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Colombo (AFP)
Sri Lanka will concern captive elephants with their possess biometric identification playing cards and ban their riders from drinking on the career underneath a extensive-ranging new animal defense legislation.
Lots of loaded Sri Lankans — such as Buddhist monks — maintain elephants as animals to present off their prosperity, but problems of ill treatment method and cruelty are popular.
The new measures are aimed at shielding the animals’ welfare and involve strict laws about performing elephants, as well as mandating a everyday two-and-a-50 %-hour bath for each and every creature.
Formal documents exhibit there are about 200 domesticated elephants in the South Asian country, with the populace in the wild believed at about 7,500.
The new regulation will demand all house owners to make certain that animals less than their treatment have new photograph identification playing cards with a DNA stamp.
It also delivers in various regulations for functioning elephants.
Infant elephants can no for a longer time be utilised for operate — even cultural pageants — and can not be separated from their moms.
Logging elephants are unable to be worked for extra than 4 hrs a day and night time get the job done is prohibited.
There are new constraints on the tourism sector much too — from now on, no much more than four persons can experience an elephant at at the time, and they will have to sit on a nicely-padded saddle.
Their use in films is banned, other than for authorities productions under rigorous veterinary supervision, as is enabling their riders to drink though working.
“The particular person who owns or has the custody of these kinds of elephants shall be certain that the mahout (rider) is not consuming any liquor or any damaging drug whilst utilized,” Wildlife Safety minister Wimalaweera Dissanayaka said in a gazette notification dated Thursday.
Proprietors have to send out their animals for a medical test-up every single 6 months.
All those who violate the new law will have their elephant taken into state care and could facial area a three-12 months jail sentence.
Capturing wild elephants in Sri Lanka is a criminal offence punishable by dying, but prosecutions are rare.
Animal legal rights activists as properly as elephant experts have alleged that above the past 15 decades, much more than 40 baby elephants have been stolen from nationwide wildlife parks.
© 2021 AFP