India’s Longest Elephant Tusk

And what it says about the dwindling elephant numbers in the country.

An average elephant’s tusk measures about four to seven feet. It’s a happy poacher who gets a six-foot-long tusk. He can earn upto Rs 6 lakh by selling it to a crooked politician, who, in turn, will keep the ivory in his puja room in the belief that it will bring him electoral gains and wealth.

Recently, a foot patrol of forest guards deep in the jungles of Chikmagalur in Karnataka were astonished when they came across a tusk hidden by poachers—it measured 8.5 feet, the longest ivory tusk ever measured in India. A forest officer says, “I have seen many pachyderms with majestic tusks both in the wild and captivity, but this was simply grand.”

Had the tusk not been found, it would have been packed in a gunny bag and hidden among logs or furniture pieces. It would have made its way to a nearby city—Bangalore, Kochi or Chennai. There, wildlife traders specialising in ivory and animal skins would have stored it in godowns till a buyer materialised.

The tusk belonged to a one-tusked wild elephant roaming the ranges. Its carcass was found a few days later, confirming what everyone knew: poachers had killed it. The find has brought the focus back on the illegal ivory trade thriving in a country with only about 27,000 wild elephants.
Only a tiny fraction of these are tuskers, whose numbers are fast declining. The southern states of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, especially, report a high incidence of illegal ivory deals. This hit its peak during forest bandit Veerappan’s reign. He is said to have killed 2,000 tuskers, and was thus responsible for tuskers being wiped out from the Deccan plateau. It isn’t poaching alone to blame for the decline. Lately, many farmers have been killing elephants marauding their fields.

The number of wild tuskers, says Jose Louies of Wildlife Trust of India, stands at just 2 per cent of the wild elephant population. While tuskers are killed by poachers, they are also held captive in Kerala temples. In their absence, makhnas (tuskless males) are taking over the wild, breeding more makhnas, thereby reducing the gene pool of tuskers. “At this rate, researchers fear the tusker population will get wiped out in two generations,” says Louies. The record set by the 8.5 feet tusk will then never be broken.

elephantstuskwild tuskers