{"id":248707,"date":"2026-09-03T03:36:23","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T22:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=248707"},"modified":"2026-09-03T03:36:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T22:06:23","slug":"the-animal-welfare-bill-the-elephant-tn-the-room-cruelty-in-culture-wealth-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/the-animal-welfare-bill-the-elephant-tn-the-room-cruelty-in-culture-wealth-power\/","title":{"rendered":"The Animal Welfare Bill & The Elephant Tn The Room: Cruelty in Culture, Wealth, & Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Jude L. Fernando<\/a>\u00a0\u2013<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Jude L. Fernando<\/p><\/div>\n

An apocalypse was promised. Elect the NPP, opponents warned, and the Perahera dies with the ballot. It did not. It returned in full grandeur, and a president once accused of plotting its ruin stood watching from the crowd \u2014 not from a podium, as every predecessor had. Elsewhere, the Animal Welfare Bill crept forward, resisted mostly in the name of a culture it supposedly endangers.<\/p>\n

Both are good news. Neither answers the only question worth asking: did any of this reach the voiceless \u2014 the elephants, and the advocates who have spent years demanding an end to their suffering?<\/p>\n

Nothing about the season reached the tuskers marching that night. Bound feet, a hook at the ready, drums that would not stop, a whip when persuasion failed \u2014 this is what they heard, as they hear it every year. The presidency of the commons, the prophecy that failed, the tourists drawn and the foreign exchange earned: none of it speaks a language available to them. The only sentence ever addressed to them directly is the mahout’s hook against skin.<\/p>\n

What follows is not concerned with the distance between a president and a crowd. It is concerned with something colder: the gap between a nation applauding itself and an animal still in chains while the applause continues. Chain by chain is the currency freedom will be purchased in here, and each day the bill sits “on its way” is a day paid for in iron.<\/p>\n

The Weight of a Century-Old Fine<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Consider what a beaten elephant was worth, legally, for over a hundred years: 100 rupees. Less than fifty cents. That was the entire penalty the 1907 Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Ordinance imposed on the worst cruelty its colonial drafters could imagine \u2014 not a deterrent so much as a receipt.<\/p>\n

That ordinance is finally being retired. The Animal Welfare Bill, now moving from Cabinet toward the Government Gazette, replaces it \u2014 though “moving” undersells how contested the road has been. Advocates who fought for its passage call it a milestone; many of those same advocates call its surviving text a disappointment, thinned out at every political junction along the way.<\/p>\n

Credit where it’s due, and it is substantial. Cruelty is now defined widely enough to matter \u2014 beating, torture, overbreeding, denial of food or shelter \u2014 carrying fines up to Rs. 250,000 and two years in prison. Deliberate killing draws harsher terms still: up to Rs. 500,000, four years. Pet shops and breeding operations require licenses; street sales and sport hunting are banned outright. Cruelty becomes a cognizable offense \u2014 police can arrest without a warrant, without delay. No government in Sri Lanka’s history has moved this far against this much organized resistance. The bill’s authors are the most consequential animal welfare legislators the country has produced.<\/p>\n

That is precisely why the bill’s failures matter. A weak bill would be easy to dismiss. This one is strong enough that its loopholes feel like betrayal.<\/p>\n

But statutes are tested where they’re least convenient, and this one was tested by the Perahera. There, it bent. Traditionalist politicians warned that language against “cruel restraint” or “heavy loads” would criminalize the Kandy Esala Perahera itself \u2014 an attack, they said, on Buddhist heritage dressed up as animal law. The government’s answer was a single substituted word: processions would not be banned, only “regulated.” To the activists watching, that word was the whole bill’s undoing \u2014 a loophole broad enough to walk chains, hooks, and firecrackers straight through it under the cover of custom.<\/p>\n

Underneath even that compromise sits a structural problem. Enforcement falls to the Department of Animal Production and Health, a body built to grow the livestock and meat economy, not restrain it. Slaughterhouse operators, in effect, are policed by their own trade office. And still, no independent authority enforces any of it \u2014 only an advisory committee stacked with the government and industry actors the law was written to hold accountable.<\/p>\n

Fifty cents to Rs. 250,000 is, by any domestic measure, a leap. Held up against global standards, it is modest at best. Both readings are correct. Neither will matter the next time a tusker is chained for a festival the law now simply calls “regulated.”<\/p>\n

A Law the Culture Argument Cannot Defeat<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

