听无止境：丛林里的伐木象
Elephant Power
In Myanmar, elephants are used to log the teak forests that were once their home. Wild Chronicles discovers that these elephants--and some thoughtful forest management--are helping to save Myanmar's remaining wild lands.
如网速较慢，可以听音频
参考文本，欢迎挑错：
This is Wild Chronicles. I am Boyd Matson.
Myanmar, which was once called Burma, is a country of vast unspoiled forest; of tiny villages, of peasant families trying to coax a living from a hard earth; of loggers, who harvest teak and other precious woods, and of elephants harnessed for generations to work the forest.
These elephants are owned by the government and employed in the teak forest. Each elephant is tended by its own oozie responsible for its care. And it takes an obedient and very calm elephant to deal with this. This curious convoy is transporting work elephants to a new logging camp where they will be for the next 5 years. The handlers and their elephants will live together during the long months of a logging season.
Each evening, the work elephants wander the woods freely; at dawn, they are retrieved by their handlers, plunge into the new morning with a bath and then head into the forest. Elephants are smart and highly sensitive creatures. They are also capable of killing a man in an instant -- four tons of wild, constrained only by their training.
This is W. W., the government’s veterinarian responsible for the work elephants in the region. He puts the animals and men through their paces. Eye, skin, feet and tusk are all carefully examined. The government painstakingly records the life history of each elephant -- a practice begun by the British over 100 years ago. The vet feels a real kinship(亲戚关系) with these elephants.
"I’d like to see every elephant. I am not sure why, maybe because they are so big. The elephants are part of the wealth of our country. I think elephants are more than animals. They are comrades in arms. They’re family. ”
Teak is a huge business here, and for almost 150 years, the Burmese have treated their forest with respect, selectively cutting mature trees and saving the rest for the future. To do it, they need elephant power. It’s the only way to harvest timber without stripping away the entire forest to build the roads needed to get the timber out. Danger is never far off. A log can quickly careen(倾斜) out of control and injury an elephant not quick enough to step out of the way. The handlers urge the elephants on by putting pressure on the sensitive network of nerves behind the ears.
"As long as we extract timber, the elephants will be here. Our system is selective logging, not clear-cutting. Without elephants, we would have to create a new road for every new tree and use heavy machinery to haul them out. ”
In other countries where selective logging has disappeared, elephants are in real trouble. There are only between 35,000 and 50,000 Asian elephants left in the wild. In the meantime, while many of Myanmar's elephants have lost their freedom, at least these working animals will live to see another day in the forest.
