TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Ecotourism Promotes ‘Mahout’ Welfare
Hot meal: Mahout Katiyo prepares porridge for his elephants
Change Size
Hot meal: Mahout Katiyo prepares porridge for his elephants. (Arif Suryobuwono)
Being a mahout was a poorly paid job before the development of the Tangkahan Elephant Ecotourism Camp in 2002.
Back in 1993, when working as a mahout for the Aceh chapter of the Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA Aceh) in Aceh, Sudiono was paid a monthly stipend of Rp 75,000 (US$5.45).
In 2002, he was transferred to Tangkahan, a former transit site for illegal loggers, and in 2006 he was granted full civil servant employment with a monthly salary of Rp 350,000.
He was appointed elephant coordinator in 2014 when the ownership of the elephants and their Conservation Response Unit management was officially transferred from BKSDA Aceh to Mount Leuser National Park Service. His current monthly salary is around Rp 3.5 million.
To make ends meet, Sudiono has to engage in other activities such as asking his wife to grow rice and vegetables in the paddy field he managed to purchase from his savings.
During their previous tenure as mahout in Aceh, he and his colleague, Katiyo, occasionally used the elephants they had trained to entertain people to supplement their meager income.
Sudiono, who learned the skill of taming elephants from two Thai trainers, Intawa Kasuphan and Sen Kachai, at the Elephant Training Center in Lhok Asan, said if an elephant disobeyed his orders, he used a gancu (bull hook or elephant goad) to discipline it.
“That’s the only tool we still use here to control them, but nowadays we don’t use it every day because we don’t want animal lovers to accuse us of abusing the elephants,” he said.
Now that both are civil servants, they no longer have to resort to entertainment shows to make ends meet. “I am not in the elephant entertainment business anymore,” Katiyo said. “I get enough additional income from Tangkahan elephant tourism to supplement my salary.”
