A Bangladeshi court on Sunday barred the adoption of elephants from the wild, a move hailed by animal rights advocates as a “landmark” order to help stop cruelty.
Rights groups said the high court order suspending licenses would stop the torture of captive Asian elephants in the name of training.
“The high court today suspended all licenses for the captive rearing of elephants,” Bangladeshi Deputy Attorney General Amit Das Gupta said.
Photo: Reuters
Bangladesh was once one of the major homes for Asian elephants, but poaching and habitat loss saw their numbers dwindle so much that they are now declared critically endangered in the South Asian nation.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature says there are nearly 100 captive Asian elephants in Bangladesh, nearly half the amount of elephants left in the wild in the nation.
As logging and farming encroach on elephant territory, young animals are captured in the nation’s northern and southeastern hills.
The forestry department has previously issued licenses to logging groups who use the elephants to drag tree trunks — or to circus groups — to adopt the animals, but Gupta said the elephants were being exploited, and used for begging and “street extortion,” breaking the terms of the licenses.
Animal rights advocates said that the suspension would end often brutal training — known as hadani.
“This is a landmark order,” said Rakibul Haque Emil, head of the animal rights group People for Animal Welfare Foundation Bangladesh.
The foundation and actor Jaya Ahsan launched a public interest litigation against captive elephant licensing.
“In this name of training elephants, private licensees including circus parties brutally separate elephant calves from their mother, shackle them for months and then torture them to teach tricks,” Emil said. “We hope it is the end of hadani in Bangladesh.”
The plight of captive elephants was highlighted in May last year when a young elephant, used for begging on the streets, was killed by a train.
Some daub the elephants in colorful paint and force them to do tricks on the streets, asking for cash for their performance.
Police in May 2019 rescued two emaciated elephants from their owners after the animals were used for roadside begging. The elephants were later handed to Dhaka Zoo.
Emil said the foundation would mobilize support for the rehabilitation of captive elephants.
“Several countries in Asia such as Thailand and Nepal have found some success in rehabilitating captive elephants,” he said. “We shall do it here.”
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS