Animal Jobs: The Unexpected Roles of Nature’s Workers

In this episode of Wildly Curious (formerly For the Love of Nature), co-hosts Katy Reiss and Laura Fawks Lapole explore the fascinating world of animals that work alongside humans. From drug-sniffing dogs making major busts, to HeroRATS saving lives by detecting landmines, and even timber elephants hauling logs in the forests of Myanmar, this episode covers how animals take on extraordinary roles. The hosts dive into the training, history, and impact of these animals, while also discussing the ethical dilemmas involved. This episode is perfect for animal lovers, nature enthusiasts, and anyone curious about the surprising jobs animals do every day.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to For the Love of Nature, a podcast where we tell you everything you need to know about nature and probably more than you wanted to know. I'm Laura.
And I'm Katy. And today we're gonna be talking about animals that have worked besides humans in many different roles, something that we have been touching on for the last few episodes in one variety or an episode, or one variety or reason. But I think we're gonna focus on a little, at least one of mine is pretty different.
So yeah, one of mine is I was so excited to learn more about one of my animals. And yeah, like we did, one of the jobs was military jobs. And then the last episode was just domestication in general.
So how do we get the animals to the point where they could even do jobs?
And now jobs. And now we're free jobs. You want me to go ahead and go first?
Yeah, yeah, go for it.
Okay, so the first animal that I wanted to talk about is one of my favorites because, let's be real, it combines several of my favorite things. And I'm talking about drug-sniffing dogs. And drugs are not one of my favorite things.
Yeah, what?
But anyone who has spent any time around me in college knows that my evening background study show prior to the office existing was watching the show Cops. Religiously, after 6 p.m. just after dinner, I could be found in my dorm room on my futon watching Cops.
So, that's just what I did every day. Every day was my study background. Again, this is prior to the office being released.
So I'm gonna talk about drug-syncing dogs, or more professionally called detection dogs, because they really can be, like do a variety of remarkable things. So dogs have served in roles alongside military and police since the time of the Romans. In a police capacity, dogs have been used for well over 100 years.
One of the first early examples was in England when bloodhounds were used to hunt Jack the Ripper, which I thought was pretty cool. That was like one of the first things that they used dogs for. From here, the use of police dogs spread.
By the early 1900s, Germany had police dogs in almost every major city of theirs. Because of their acute sense of smell, it's only natural police use them to use scent detection on a variety of things. Dogs possess up to three million olfactory receptors in their noses compared to about six million in humans.
So this has allowed them to be trained to find human remains, bed bugs, explosives, firearms, invasive species, money, termites, and even water breaks and pipes underground.
I almost covered, I was thought about doing diseases.
Oh yeah, yeah, because dogs have been known for cancer, all kinds of things. So by the 1970s here in the US police dogs became a regular sight around the country. So what sort of training do these dogs go through?
First, dogs go through obedience training, and that's where most, if the dogs are gonna flunk out, they do so here, because not all dogs are cut out to be police dogs. From here, they will undergo some agility and endurance training, because after all, just like they're police handlers, the dogs also need to be physically fit. Finally, if they made it through all this, they go into specialty training.
In regards to detection dogs, they won't be trained to detect everything, of course. That would just be way too much. So they'll be trained to know a variety of things pertaining to their job.
So if it's a patrol dog with the police, typically it will be drugs and finding people and a few other things. And then if you think about the variety of dog breeds, they've been used by humans historically for hunting based on what they were bred for. So beagles, for instance, are small.
Same thing in jobs. Beagles, because of their small size and spectacular nose, typically end up as bomb or drug-sniffing dogs in airports because they can meander throughout crowds and jump over luggage easily on luggage belts. So this wouldn't exclude, of course, larger dogs from serving in its role, but it's just more a matter of the right tool for the right job.
So let's talk about some of these drug-detection dogs and their successes, because that's really why I wanted to talk about this. In 2019, after a US border patrol saw an anomaly in a semi-truck and an X-ray, they searched the vehicle but couldn't figure out what the anomaly was. A dog was brought in and found the area to a secret compartment, which led border patrol agents to find 254 pounds of fentanyl and 395 pounds of meth.
This has a street value around 3.5 million for the fentanyl, 1.1 million in meth. And that's not all that unusual. I mean, the amount is yes, but it's the dog's job to find that.
One dog in Colombia has gotten so good at her job that the cartels in Colombia have actually put a hit out on the dog.
Holy cow.
