Spare the rod and keep the elephant in line.

A recent visit to the neighbourhood temple revealed an interesting facet of elephant
discipline. As usual I was there with Aman as he wanted to see the elephant when we
saw that the animal was being decorated for some temple function.

There was this elaborate headgear which was being placed on the animal by the two
mahouts. Every elephant has 2 mahouts - First Mahout & the Second Mahout, known
in Malayalam as "Onnaam Paappan" and "Rendaam Paappaan" respectively.

Due to some reason, the elephant was not keeping still and was moving its legs. Since
this was making the job of the mahouts difficult, one of them takes a steel rod that the
mahouts always have with them and leans it against the leg of the elephant, as seen
in the snap below.


In elephant-school, what this means is that the rod should stay that way till the mahout
takes it away and under no circumstances should it fall down, which can happen only if
the elephant moves its leg. A trained elephant will stay without moving its legs for hours
to ensure that the rod does not fall down.

So, once this rod was placed, the elephant stayed still without moving and the mahouts
were able to put the headgear properly. Ofcourse in between, it did reach out with its
trunk to grab the balls of jaggery that some people were offering to it.

However, the poor thing gets confused when the other mahout who was on top of the
elephant signalled to it that he wanted to get down. For him to get down, the procedure
is for the elephant to raise its right front leg on which he climbs down. But since the rod
is placed against that leg, the animal is not sure what to do - if he raises the leg, the rod
would fall down, which is a violation of the other mahout's command.

But the mahout on top does not know about the rod placed against the animal's leg and
so repeats his command. Finally the animal decides that it is better to obey the most
recent command and raises its leg enabling the mahout to climb down. The rod falls to
the ground, but this is excused since it happened while following another command.

It is surprising how a dimunitive man is able to so easily control such a big animal, which
by nature roams free in the wild. Ofcourse, all this discipline is thrown to the wind when
elephants go amok. And usually the first casualty is the poor mahout.