No one disputes what the Esala Perahera means to those raised on it \u2014 the fire dancers, the drums, the tusker bearing the relic casket, a spectacle that has summoned pilgrims and kings alike for centuries. Nothing here demands that feeling be surrendered. The only demand is honesty about what sustains it: whether that feeling requires an animal in chains to survive, and whether a civilization capable of answering this question elsewhere can answer it at home.<\/p>\n

Thirty-odd countries have already written animal sentience into law. Indonesia has moved decisively against captive elephant exploitation in recent years \u2014 performances curtailed, forced encounters restricted, tradition offered no blanket exemption. Sri Lanka’s own Animal Welfare Coalition has pointed to that precedent for good reason: a devout, tourism-reliant Asian nation is proving that culture and cruelty are separable. Keep one. Cut away the other.<\/p>\n

Compare the pace. Indonesia has moved. Sri Lanka, retiring the same 1907 ordinance for fines that now reach Rs. 500,000 and years of imprisonment, still stalls \u2014 caught in something more stubborn than legislative gridlock. Good policy is measured not by how fair it sounds but by what it dares to threaten. Here, culture is not truly being defended; the wrong it conceals is. The bill isn’t being debated on its merits. It’s being waited out.<\/p>\n

Say plainly what this resistance is: cruelty wrapped in a flag and called patriotism. Notice the crucial detail: Sri Lanka’s bill leaves the elephants in the pageant entirely. The procession stays. The drums stay. The devotion stays untouched. What the law criminalizes is narrower \u2014 the chains, the hook, the untreated wound, the starvation dressed up as ritual observance. Those objecting are not protecting tradition; they are protecting what tradition has been made to hide.<\/p>\n

Listen to the objections themselves: cultural erosion, vanishing heritage, damaged tourism, wounded sentiment. Everyone circles the suffering without naming it \u2014 the chain, the hook, the torn foot, the panic of an animal trapped in a crowd it never chose. There is no path from that suffering to a defense of it that doesn’t require silence about the suffering itself. An argument unwilling to name what it defends isn’t an argument. It’s a diversion in formal dress.<\/p>\n

Then comes the reflex, right on schedule: frame reform as assault \u2014 on Sinhala Buddhist identity, on sovereignty, on the nation itself. Except for the accused, this time cannot organize a rally, cast a vote, or issue a rebuttal. All they can do is bleed where cameras happen to catch it.<\/p>\n

Culture, invoked this way, becomes a trump card no one has to justify \u2014 continuity crowned automatically superior to welfare. But something sharper is happening beneath that invocation. Many of the loudest objectors describe themselves as devout, men who would bristle at any suggestion they take Buddhism lightly. So put the question to them directly: when they defend the Perahera’s chains, are they answering to the Dhamma, or to something wearing its robes?<\/p>\n

The Buddha’s ethical teaching does not equivocate on cruelty toward sentient beings; it does not carve out festival exemptions for suffering; it does not rank tourism revenue above the pain of a creature bound and struck. If Dhamma were truly the standard being upheld, this bill would have religious support, not religious resistance.<\/p>\n

What actually seems to be operating is an ethno-nationalist identity that has annexed Buddhist language for a political project distinct from Buddhist ethics \u2014 race and nationhood dressed in the vocabulary of faith, sovereignty smuggled in under the name of scripture. It lets objectors sound principled while answering to something far narrower: an identity built on who belongs, who rules, who is permitted to define “Sri Lankan” and “Buddhist” on their own terms. The elephant never enters that calculation. This was never faith weighed against welfare; it is tribal belonging weighed against an inconvenient truth.<\/p>\n

Who\u2019s Sacred Is Honored by a Chain?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The sleight of hand is nowhere more naked than in the appeal to the elephant’s religious role. The procession is said to honor the sacred tooth relic of a teacher who preached compassion for all sentient beings and renunciation of world spectacle. What chain of theological reasoning leads from that teacher to chaining, hooking, and marching a captive animal through fire and deafening crowds for a paying audience? No sutta has been produced. An argument this insistent about the sacred, yet unable to cite scripture, is not religious. It is a commercial arrangement wearing borrowed legitimacy.<\/p>\n

The Perahera is, remarkably, multi-faith \u2014 Buddhist and Hindu devotion processing side by side, Vishnu, Kataragama, Natha, and Pattini honored alongside the Tooth Relic. That widens the question rather than narrowing it: would any of these gods be honored by cruelty performed in their name? A deity adored through an animal’s suffering is not being worshipped. It is implicated. Tourism, not theology, explains the elephant’s presence: it draws crowds, and crowds pay. That this secular fact is endlessly re-narrated as sacred obligation is the quiet joke at the center of the controversy.<\/p>\n

