing these transformations is to consider them as part of anti-colonial nationalists counter hegemonic project to unpack that a bit that is parts of the attempts to build a state that both inherited the cohesive power of the imperial predecessor but also that readdressed the injustices of the colonial order. This means first conceiving of the threats posed to the consortium of British timber firms by communist rebels the AFPFL and even the threats posed by their own workers as aspects of attempts to realise greater economic democracy and economic justice in Myanmar and secondly to situate the timber firms trouble experiences in Myanmar's eastern border as symptomatics over battle battles over the geobody of the successor state. So beginning with the attempts to realise greater economic justice or greater economic democracy British timber firms were unprepared to react to the strength of popular opinion against them. Their strategies of countering negative coverage to the weight plan in the press, accelerating the bourbonisation of their management and lobbying colonial authorities were insufficient to protect their interests as they missed the centrality of economic democracy to their opponents grievances. Although it is hard to see practically what they could have done to entrench their position in this new political landscape. Even getting the elephants that they had been able to recover following the reoccupation back to work proved to be difficult due to a breakdown in labor relations in some of their key forest camps. They faced a reluctance among current foresters to take up contracts with them. A problem of labour supply that in fact proceeded the war but became a marked problem again by 1947. More concerningly at least the timber firms managers strikes also broke out among forest workers during 1947. Now workers in timber and in elephant camps were not prone to striking when they did take action previously, notably in the 1920s. This was principally in the form of isolated wildcat action rather than through an informal union structure. In the summer of 1947 the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation faced a near stoppage their total stockage of their forest operations on the Shwayli River in the Shand States to the northeast of the country. Wild managers sought to downplay the debt for feeding behind the action blaming it on the dismissal of two foresters known for political activism as well as the news coming out of Yangon reporting the assassination of Aung Sanh, a document listing the demands of the strikers instead emphasised pay. More specifically they demanded to be paid for the years that they had looked after the elephants between 1942 and 1945. Now an investigation into the records conducted by the corporation showed that this was something that was verbally promised to workers and by some fleeing white British supervisors but it was not a formal agreement a somewhat spurious rationale for declining to provide back pay given their chaotic and rushed nature of the retreat. The corporation though was sufficiently concerned at the unrest is to sanction the withdrawal of its white supervisory staff and the strike was only broken after the murder of one of its leaders. Ultimately the consortium as a whole did agree to offer some rewards to workers who had looked after elephants during Japanese rule although the amounts fell well short of what the strikers were demanding. The growing power of labour in Myanmar as British rule entered its final months was compounded at least in the eyes of the consortium by the disruption caused by communist rebellions. In December of 1947 dozens of Bombay-Behmer trading corporation elephants were seized by rebels in central Myanmar along with hundreds of small arms. In one instance in March forest camps found themselves ambushed by uniformed troops whose leader identified themselves as communists. The corporation's records describe these communists as and I quote polite. The concerted fighting was not directed at the timber firm and its agents the rebels had been engaged with encounters with the military the police and militia's loyal to our son. We might instead see the raids on the corporations or operations as framing the timber firms as holding assets that were fair game for expropriation in the fight to realise a social revolution in Myanmar. This might be why the leader of his particular age was apparently apologetic about the disruption but timber firms were no longer seen as a powerful obstacle to decolonisation. The writing was on the wall for the consortium and that was legible to the communist rebels from the vantage point of Myanmar's mountainous forests even if the firms themselves were slow to read in. It is against the threats of communist insurrection and the seizure of elephant power that the policies of the AFP-LF towards nationalisation should be understood. The speeches of Wang Sang and Eunoo his successor following his untimely murder made it clear that some form of nationalisation was coming. In 1948 over a six-month period the consortium's operations were appropriated by the newly established independent regime. The desire of smaller Burmese timber firms to inherit their favourable leases enjoyed by the consortium was however not realised. A newly established state timber board became the owner of the firm's fixed capital including their elephants, stocking trade as well as forest rights, compensating the firms for these losses with a considerable tonnage of teak logs. The partial nationalisation of the timber industry meant the state ownership of the vast majority of working elephants. The establishment of a state-supported cooperative for elephant capturing firms in the 1950s served to reinforce and replenish the state timber board's elephant power although the continued downturn in teak production meant that the cooperative was largely a failure. Working elephants in essence went from private capital to being a national asset but they were still tethered to the production of export commodities. One important exception to this near-state monopoly in working elephants was the Korean homeland of Kathooli where the autonomy won in the early years of the civil war that broke out at independence enabled Korean nationalists to exploit the timber through the mobilisation of local elephants. Logging became central to the