Status of Mahouts and Human-captive Elephant Conflict in Three Management Systems in Tamil Nadu, India

Mahouts are a specialized class of people with aproud professional background. However, the profession is losing its appeal owing to the dwindling importance of captive elephants. We have assessed their incomes, number elephants^-1, background and human casualties by captive elephants through extensive surveys in three captive elephant management systems-private, Hindu temple and forest department prevalent in Tamil Nadu.The number of mahouts elephant ^-1 was significantly less than actually required in the temple system. The forest department with the highest salary retained a higher proportion of traditional mahouts (83%) followed by private system (>60%) and the temple system with the lowest salary and benefits had the lowest proportion (56%). The forest department system with a large segment of adult male elephants (68%) recorded larger numbers of human injury (0.02 incident elephant^-1 year^-1), but cases of manslaughter was negligible (0.002 human deaths' elephant1 year). The temple management with predominantly (95%) female elephants still experienced the highest man-slaughter cases (0.01 human deaths elephant^-1 year^-1), which is attributed to a lack of traditional compassion and kindness, the essential traits to handle elephants effectively. Better economic and welfare measures are needed to retain the traditional talent in the profession and manage the captive elephants effectively.