India Blog!

The elephants (and the bulls in town) seem to get whipped a lot, which is hard to watch if you care much for animals. I'm sure elephants are probably even tougher than they look and that the business of taming them is tricky, but I noticed that the drivers carry a large utensil that looks like a fire iron which they keep pressed to the top of the elephants' heads. They also have a bamboo rod they use to stir the elephants to action when they aren't moving fast enough (or at all).

I asked Mona if elephants ever got loose in the city (especially those work elephants that sleep in stables by the river in Delhi), and she said that it's very rare. With the traffic, crowds, and some of the loosely built structures, the cities really can't afford to have elephants get loose. I am remembering bits and pieces of the George Orwell story "Shooting an Elephant," which now, suddenly, I want to read again, having seen these magnificent animals in daily life.