political ecology and economies of post-colonial warfare in Myanmar and elephants were conscripted into these endemic struggles. But whether now owned by the state timber board or by Korean nationalists the material conditions of the elephant's lives remained for the most part the same as during the colonial period, semi-captive and bound to the labour processes of teak extraction. At the same time the consortium found itself struggling to kick-start operations in the generous leases they had over forests in Myanmar it was embroiled in protected difficulties trying to reclaim working elephants that had been smuggled into Thailand during the war. The Bombay Verma Trading Corporation lobbied the colonial government to intercede on their behalf to recover elephants that had been stolen and taken over their border while simultaneously attempting to initiate their own attempts at recovery. In the 1940s the colonial state and the firms themselves found that they didn't have the material strength to wield any authority or enough meaningful authority in the borders to effect this. The firms were able to send their agents to identify elephants that may have originally been in their herds something that they were able to do through identifying brand marks on the elephant's legs or hinds and through the descriptive roles that detailed the physical specificities of individual elephants but regardless of the strength of evidence that they could muster it was apparent that they could not recover these elephants even when they felt the law was on their side. The firms instead opted to buy back their last elephants at relatively competitive rates although even this appears to have had limited success as the consortium was still lobbying for intervention from Westminster to pressure the Thai government to take a further hand on the situation. It is worth noting however that some firms were playing both sides when it came to the illicit movement of elephants across the border with Thailand. In the years immediately prior to the war the Bombay Verma Trading Corporation had used the pat work of jurisdictions in place in the federated Shan states where British rule was mediated through local rulers in order to enable them to move elephants from Thailand without falling foul of game laws. In the early 1950s they were again trying to find innovative ways of circumventing legislation in Burma and Thailand that restricted the movement of elephants as well as their attendant human workers in order to realize an ill fated scheme to transfer some trained Burmese elephants to North Borneo to commence elephant capturing operations in that colony. While nearly all of the elephants had been transferred to the post-colonial Burmese state it would seem that the corporation nevertheless retained ownership of a small number of elephants. The plan to move these elephants to Borneo emerged initially in 1949 and they obtained a license for elephant capturing in that British colony the following year. At around the same time that the Thai government banned the trade in wildlife. The scheme entailed some tricky diplomatic maneuvering as the now independent Burmese government was seeking legal redress from the Thai regime for the elephants that had been smuggled over the border during the war elephants that they now considered their own. The corporation rapidly backtracked on its historical claims to these animals so as not to become embroiled in this case for fear that it would unravel their tentative permissions to transfer their own elephants through Thailand and overseas to Borneo. It also necessitated the corporation seeking an exception to the newly passed ban on wildlife trade. While the archive is silent on the success or not of these attempts by September 1951 10 elephants arrived in Borneo but the scheme was an unmitigated failure. As early as December 1952 two elephants had died. A year later only six remained and the corporation had given up on its plan to capture elephants and were now struggling to sell them. They contemplated having to shoot them if they could not find buyers. The ultimate fate of these elephants is not recorded in the documents I have consulted but it was likely on unhappy end. The corporation's audacious plan to transplant its activities to a location where British colonial power was still ascendant ended in catastrophe for the last Burmese elephants to live under an imperial regime. So I'm just going to quickly wrap up now. In 1936 George Orwell wrote a powerful essay about his time as an imperial police officer in the port of Molymine where he was felt forced to shoot an elephant rampaged through the streets causing destruction and destruction in a fit of must. His essay called shooting an elephant in that Orwell tied to outline the psychological impact of being a tyrant. He didn't want to kill the animal but felt forced to do so by the audience of Burmese folk in front of him whom he could not become a laughing stock in front of. He was transformed in his performance of imperial authority. 11 years after the first publication of his story another large tusker called Pu Tai through his rider and bolted through the streets of Qiongong village about 200 miles north of Molymine. His killing was captured in a letter entitled shooting of elephant in the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation archive. He too had caused Pu Tai had also caused damage to property and crops before being shot not by British police but by members of the PYT group of nationalist fighters and loyal to Aung San. They had been sent to the village to suppress crime a new shadow police force forged in the heat of total war and anti-colonial further. The two episodes capture the nature of decolonisation for elephants currently perhaps in an extremist certainly but they get to the heart of the problem. The change for elephants was mostly in the in the nature of the humans who controlled them. And that's where I'm going to wrap up now so thank you for listening to me and I look forward to any questions and again sorry for curtailing the question time. Hey thank you very much Jonathan. I forgot to mention to everyone where to put your questions so if you could if you have a question put it in the Q and A box or raise your hand although it's more difficult for me to find that in the list of attendees. But as the chair of the