What “Culture” Actually Protects<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Strip away the pious phrasing, and “culture” in this debate condenses into four interests. Institutional inertia preserves custodial arrangements as they are, on the unexamined premise that longevity is itself a virtue. Economic interest launders tourism and ceremonial revenue as “heritage,” with the elephant as its most bankable asset. Social hierarchy shields itself behind the spectacle: the elephant a captive body pressed into service so that status can be displayed and unaccountability to the voiceless and powerless goes unquestioned, its tortured posture beneath the howdah mistaken for reverence rather than exposed as domination. National-symbolic capital borrows genuine public fondness for the festival to dress up narrow institutional defense as national consensus.<\/p>\n

Religious framing exists partly to escape economic critique; cultural framing exists partly to escape religious critique \u2014 a closed loop engineered so the one question the bill actually asks, what happens to the animal, never has to be answered. None of these four interests requires cruelty to survive. They require only that cruelty remain unexamined.<\/p>\n

Legal owners, religious institutions, and trafficking networks alike have a stake in keeping captive elephants outside the bill’s jurisdiction, shaping drafting guidelines rather than ceding authority to veterinarians or independent welfare experts. Elephant ownership has long correlated with social status and political leverage \u2014 the animal itself functioning as a mobile throne, its size and burden a proxy for the owner’s standing. Reporting by animal welfare groups links intense opposition to the bill with concerns about illegal trafficking, especially the capture of wild calves. When trafficking is framed as “religious freedom,” public conversation is redirected away from enforcement and toward identity.<\/p>\n

At root, the dispute reflects a politicized anthropocentrism that goes largely unexamined. Culture is treated as something owned by human participants \u2014 heritage, revenue, spectacle \u2014 while the elephant is positioned as a prop rather than a moral subject. The question “Does the elephant experience the Perahera as heritage?” sounds absurd only because the debate has already narrowed the moral community to humans \u2014 difficult to reconcile with Maithri-centered governance and early Sri Lankan prohibitions on animal harm. A culture that cannot extend protection to the voiceless risks shrinking its professed values to fit its convenience.<\/p>\n

Doctrine Cited, Doctrine Ignored<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

A notable feature of the objections is the tendency to invoke Buddhist authority while ignoring the doctrine that would actually constrain the practice. The Five Precepts counsel against harming living beings; the Metta Sutta emphasizes loving-kindness toward sentient creatures without exception. Yet outrage concentrates on provisions restricting parade practices, while other regulatory matters receive far less attention.<\/p>\n

Ceremony cannot erase the moral conditions that enable it. If a ritual depends on sustained pain and fear, its claim to merit becomes ethically unstable. Handlers commonly direct elephants using the ankus, which operates through pain and the anticipation of pain. Elephants do not enter crowds and noise because they prefer it; they comply out of fear of consequences. When elephants panic \u2014 as is well documented \u2014 the tool’s function shifts from guidance to coercive re-control.<\/p>\n

Audience perception is shaped by what is visible and what is not. A swaying procession reads as dignity; rigid stillness under sensory pressure reads as reverence. Cruelty is visually masked by gold, lights, and camera-friendly composition \u2014 by design. Ask spectators what they enjoyed, and they answer readily. Ask about the animal’s condition, and the answers change. There is no dignity in parading suffering for broadcast.<\/p>\n

Calling Compassion an Attack on Religion and Nation<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Point out that an elephant’s feet are bleeding, and you are accused of hating Buddhism. Say it has been chained since infancy, and the accusation escalates into a Western conspiracy against Sri Lankan sovereignty. Go further, and animal welfare itself is recast as an NGO racket \u2014 foreign-funded activism manufacturing a crisis to defame the nation. Each step turns documented suffering into a test of national loyalty, without ever addressing the suffering itself.<\/p>\n

Notice what the accusation never does. It never argues the chaining is acceptable, the hook harmless, the wounds exaggerated. It changes the subject, then changes it again, until the original question has been replaced entirely. Notice, too, what it accomplishes regardless of intent: it shields whoever profits from the chained elephant \u2014 the pageant organizer, the tourism operator, the temple renting out the animal for a fee \u2014 from ever answering for the wounds. The accuser becomes the subject under investigation.<\/p>\n

This is the quiet function these tropes perform across entrenched interests generally, not only religious ones: they let critique dissolve into culture war before it reaches anyone’s balance sheet. Question a chained elephant, and the tourism board never has to explain its role. Question a land deal or a patronage network, and the same move is available \u2014 suddenly it’s the critic’s motives, funding, or loyalty under scrutiny, not the practice.<\/p>\n