Sombra is a six-year-old German shepherd which has helped Colombia's police department detect starting out more than 4,400 pounds of cocaine hidden in suitcases, boats, and large suitments of fruit. And that's just cocaine. The cartel then offered a reward of seven grand to whoever kills or captures Sombra.
Sombra in Spanish means shadow, by the way. So the threat by the cartel prompted officials to relocate Sombra from a port in Colombia's Caribbean coast to the capital city where she started to sniff through cargo at the El Dorado International Airport. So after her six-hour shift is over, Sombra is transported in a van with tinted windows back to her kennel.
Good, the poor thing.
Well, when she is transported, she's also accompanied by two armed guards. Some of Sombra's recent busts include uncovering over five tons of the cartel's cocaine destined for Europe and concealed in crates of bananas. Of all things, those good bananas.
Officers also credit her incredible nose with more than 245 drug-related relays and two of Columbia's biggest international airports. So from working here at the airport, the cartel learned of her new location to where Sombra was again moved to a new location where she sniffed thousands of more pounds of cocaine hidden in boxes full of sneakers and wooden necklaces. She detected 140-plus pounds of cocaine placed deep inside an industrial-rich machine.
So needless to say, Sombra is really damn good at her job. And I really should have focused on Sombra for my Badass Women episode, because that would have been way oddier. So now because they are still dogs and dogs make mistakes, there have been a lot of debate recently on whether to continue to utilize drug detection or drug-sniffing dogs or not.
Oftentimes, when a dog alerts on a vehicle, let's say, several studies are showing that about half of the time the dog alerted on a vehicle, nothing inside was found.
This happened to me.
Yes. Well, I was going to say, I was like, this is often because the drugs are already gone, but were there, and the dog picked up on the scent. So while there is still a debate around it, for now, drug detection dogs will be utilized.
But it can happen. I mean, it does happen. More often than not.
I mean, and it can be, again, they make mistakes. I mean, imagine.
Well, and I mean, I think, like, for a vehicle, what I always figured when we got, we got pulled over one night and harassed and all kinds of stuff, but the dog was going around the vehicle and alerted, like, near a wheel well, and we just come from the airport. Like, who knows?
Yeah, what was there?
Yeah. Like, who knows what splashes on a vehicle? Like, how the scent is attached to a vehicle.
Well, and also some of the debate, too, is because they're saying a lot of the times the dog is looking at the owner's body language and everything, and if the handler shows any bias whatsoever, the dog is like, oh, well, if I... Because they know as soon as they detect something, you know, they're rewarded, and so the dogs kind of pick up on, okay, well, if I, yeah, if I, you know, detect, if I show something, boom, I'm gonna get rewarded kind of thing. So there's a lot of debate about it, but I mean, I was trying to find like some statistics on like police dogs, but I couldn't find anything that was like concrete, because there's just so many detection dogs out there serving so many different uses for so many different things and so many different departments.
It would just be nearly impossible to like pull together all those stats of like how much they have found. I mean, again, like Sombra, like there's individual, you know, their uses and everything. But I also found that it was interesting that it's only really like here, dogs have only been routinely, extensively used since the 70s.
Yeah, but was that when the war on drugs was declared?
Uh, I think it was, was it then?
I don't know.
I don't know. Before my time. But yeah, I mean, I just thought that that was kind of late.
But like I said, I mean, bomb sniffing drugs, dog, like drug sniffing dogs. Bomb sniffing drugs. Bomb sniffing dogs.
Yeah, right. And like Laura said too, like with the whole, uh, like dogs that sense, like cancer, cancer, yeah, and epilepsy and blood sugar and all kinds of things, all because of their sense of smell. So I just briefly talked about this one, but yeah, they're used for a variety of things.
Cool. Well, actually, as almost always goes with us, leads directly into mine, because I'm going to be focusing on mine detection rats, which use scent detection. So I heard about these rats years ago, and I couldn't wait to find out more, and I was not disappointed.
So these, I have in my own head just referred to as the landmine rats. They are a species of African giant pouched rat, which real quick, they are, because everybody knows about dog.
That's why I didn't do much natural history on dogs, and we just did the domestication issue, so I wasn't going to go into all of that, too.
They are found in most of Sub-Saharan Africa. They are omnivores, mostly nocturnal, and just picture a giant rat. It's 2.2 to 2.8 pounds.
It's a little excessive.
It's a big rat. It's like a small cat, like a kitten. And they're buff-colored with a paler belly.