session I'd like to ask the first question and I've been more recently I've been thinking about Deep Press Chakrabarty's book on what's the climate of history and planetary terms and I was thinking there's both the factual case that in Southeast Asia a lot of flora is determined they can have a huge economic fed flora is determined by the ground animals that are trampling and make available you know and there's also this fantastical project I don't know if you've seen it where they want to recreate the woolly mammoth because uh when you get the DNA recreate the woolly mammoth because they stomp the tundra in Siberia and they keep carbon in place so what I'm wondering is you you brought the issue you raised the issue of what the ecological effects of colonialism were on elephants but I'm wondering what does the impact on elephants what kind of ecological effect does that have on the change the you know the change the niche ecological niche elephants have maybe for everyday Burmese or something like that. Yeah so quite a profound impact on a number of areas on on the ecologies of the necessary for a wide range of other fauna and but also on biodiversity of flora so elephants do a whole bunch of things they they sort of graze and maintain sort of grass grass areas large wild grass areas that can encourage homeostasis between penises and prey and they disperse seeds wild widely and they produce habitats for for small creatures the dispersal of seeds is and they also find salt lakes that's another really important thing that they do which then other other small creatures rely upon so the both depletion in elephant populations but also the restriction of the movement and where they where they move between has quite profound impacts on particularly beetle populations and as a result bird populations and amphibian populations in in the jungles and I walk that then might knock on in terms of the diversity of types of forest products that exist that population human populations might use is is also worth thinking about but I think the more commonly noted issue is what becomes I guess elephant trespass if you like and the the conflict between humans and elephants around agriculture there was an attendee who would have liked to mention the name but had to be someplace else but I'm sure the question that she would have asked is did do the elephants have an impact on the malaria maybe I'm just wondering elephants moving through the a lot of these peripheral areas are where malaria is strongest would possibly that have had an impact on malaria in terms of them not being there because I would imagine you know potholes are great breeding grounds for anopheles so I'm just wondering you know in terms of the weight of the animal leaving footprints that might get in race season at least get filled with water if that might have actually encouraged malaria when they're allowed roam free it would be it would be really interesting to know how the sort of the geographies of malaria change with the active profound ecological shifts because the the more common narrative is about the increased incidence of malaria as a result of the increase of wet rice paddy production and and so there where that's the area where elephants are no longer residing where they once were so the net impact of the it's probably likely to be quite different but there's also larger human populations there who are more likely to be living among mosquitoes than before I don't know this is a really tricky one sort of unpack but it's an interesting question we have a question from my colleague so Jim Marching who is asked what had the animal rights organizations in Myanmar done regarding this I mentioned the condition of elephants after you know yeah I think so in Myanmar has been a really interesting position for this and like in as opposed to the Swiss neighboring countries India and Nepal and Thailand you have a state authority who is responsible for the welfare of a large number of elephants and that has meant a certain baseline level of healthcare in place and and fairly good record keeping actually on the lives of elephants and and there's been some welfare initiatives that have involved civil society organizations but also academic organizations universities both in and without Myanmar involved in trying to improve the conditions and better understand the conditions for working elephants I mean particularly in the last sort of 20 years and and then alongside that you've had a sort of broader ecological and environmental initiatives that have been largely grassroots like the salween peace park for instance and things like that that have have effects for the protecting elephant populations there were also limits being placed on on on timber extraction and that they had a sort of double-edged sword impact on elephants and in the sense that it started to put question marks over the the livelihoods and the the need the necessity for having these large elephant working elephant populations when when timber extraction dropped so there's all sorts of tricky questions around that but certainly there were and not necessarily animal rights organizations as we might conceive them in the tradition that has emerged in the last 40 years in in the global north but certainly organizations which have and individuals who've been operating on the behalf of elephants that have elephants welfare concerns at their heart and I think one of the interesting things about Myanmar is there was an agency that had a level of responsibility that things could be enacted through now for your project you your your when you're talking about empire you're talking about long lines of formal empire yeah and I'm thinking in terms of informal empire as well what would the impact of changes in the Thai timber industry have had in this because you know you had Mahoots who went back and forth I think a lot of the Mahoots in in Siam or Thailand were actually from Burma or Sean or whatever um you know were a lot of your elephants did they wind up there or did you know I mean is that if you still have this going in time there must have been changes in Thailand that also made poor availability of employment for these elephants at the same time so it's like transnational right yeah it is transnational but that that particular nexus um between uh you know over the salween and the borders there uh you