Lucky Sama
Visit a three-legged elephant on the tropical island of Sri Lanka
Sama is the saddest elephant I have ever seen.
A small adult, she has only three usable legs and leans desolately against a sturdy metal fence at the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage in central Sri Lanka. A hundred or so tourists crowd around the dusty corral that houses Sama and three adorable baby elephants. Most of the visitors are admiring the babies, and a few lucky ones even get to feed the youngsters from giant baby bottles. But I am looking at Sama.
Sama’s right front foot and about six inches of her lower leg were blown off when she stepped on a land mine during the Sri Lankan civil war. Although the injuries themselves have long since healed, the elephant’s left front leg is severely bowed from carrying her poorly distributed weigh, and her back is grotesquely twisted for the same reason. But it is Sama’s eyes that affect me the most.
She gazes at me with the saddest expression I have ever seen. I am surprised to discover that an elephant can be expressive, but there she is, four feet away, looking at me with what is clearly a mixture of resignation and anguish. She must be in a great deal of pain. We stare at each other for a minute or so until I can’t bear it any longer and turn away. I know it sounds silly, but I don’t want Sama to see me cry.
Also, I don’t want her to see the pity in my gaze.
I’ve read a lot about the emotional life of elephants, and there’s no doubt among animal behaviorists that elephants exhibit empathy. They respond to each others’ pain or physical problems; they assist each other and comfort each other and grieve for their dead. If they can do all that, I’m not taking the chance that Sama can recognize a look of pity on my face.
I also don’t want the nearby humans to see me crying, so I move on to explore more of the twenty-five-acre Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage. It’s at an old coconut plantation in the forested hills of central Sri Lanka, between the ancient royal residence in Kandy and the present capital of Colombo. Established by the Department of Wildlife Conservation in 1975 to feed, nurse and house five orphaned babies found wandering in the jungle, it is now home to the world’s largest herd of captive elephants.
Sri Lanka, the 25,000-square-mile tropical island just off India’s southeast shore, was once a paradise for Asian elephants.
Before the British invaded in 1815, an estimated 30,000 of the pachyderms lived on the island. But according to the Sri Lanka National Zoo, in the 1960s, “following nearly a century of game hunting and jolly slaughter by the British colonialists,” the elephant population dwindled to the point of near extinction. The tragedy prompted the Sri Lankan government to found the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage.
British colonialists were not the only threat to elephants in Sri Lanka. Drought can be a serious problem there, so over the centuries various rulers have built tens of thousands of reservoirs, called “tanks,” across the country. Elephants — especially small ones — regularly fall into the tanks and get stuck. Add to that the problems of poaching, fragmentation and loss of habitat, construction of roads and railways, and human encroachment to the forest for settlement and agriculture, and the situation looks pretty grim.
Life at the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage, on the other hand, seems quite agreeable.
As much as possible, the daily routine simulates conditions in the wild. The elephants are allowed to roam freely during the day, and have formed a herd structure with stable social interrelationships. Even though each adult requires about five hundred pounds of food each day, there’s plenty of jackfruit, banana, coconut, tamarind, grass, foliage and other vegetation for them on the reserve. There’s plenty of fresh water, too, which is a good thing, because elephants drink up to fifty gallons of water a day — about as much as a standard bathtub holds.
Bathing is a primal pachyderm pleasure, and twice a day — from ten o’clock to noon and again from two to four, mahouts (keepers) walk the elephants a quarter of a mile through the village of Pinnawala and down to the wide Maha Oya River, where the elephants cool off, play, or just relax. It’s one of their favorite activities.
One of the tourists’ favorite activities is watching the bathing elephants.
The individual animals interact with each other, splashing and squirting, sometimes lying down in the shallow rapids, rolling and lolling and generally looking like they’re having a good time.
A natural environment, good care, and freedom of movement have afforded the elephants at Pinnawala opportunities to mate, and in 1984, the first baby elephant of Pinnawela was born. Today a scientifically designed captive breeding program is in place, and some of the elephants are third-generation residents.
YouTube activists have raised concerns about the treatment of animals at Pinnawala, posting videos showing that some of the larger elephants’ ankle chains have chafed or injured the animals. I didn’t observe that problem when I was at Pinnawala; perhaps the publicity prompted a change.
Sama is not the only notable elephant at the Pinnawala orphanage.
The oldest tusker here is Raja. Closing in on seventy years, he is blind in both eyes, weak, and at the end of his natural life. He stands quietly, not interacting with much in his environment except his mahout. Raja came to the orphanage as an adult, suffering from a gunshot wound he sustained in the wild. His tusks are huge, and part of one is missing. The mahout explained that the exceedingly long tusk was making it difficult for Raja to eat, so his keepers sawed it off.