They've got big cheek pouches for transporting food and nesting materials. And they have an incredible sense of smell and are highly intelligent, which makes them perfect for the job of mine detection. Mine as in M-I-N-E, not mine-de.
Here's how it all shakes out. In 1995, Bart Wiechens from Belgium wondered if you could use rats to detect landmines.
For a second. But also for a second, I thought you were going to say, because I jumped right into the dogs and their names, and I thought you were going to say a mouse named Bart. And I was like, I need a rat named Bart now, because that's an amazing name for a rat.
But continue. Yeah, yeah.
Bart.
We, so although also like what a crazy like, I wonder if they can take the landmines. But apparently he was trying to help the global landmine problem, which most of us here in America do not think about, but is a huge issue around the world. There are thousands of landmines and undetonated explosives that have been put in the ground all over the world during wartime.
And he'd heard that you could use gerbils as scent detectors. Goes back to our last episode with you talking about gerbil domestication. And he had a pet rat, so he was like, I wonder if rats can do it.
So that was in 95. In 97, they decided to use these African giant pouched rats as they can live up to eight years, so they live long enough that it's worth the training. Whereas, you know, like normal pet rats are like three to four years.
And they already live in Africa, so perfect, because that's where a lot of this work is going to get started. And then in 97, APOPO, APOPO, the APOPO project was launched. And that's this whole organization.
So if anybody wants to know anything more about these amazing rats, APOPO. So training lasted several years with these rats, and the first real trial with landmines was in 2003. So it took them about six years to like get the program started.
The rats bred, started training, yada yada. They then 11 rats became accredited, like accredited landmine detectors in 2004. And in 2005, the Hero Rat Campaign started, which is a citizen-based support network and public outreach.
So, you know, they needed some funding to get this project going. So, yeah, Hero Rat. They, these rats, these Hero Rats, cleared areas of landmines in Mozambique, Thailand, Cambodia, Angola, Laos, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe.
Which is how many different, I can't even, how many different wars have been fought there?
Three, four, five, six, seven countries, oh my gosh, yeah.
The number of wars, just like constant wars over the decades.
The two big ones that they've done the most work in are Mozambique and Cambodia.
Makes sense, yeah.
As far as amounts cleared.
Yeah.
Listen to the success, much like your intense drug dog. So, in Mozambique, they started a project where they were basically contracted to clear Mozambique of landmines. So, they started in the Gaza province, where they cleared 6 million square meters.
They found 2,406 landmines, 13,025 small arms, 922 unexploded ordinances, and that was all in four years' time. In another province, they cleared so many mines that it allowed 400,000 people to get back to using that land again. And by 2015, so that would have been, what, seven years later.
In seven years, Mozambique was declared landmine free.
Wow. Well, because of rats.
Because of rats, teaming up with people, to be fair. It's not just the rats. But so far, this project has been going on, like I said, since 1997.
So they have cleared all over the world, 140,101 landmines and explosives.
Geez.
They have cleared 64,971,702 square meters.
And they have made 1,722,231 people safe.
Yeah.
So like serious global impact.
Yeah.
So how does the whole thing work? Like how do rats detect landmines? Well, first, let me start off with that these rats are incredibly well cared for.
Like if anybody's worrying, like last night, I just brought up landmine rats to my husband, and he was like, what, do they just send them out there to explode? And I was like, no, no. They are, they get the highest quality care, nutrition, like, wow, you can read all about it on the website.
But what happens is that they're trained over a period of nine months, which is still pretty freaking impressive to become landmine detectors in three months.
That's a very short amount of time.
They start with the rats when they're four weeks old, just socializing them, so just cuddling babies. And then at ten weeks, they start to click or train them to identify TNT by smell. So it's not the landmine itself, it's the TNT inside.
They can smell at one meter away and up to 7.5 inches underground. So then they learn to discriminate scents, like, yes, this one has TNT, no, this one doesn't have TNT. They have these little balls with holes in them.
I think it's like literal tea infusers is what they use, full of TNT. Then they're taken outside and learn to train in the soil, like scratching and learning to smell through soil. Then they're taken on a field test where there's deactivated mines, and that's where they learn to gently scratch the surface over a mine to tell the handlers one's there.
But of course, they start them where they're not going to explode.
Talk about diving into a deep end there.
But it's super thorough. Before graduating, they need to pass a blind test. And by blind, we mean their handlers don't know where mines are.