know it's it's what's most crucial to this as well as the borders with the shan states and there you know um the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation had operations in in Thailand and in Burma bigger in Burma but they transferred elephants across sort of willy nilly but that that stops with with the war and then never really returns and and they they don't have the uh the the the successor state in in Thailand does not have any sympathy with them in the way that their reoccupying British state does rely on them because they want to get those teak revenues back up and running um so that that's definitely a big a big part of the problem and uh rather than trying to re-establish their own interests in in Thailand they're more interested in recovering their smuggled elephants and that becomes their diplomatic priority really um yeah we we probably have time for one more big question because you have to leave in five minutes so uh Tharpe Tharni we we all know Tharpe uh has left the link the question so thanks for your talk Jonathan I wonder if we can use the term rewilding in conjunction with decolonization perhaps elephants can never be rewilded rewilded or rehabilitated also if you've seen any parallels between the 1946 decolonization of elephants and the 2010s decommissioning of working elephants many ecotourism businesses emerged making use of these elephants and I wonder whether these popular businesses stop or reverse the decolonization of elephants Thai businesses bought these elephants and brought them to Thailand from the Burma side okay yeah let me just talk about this not only um elephants but also Karen Mahoutz from Karen and Kiranee uh were brought over to Thailand what would what could decolonization look like for this recolonization project under a different name yeah I mean it's it's a it's a really great question and there's a lot in there there was a really interesting debate quite recently in the Journal of Animal Sentience around the the problem of rewilding predominantly Thai elephants and and a group of biologists conservation biologists who argued that there was something that could be done and should be done and and spent some really interesting responses and the two interesting responses to it really stuck in my mind one by a guy called Nicholas Lane who works on works on the anthropology of elephant keeping and who argues that any rewilding project needs to be a decolonial project because that process of rewiling of rewilding of familiarizing an elephant with new new terrain needs to build in the knowledge and the the practices of perennie um uh Uzi's for the most part and so that needs to be built in and thought about as well as about the livelihoods of of those humans who who are attending to those elephants and and the other response to it was a much more sort of policy-driven one which was about um poverty alleviation that the the the research which has gone into seeing what what the problem of conflict between agriculturalists and and elephants is often one about um poverty agriculturalists accept or understand uh the the the the possibility of conflicts with elephants but it's the um it's just their their sort of tight margins for survival and profit that that make those things so so problematic to them um so thinking about the policy process in which you attach rewilding to another a wider set of programs about agrarian poverty alleviation now all of these things end up seeming somewhat um utopian i think in in a current context but i think they're nonetheless worth worth thinking about what the implications of the potential for rewilding mean what does it necessitate in terms of wider social policies for for human populations as well as for animal populations and now the ecotourism idea or sort of tilt towards ecotourism was something that the Miamat Timber Enterprise also tried to do MTE tried to do it a little bit but they they didn't have any of you sort of infrastructure for it and the elephants weren't doing the work so weren't being conditions weren't living in the conditions that they were used to and that produced some health issues as well there and nor was they really the tourist demand for that number of captive elephants um to to be seen uh and so though the problem there was a kind of a political economic one that um or even just a sharply a market one that the the requirements for a thriving ecotourist elephant uh industry are not the same as the labor requirements for teak extraction and so the two things didn't really ever map on to one another so it's a understandable transitory solution um but it is one that we can never really provide an answer to the problem um and uh it is then this therapy's question sort of implies compounded by the the value of trained elephants and their UZs over the border in over the border in in Thailand for what is a more thriving tourist industry or what was a more thriving tourist industry in captive elephants and watching captive elephants I would also want not want to tarnish them all with the same same sort of brush if you like there is there was some really uh well thought through small scale schemes for dealing with retired working elephants um uh that had sort of a broader ecological impact in terms of trying to replant um forested areas using the elephants and but again the scalability of those projects is I think very limited um thank you I think that that is just about perfect in terms of time we're exactly on the dot so um do you want maybe we can just if anybody has any questions please google uh Jonathan Sahadurham and that your email address will show up right it will do yeah I can put it I can put it in the chat just now okay he's going to put his email Jonathan will put his email address in the chat if you don't need further questions and while he's doing that I'd like to because I know you have to go um I'd like to thank Jonathan uh for graciously presenting his uh his work and for working with this tight time constraint between office hours of class and uh thanks for all of our attendees for attending and um wish everybody a very pleasant day and I'll leave we'll leave this up for a little while um uh Jonathan will see you later and we'll leave this up for a little while for people to write that email address down yeah but otherwise I'll close the session thank you very much see you bye bye