Dung-Ho

Cover story: Dung-Ho
07 Jan 2007


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A young researcher whose heart is as big as the animals she’s determined to save lets JESSICA LIM tag along on her unusual quest.

AFTER months of battling shin-high, leech-filled mud, dense undergrowth, wasps and a kind of poisonous tree sap that breaks skin into raw blisters, the petite girl squatted happily by the treasure she sought.
It was a shimmering, lustrous pile of elephant dung.
"Wow. Very fresh. So nice," said elephant researcher Cynthia Boon as she broke into a smile.

Boon pinched a bit of the human head-sized bolus and sniffed it.
The team whipped out their dung-assessing gear — a GPS reader, compass, measuring tape and identification tag — and began noting how far it was decayed, the size and exact location.
As coming too close to the actual animal is rather dangerous, Boon explained that the team keeps a safe distance and looks out for the next best indicator — its fibrous poop.
The data will be compiled and analysed under the country’s first nationwide elephant survey, called the CITES Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE) programme.
It is a Department of Wildlife and National Parks (Perhilitan) and Wildlife Conservation Society Malaysia project, sponsored in part by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
It will find out how elephants are distributed in Malaysia, paving the way for a sorely needed elephant master plan.
The plan must strike the delicate balance between the needs of elephants and their human neighbours.
And the plan must be hatched soon, says Perhilitan. Nearly one in five wildlife conflicts reported to the department have to do with elephants.
This makes them second only to long-tailed macaques, which account for more than half. The department receives about 730 jumbo-related complaints a year.
"They may not be highest in the number of complaints, but they are definitely the most expensive wildlife conflict to handle," said Perhilitan’s Salman Saaban.
Salman, the senior assistant director of the department’s Biological Diversity Conservation Division, said that the cost of translocating a single elephant was RM41,000.
They have moved 336 elephants since 1974, an average of one per month.
"The truth is, we cannot say whether we’re putting too many elephants in one place. Maybe the area is over-full, we don’t know. That's why we need this study.
"Until this study is done, we’ll just have to translocate ‘problem’ elephants the way we always done."
It has been seven months since porcelain-skinned Boon, 26, traded the cushy comfort of her hometown in Kulai, Johor, for the dank, foreboding jungles of Taman Negara.
The only child of a contractor dad and hairdresser mum, Boon is one of three young women biologists who are leading teams of Orang Asli, local guides and wildlife rangers into the last of our country’s surviving elephant territories.
"They are our iron ladies," said programme co-ordinator Dr Jephte Sompud.
"We had people from all over the world apply for the job. Sad to say, none of the men had what it took.
"But these three, they’ve got the experience, they’ve got the guts and they’ve got the spirit."
The women only come out of the deep jungles once a month. When in there, they're unreachable by phone, exposed to all manner of wild beasts and surrounded mostly by men.
They sleep in tents and toilet is behind any thick clump of bushes.
The other two biologists, Nurul Fatana Samsuri and Nurulhuda Zakaria, both 23, declined to be photographed.
Their parents, confided Nurulhuda, had a tough time coming to terms with the fact that their darling daughters were risking their lives for hairy, trumpeting giants that could trample them without remorse.
In theory, the plan of action is simple.
First, the team asks local folk to point out where the elephants are. They follow the jumbo footsteps closely and take note of where they hang out.
They then take a huge grid map of the park and mark out systematic horizontal lines on areas within the animals' projected home range.
They must walk along these lines and count the pieces of poop they find.
"Ha, ha. That’s in theory," laughed the bubbly Boon.
Those transect lines, so neat on paper, are very rarely that straightforward on the ground.
"There is no trail to follow, and whether it’s a raging river, a 60-degree incline, or an area infested with semut api (fiery fire ants), the team has to take one determined step after the another to cover the two kilometres.
Recently, after a two-day hike into the park from the Taman Negara Merapoh entrance, Boon and her two Orang Asli guides, Mat Daling and Soufi, stood at the base of an almost vertical incline.
According to their predetermined markings on the map, they were supposed to scale it.
Their progress for the past two hours had been slow. The two young locals had worked non-stop, furiously chopping a path through tangled and thorny undergrowth.
Often, all that stood between them and a death-inviting plunge into the ravine below were some scraggly trees which they clung to for dear life.
And now, scratched, muddy, exhausted and not even halfway into the transect, they were stuck.
A detour to the left and right confirmed that the rock face went on indefinitely. An attempt to clamber up the incline brought down a shower of rocks.
And they hadn’t found a single piece of dung.
What more, rain clouds had gathered ominously. Boon’s left big toe-nail, which had developed a persistent fungus from the constant damp conditions, was torn and throbbing.
"It’s all right," said Boon — a phrase that would be repeated many times over the next few days, weeks and months.
She adjusted her cap and glasses and joked: "It’s not wasted. At least we know there are no elephants here. The only reason an elephant would climb up there is to commit suicide."


Jumbo-sized shoes to fill

COMPLETELY blind in one eye, with vision fading fast in the other, the 70-plus-year-old elephant was glad her employers finally gave her the golden trunk-shake.
Towards the end of her working life, the old dame could hardly walk in a straight line anymore. Mountains, once easy walking, now drained her too easily.
Her keepers said they even saw tears in her eyes when she was gently pushed to deliver her services for one more day.
Mek Bunga the guide elephant would have liked to retire much earlier, but she was an expert in her field. There was just too much work to do and no one to do it.
She is the go-between, pacifier and big momma to frisky younger elephants who have been plucked out of their jungle homes and planted in new ones.
When an elephant persistently disrupts villages, the best strategy so far is to sedate them, transport them over miles of land and sea, and help them adapt to a more food-abundant area, said the Department of Wildlife and National Park’s (Perhilitan) Salman Saaban.
The senior assistant director of the department’s Biological Conservation Division said the job needed two trained elephants to sandwich the sedated wild one as it stumbled though deep jungles inaccessible by land transport.
To discourage the wild elephant from finding its way home, the animal is usually transported over bodies of water, like in the Tasik Kenyir area or in the Belum Forest.
Every year, 12 to 14 elephants are translocated.
Now that Mek Bunga the matriarch has been let loose to contentedly chew greens in the Kuala Gandah Elephant Sanctuary, there are only two guides left and they’re both over 60 years old.
And Lokimalar and Che Mek, says Perhilitan’s Siti Hawa Yatim, may have less than a year to go before they find their job too demanding.
"Without these guide elephants, translocation would be impossible. Don’t tell me you want to pull the elephants yourself!" said Siti Hawa, the department's Biodiversity Conservation Division director.
"Besides, the trained elephants also comfort the new one. It will think ‘hey, at least I got gang here’."
The department had relied on Mek Bunga and Che Mek, both Thai elephants, since adopting this strategy in 1976. Indian-born Lokimalar was roped in recently to take the place of ailing Mek Bunga.
A younger elephant from Myanmar, Myan Thon Pian, was thought to be able to fill the gigantic shoes, but the plan didn’t work.
"The senior elephants rejected Myan Thon Pian. We don’t know why. They just refused to co-operate. It’s not that simple."

National Elephant Conservation Centre’s Nasharuddin Othman said it wasn’t easy to come by trained elephants, and training local ones was out of the question.
"In Thailand, they have domesticated elephants for 2,000 years," said Nasharuddin.
"An elephant needs to be tame for at least eight generations before it can be trained to do this kind of work. Our elephants are very wild."
The situation is getting desperate, said Siti Hawa. The department had been trying for one year to get in new ones, but efforts have not been fruitful so far.