Only one person knows where they are, and they can have zero mistakes to pass that test. And then they graduate and they become accredited. Currently, they have 96 rats who detect landmines around the world.
What they do is first, when you're doing mine clearance, apparently these are areas that haven't been used by people in quite a while. They first send in big equipment. I don't know how it doesn't explode, but first they send in big equipment to tear down trees, basically clear it so it's perfectly clear and the soil is a little bit disturbed.
Then they create safe lanes, which is when people go out with metal detectors and clear one meter wide lanes down the area. Then they take the rats out and they send them back and forth and back and forth and back and forth between these lanes. The rats are on a tiny little harness, and there's lead ropes between two handlers.
So the rats follow the lead, so it's very systematic. They can clear, a rat can clear an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes, which would take a human with a metal detector four days.
Geez.
To be thorough.
Four days with a metal detector? I feel like that's very slow metal detecting.
Yeah, but I, and so then once the rat detects a mine, then the human will go out there, confirm, by digging it up, and then they detonate it. And so it's just constant explosions, I guess, all along. Um, and yeah, so these little rats are, they are not just trained to, just like scent detection dogs, these rats, some of them are used for mine clearance, while other ones have been trained to sniff out tuberculosis, which is the other giant part of this project, which is saving thousands and thousands of lives.
They can also sniff out pangolins to root out like illegal wildlife training. And they can sniff out illegally logged timber. So much like dogs, these little rats, their sense of smell is incredible, and they are doing world-changing work.
You can actually support and adopt, virtually like adopt these rats. They've all got names. So if you want to get more involved, look up Project A Popo online.
It's really cool.
Yeah, I have to check that out. It's also the drastic differences. I mean, I know like tuberculosis is obviously a huge issue.
I mean, in Africa especially, but just like the jump from like landmines, tuberculosis. You know what I mean? Like it's very...
The other two, like the pangolin and the illegal timber, I think they just like know that they can do it, but it's not a big project. The tuberculosis project is really big, but they use a completely separate set of rats for that.
Yeah, it's just from an organizational standpoint. That's like quite a leap.
It's really weird and interesting.
Well, the second animal that I'm going to talk about is a little bit more unusual and unexpected than my first one. And I'm going to be quite honest. The only reason why I picked it was to share one particular story about this, but I'm going to talk about seeing and emotional support monkeys.
Yes! Only to talk about this one hilarious story.
I just really wanted to do this. I wanted to train one so badly in high school. We had to do senior projects, and I was like, I want that to be my senior project.
Can you imagine?
And then I looked up more into it because it was through helping hands. And you couldn't have a job or be a student. You had to be full time at home with this monkey.
And I knew that was never going to fly.
Yeah, no. So for as long as people have known that monkeys are around, pretty much they've kept them as pets. Why?
Don't know.
Because if you guys ever took care of a monkey, you would quickly change your mind.
Right? That was when I was naive. That was when I was naive.
Most popular species are capuchin, macaques, marmosets, et cetera. So while the legitimacy of having monkeys versus other helping animals is strongly debated, there are some advantages. For instance, there is a company, the one that Laura was talking about in Boston, Massachusetts, which trains capuchins as quote unquote helping hands, which is also the name, the nonprofit name.
These jump up on countertops to be able to reach things, and typically, well, a monkey helper can assist with tasks such as retrieving dropped or out of reach objects, helping with drinking water, turning pages, like scratching, like if something itches, giving a scratch, pushing buttons and switches for remotes, phones, computers, et cetera, even repositioning limbs on a wheelchair. It's also important to note that several of their monkeys are trained to help recipients in the home environment only, and so they're not allowed in public places just because, like, well, one, you're not allowed to bring monkeys into public places anyway.
Yeah, rightly so.
So they do particularly send these helping hand monkeys to individuals. It's a very strict, like, criteria. Just as strict as it is for the criteria of who is training them, it's who is going to get them as well.
Most are actually spinal cord injury patients because...
That makes sense, like quadriplegic when you really need help.
Yeah, with, like, these fine motor, that, like, a dog just couldn't do a lot of these tasks. But also because, like, one, they have to be adults, since having a monkey is very much like having a small child. They need to be mature and stable enough to provide the right environment and structure, and they won't place a monkey in a home with kids under the age of 12.
Just because, again, the same thing, it's just, like, they're too unpredictable. And they need to have full, unimpaired cognitive function and must be able to communicate verbally. So you figure, like, that is a very, like, defined...
