First Project
Study of the Migratory Movements of Wild Elephants Between Burma and India
With the support of the AsECF (Asian Elephant Conservation Fund, USA), the two years that the foundation dedicated to this project permitted us to produce a report, which was immediately circulated amongst concerned specialists in the world and alerted the Ministry of Environment in New Delhi on the catastrophic situation of Namdapha National Park.
Situated in the extreme east of India, in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, Namdapha is a site of exceptional beauty and richness that suffers from its geographic situation since it shares an international border with an opaque country marked by grave political and social problems, Burma. In consequence the frontier is a terrain for traffic of all sorts, arms, opium, illegal wildlife products destined to China, and violent militant groups have made the army presence indispensable.
This project had permitted us to make number of important contestations:
- Firstly, we established a vertiginous decline in the number of wild animals, notably the elephants due to intensive poaching, since the mid 70's.
- We had also identified a new illegal trade route for products issued from poaching (ivory, the fat and skin of elephants, bones, claws and the skin of tigers) in the North of Burma, to sustain this type of market in China.
- We succeeded in locating and mapping out at least one migratory route, which is used regularly today by wild elephants between Burma and India.
- At last, we provided the necessary samples for a comparative DNA analysis of the Asian elephant populations, conducted by Régis Debruyne, a geneticien, under the supervision of Pascal Tassy, Professor of palaeontology, and specialist of the proboscidiens, at the National Natural History Museum of Paris.
Our first expedition into this region marked us profoundly, which was also the subject of a documentary film: The Old Elephant Route.
This film had a worldwide distribution on television and for the first time the threatened splendours of Namdapha National Park was revealed. It is one of the last of the primary forests left in Asia and the only one where tropical vegetation grows below snow-capped mountains.