It has been revealed that more than half of the tame elephants in Sri Lanka are privately owned.
The Minister of Wildlife says that there are 210 tame elephants in the country and 102 of them are in the National Zoo and the remaining 108 are privately owned.
Wildlife Minister CB Ratnayake made this observation in Parliament yesterday (22) while initiating the debate on several orders under the Wildlife Conservation Ordinance.
The previous government had also taken legal action against 49 privately owned elephants.
The government says it has submitted a cabinet paper in 2020 to formalize elephant registration and enact new rules and regulations.
The Minister has stated that the elephants as well as their owners have been affected due to the prolonged detention of elephants in the same place by the previous government.
The Minister said that in order to prevent such incidents in the future, new rules will be formulated for the proper registration of elephants and a new set of regulations will be prepared for tame elephants.
According to the Government Information Department, the Minister will focus on measures to reduce judicial pressure on tame elephants, minimize controversial ideologies in the society, welfare of tame elephants and prevent animal cruelty.
The court had recently ordered the return of the baby elephants to those who were accused of illegally keeping them.
The Colombo Chief Magistrate’s Court had ordered the Director General of the Zoological Gardens to return 13 baby elephants in the custody of the Sri Lanka National Zoological Gardens to those in possession of the case material.
Following the order, Ishini Wickremasinghe, the Director General of the Department of National Zoology, resigned.
The last elephant census in Sri Lanka was conducted in 2011. According to those data, the elephant population in Sri Lanka is 5879. 55 of them were adult tusks.