Yeah, very selective. Um, what's interesting, too, is kind of like the trainers, the applicants that are applying to have one must spend the majority of their time at home. So people who work a full-time job or, you know, full-time students, whatever, they're not eligible as well, just because it is just way too much to care for.
Um, so anyway, so they started out as a nonprofit, just training. They have, like, over their 40 years in existence, have added some more legitimacy, or helped to add more legitimacy to their organization. Things like adding a board, adding a veterinary center, adding all these different things.
Um...
I'm sure they would get all kinds of crap.
All kinds of crap, yeah. Because now so much, they have what they call, like, unofficially the monkey college, which includes the dorm room, like monkey dorm rooms, plan recreation areas for them, bathing areas for them, a veterinary center, a kitchen for preparing monkey meals, administrative and placement offices, workshops designed for fabricating adaptive equipment, a respite care facility for the older, I guess, retired monkeys, and innovative classrooms that vary in size and complexity equipped with closed-circuit TV and one-way glass to facilitate observation. So while there are several organizations like this one to try to legitimize the usefulness of monkeys, because again, like, if you have a spinal cord injury, like Laura said, quadriplegic, like, there are things that the monkeys can do that a dog just can't.
You would need somebody, you would need another human, but home with you to be able to do all this stuff. However, there are still folks that abuse the privilege of being able to own the fact, I mean, just like you see quote-unquote emotional support dogs, you're going to see quote-unquote emotional support monkeys, aka pets. One such instance happened here in Texas, and this is by far my favorite thing that has come out of 2021.
I have not heard this story.
Listen, I died laughing so hard. So outside of Houston, and this is, there's two people involved here. One, that was the University of Texas' one of their coaches.
I think it was a special defensive coach. I forget. Anyway, he was a coach on the Longhorns team.
His girlfriend, Danielle Thomas, is the real person of this story here. So Danielle Thomas and her seven-year-old white-faced capuchin monkey, Gia, Danielle Thomas, also known by her stage name, Pole Assassin, to which, which is, listen, if you're going to be an exotic dancer, and your name is anything but Pole Assassin...
Missed opportunity.
Missed opportunity.
That is a fantastic stage name.
So Gia, the capuchin...
She's clearly killing it. Yeah, right.
Her monkey, Gia, who also dances with her on occasion, and they have both been featured on The Jerry Springer Show, which is in par with how this... Yeah, I mean, well, it's on par with the rest of the story here. So Pole Assassin has started dating the Jeff Banks, the University of Texas football coach.
They had set up a Halloween trick-or-treat, like, walk-through thing in their Houston suburban home. And as one of the children were going through it, apparently Gia only really... The kid was told, so there was a kid that was going through it, and the kid was told that the monkey only listens to the command of high-five.
And so the kid went to give it a high-five, and the monkey then bit the kid's hand and refused to let go... Poured those of them... .to which the monkey had to be pried off of this child's hand.
So if you wanted, at one point, before all this hit the fan, Gia had her own Instagram account, the monkey, don't forget, over 9,000 followers, bit the trick-or-treater, had to be pried off. The kid had to go get stitches. Because it's a freaking capuchin.
I've been bit by a monkey, and it was the smallest kind, and it was no joke.
No, it sucks. So there was all kinds of debate around what actually happened. Of course, there's all sorts of lawsuits flying from both directions.
Miss Pole Assassin has since deleted all of her social media accounts because at first she did a walkthrough of their property to show how the kid could not have gotten to Gia without going past several signs that say, do not, emotional support monkey, do not touch, do not pet. And she came out and was fiercely defending her choice to have an emotional support monkey.
That pole dances.
That pole dances, yes.
I'm not unlegitimate.
No, I'm not here to judge.
Or because some of them are completely real, rational, certified emotional support animals.
Correct, however.
Also having a side gig.
Dancing. Again, not to judge any exotic dancers either, but I am judging her for making her monkey do it.
Yes, which has an Instagram following of over 9,000, or had an Instagram following over 9,000.
You can have whatever you want for yourself, absolutely. But your emotional support monkey should not have to also do this job.
So long story short, there's still lawsuits being flown back and forth each way, she's saying they had the haunted house on the side that was gated, the kid never should have been in the backyard, why the monkey is being kept in the backyard. But there's all kinds of things that people pulled off the internet and her page before that Gia could count money, and was very effective at pool dancing. I mean, it is a monkey.
Yeah, I mean, definitely up its talents.
Yeah, right. Goes right up there with natural abilities. So again, like Laura said, we're not here to judge anyone's...