In the village of Pinnawala, a tiny shop sells specialty items made from elephant-dung paper.
The walls are adorned with hand-made posters showing various stages of the paper-making process: The dung is already ninety percent fiber when it “exits” the elephant. It is boiled for three days — and let me just say I’m glad I wasn’t around for that demonstration — colored for a week, blended for three to four hours, and spread across a small screen to dry in the sun for a day. At this stage it’s a coarse product, more like cardboard or wallpaper than stationery. It is then pressed into a much finer product, scented with cinnamon or lemon grass, and proudly packaged as elephant-dung stationery and elephant-dung note cards.
It was from another poster in this informative shop that I learned about some of the physical differences between Asian and African elephants. African elephants are larger than Asian ones, with proportionately larger ears, which are shaped like the continent of Africa — a lucky convenience for those of us trying to remember the differences, but not blessed with the excellent memories of an elephant. Asian elephants typically have patchy orange-speckled pigmentation on their faces, trunks, or ears, which African ones do not.
While African elephants all have tusks, most Asian ones do not — only about seven percent of Asian male elephants grow them. Even more interesting, Asian pachyderms have only one “finger” at end of their trunk, while the African ones have two. And, while African elephants have the expected twenty toes, Asian elephants have only eighteen; their back feet have only four toes each.
I wanted to know more about Sama, so I did a little research after I got home.
It turns out this elephant, whose name means “Peace,” is known around the world. But much of the information available about her online is contradictory. Sama may have had the accident in 1996, when she was six years old. Or it happened when she was two. She may have arrived at Pinnawala in 1995, or perhaps it was in 1992 or 1984.
Information published in 2011, possibly from a 1998 research report, states that Sama “is now twelve and will suffer from considerable discomfort in the future due to changes in her spine, because of her unnatural body position, trying to balance the body weight on three legs.”
Sama’s situation was made worse by the fact that she was beginning to experience circulatory problems, as evidenced by changes in her pigmentation. Her keepers were also concerned about the possibility that Sama might develop psychological difficulties due to her medical condition, so they contracted with a German engineering firm to fit Sama with a prosthetic leg.
The Germans were excited about the undertaking.
They set up a website for what they dubbed the “Lucky Sama Project,” raised money and, in 2003, constructed a cylindrical trans-tibial (below-the-knee) prosthesis of steel and cotton, customized for Sama so that it fit perfectly.
But Sama would have none of it; she managed to remove the contraption from her leg, breaking it in the process. The next day her doctor repaired the prosthesis and tried again, but with the same results. After a third try it was determined that Sama would have the final say with respect to the prosthesis, and that say was No way!
What does the future hold for Sama and Raja?
They’ll live at Pinnawala for the rest of their lives. I can’t imagine that either will survive much longer, but I’m glad to know they are as comfortable as possible, given their circumstances.
Some of the other rescued elephants will eventually be given to zoos. Many more will be “honored” by being presented to Buddhist temples, where they will be given starring roles in traditional religious processions.
But these conditions are exploitative: The animals must be taught to behave obediently in parades, submitting to human commands and control. They must walk for miles in stultifying heat and humidity, carrying their lavish — and heavy — caparisons. They must endure drums, shouting, high-decibel fireworks, and other assaults on their sensitive hearing.
Many succumb to loneliness and depression. Elephants are intelligent, emotional creatures who need companionship and have evolved to live in herds. News reports of zoo elephants dying from loneliness have documented incidences in Japan, the Philippines, Spain, the United States, and elsewhere around the world.
As I leave Pinnawala, I feel hopeful about the future of elephants.
We are learning more and more about their emotional capacity, and some places — Pinnawala is an example — seem to have figured out how to treat them ethically. Internet interlopers don’t hesitate to step in with photos, videos, and pleas for action when they see mistreatment.
Want to get involved? You can learn more here about the Pinawalla Elephant Orphanage, and Charity Navigator lists several reputable organizations that help elephants.
February 18, 2017 update: I’m delighted to announce that this “Lucky Sama” article won first place in the 2017 Bay Area Travel Writers Planet Earth awards for best travel article or essay for planet earth!
A version of “Lucky Sama” was published in Your Crocodile has Arrived: More True Stories from a Curious Traveler — a collection of stories celebrating the world’s oddities and ephemera. The book won a first place Independent Press Award, and is available from Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA; from other independent bookstores at IndieBound; and online.