This isn’t devotion. It’s deflection, and deflection is the deeper offense. Ahimsa \u2014 doing no harm \u2014 has no exemption for culture or national pride. The Dhamma belongs to no single nation or flag, and truth remains truth wherever it is spoken.<\/p>\n

These conspiracy tropes reflect a common Sri Lankan political habit: placing everything else above the Dhamma, even when it conflicts with religious teaching. But the habit is broader than religion. It is the general reflex of entrenched power everywhere to convert scrutiny into an identity threat, so the interest itself never has to be examined on its merits.<\/p>\n

The Statue Feels Nothing. The Elephant Feels Everything<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The Buddha’s compassion was never confined to human beings, nor reserved for those sharing one’s language and culture. Every sentient being capable of suffering fell within its reach. A carved likeness of the Buddha, incapable of feeling anything, watches a living being of far greater sentience and memory walk past in chains, bleeding beneath ornamental garments.<\/p>\n

The carving feels nothing. The elephant feels everything \u2014 repeatedly, annually, predictably, in full view of thousands who line the streets to watch. People see the chain. They see the raw skin beneath the cloth. And still they call what they are watching devotion.<\/p>\n

What separates what they are watching from what they claim to believe is not ignorance \u2014 it is a moral gap between what the Dhamma demands and what religiosity has quietly agreed to settle for instead. Elephants are not blank vessels for human ritual; they mourn their dead for years and nurse their young with tenderness. Their long memory of trauma is precisely why the same animals, forced through the same ordeal annually, never grow accustomed to it. What has acclimated instead is the crowd \u2014 taught, generation after generation, to see the chain and name it tradition, the wound and name it garlands.<\/p>\n

What Would the Gods See on Perahera Night?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Were Siddhartha, Vishnu, Kataragama, Natha, and Pattini to walk Kandy’s streets on Perahera night, reverence would sit uneasily with elephants chained to bear relics. Grief seems plausible from the gaze that recognized suffering in an old man’s face and left a palace built on privilege. No scripture represented in this procession asks that devotion be purchased with an animal’s agony. How can the sacred be built upon cruelty \u2014 and what does it say of those who watch, applaud, and call that cruelty devotion?<\/p>\n

The bill now awaits gazetting and approval \u2014 the passage from promise to enforceable law. Opposition on cultural grounds should be named for what it is \u2014 a defense of cruelty disguised as protection of Buddhism. Indonesia is moving elephants out of religious ceremonies without losing its identity \u2014 Sri Lanka can do the same, if it admits that no tradition requiring suffering is untouchable.<\/p>\n

Alternatives already exist. Crafted wooden and mechanical elephants have replaced live animals in processions elsewhere, honoring tradition without inflicting harm. Their existence collapses the claim that ending cruelty would erase Sri Lankan identity. Whatever requires torture to survive is not worth preserving in that form. A law left unenforced is merely a gilded word.<\/p>\n

The World Watches the Gap Between Marketing and Reality<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The world watches the gap between marketing and reality \u2014 Sri Lanka sells itself as an island of Buddhist wisdom and meditation, with the Esala Perahera among its most celebrated exports. Yet it parades chained, hooked elephants past cheering crowds and calls it heritage. Other nations have noticed the contradiction. Will Sri Lanka?<\/p>\n

The country’s most sacred spectacle should embody ahimsa, not elephant suffering. The Dhammapada speaks with equal force for every sentient being:<\/p>\n

“All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life. See yourself in others, then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?”<\/i> \u2014 Dhammapada, Chapter 10 (Da\u1e47\u1e0davagga, “Violence”), verses 129\u2013130<\/p>\n

The elephants do not know this verse. They know only the hook, the chain, the drums that will not stop. They wait, bound, while the law meant to unbind them sits, awaiting approval and so unenforced. This is the elephant in the room that no amount of festival pageantry or cultural pride can chain-walk around: a nation that recites compassion as scripture while practicing cruelty as heritage.<\/p>\n

The Dhamma does not require a courtroom to render its verdict; it has already rendered one against every voice raised in power that refuses to answer for a body that has none. That is the true moral crisis here \u2014 not what the law permits, but what the powerful, quoting scripture with one hand, do to the voiceless with the other. The elephant is not the exception to the nation’s professed values. It proves those values were never meant to withstand this. Responsibility cannot be outsourced to government alone. It belongs to society \u2014 those who profit, those who applaud, those who expect blessings for watching, those who stay silent, and those who turn compassion into a slogan while the chains remain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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