No, it's super fun.
No, really, yes.
It's like in instances like this that take away from people who genuinely could have the emotional support of a dog, or helping hands, like could utilize a capuchin, a monkey, to help, but it's instances like this that then kind of cast a shadow on everything, and then people are like, well, can't have them because they're too dangerous. Well, no, only ones that are, you know, pole dancing... And not really trained.
And not really properly trained, and, you know, behind a haunted house, a makeshift haunted house, there's just so many things wrong there.
Or Florida. Yeah, that was almost a Florida story.
Yeah, all right.
Come on, Florida people, you know what we're talking about.
So anyway, so yeah, so there are a lot of good uses for monkeys when used and handled and trained properly. It's just oftentimes more than not, they are not to use properly.
Well, just like primates are controversial to have doing jobs, my next animal is controversial. Mine are timber elephants.
Oh, okay, yeah.
I asked Justin what, I had a couple other jobs, and I was like, what do you think sounds the most interesting? And he chose this one. So timber elephants or logging elephants are Asian elephants.
That's the job. Asian elephants are used for the job. So, I mean, most, all my listeners, I certainly hope you know what an elephant looks like.
But an Asian elephant in particular is the smaller kind. They're six and a half to 11 and a half feet tall, around 11,000 pounds, live in forests and grasslands of south and southeast Asia. And only the males have tusks.
The little females have tushes, which are just tiny little teeny ones coming out. And they're an endangered species. So, what job did they perform?
They help with logging. And they have been doing so for a very long time.
Yeah, I was going to say, they've been around for a while, utilizing them this way.
Yeah, so rather than going through a timeline, I'm just going to talk about how it works and then some positive and negatives about it, kind of like you just did. So, how the whole thing works, elephants are trained over a period of years. And as far as the information I'm going to give you, this is almost all related to logging elephants in Myanmar, because they have the largest population of captive elephants in the world.
Other countries do it too, but Myanmar is like, found the most information about. So, they're trained over a period of years. They started around age four.
Before then, they're known as calves at heel. So, just little calves, they're allowed to follow their moms around, and they're not, you know, they don't do any work. But they can watch the whole process and everything.
At age four, then they are, they start their training, where they will learn various commands. But when they're between the ages of like five, like, yeah, they start, they start to learn some commands when they're that little, but not a ton. It's mostly just like working with them a little bit.
So they'll learn different things, such as stop, walk, pick up. And they're considered trainees until age 17. So from age five to 14, they do light transport, which is just like carrying a small, teeny equipment.
Ages 14 to 17, they are light extraction apprentices. So they're starting to learn how to take out their stuff and apprentices. And then they also carry some heavier baggage.
Their human partners in this whole process are called Mahouts or Oogies. And they are, they give the, especially the babies, they give the massages at the end of every journey where they're carrying stuff. They massage their spine, they take good care of them.
And then once they reach 18, just like humans, when they come of age, that's when they start their real work.
Now that they're of age, they're adults, now you must work.
You're 18, get a job.
But it's kind of cool. They have it all broken down. And so in Myanmar, they have logging elephants that work for the government, like for the forestry part of the government, and they also have private contractors.
So everything's very regulated in Myanmar. So that's why there's all of these broken down tiers of things. From ages 18 to 24, they only do light extraction, so light work.
From ages 25 to 30, they can then start to be used to work on hillsides where it's a little more treacherous. And then from ages 30 to 45, that's prime age. So that's like where they're doing best work.
Yeah, and they're grown muscular by that point.
Yes, full grown elephant at age 30. Again, we're pretty on par. 30 till 45, you're in your prime.
And then 46 to 53, they're considered post prime. So they're still working, but the amount they can pull is less and less and less. And then from ages 53 to retirement, which is either 55 or 60, they're given very light duties, then they're retired.
They also are divided into classes, like first class, second class, third class, based on both their age and their dragging capacity, so the amount of weight that they can drag behind them. So a fully grown elephant in its prime can haul around 21 ton logs per day, which is so much.
That's so much.
So they are responsible for extracting and carrying the logs once they've been cut.
They, the actual process, they're involved, so when you're extracting logs, there's like four steps. Elephants are really only involved in the second and third step. The second step is stumping, and that's pulling the stumps out of the ground.
And then the third step is transporting the logs to a point along the river where they've been rafted down. So that's the two parts that the elephants are involved in. And there's two major jobs that they do in those steps.
I'm not even gonna... I am gonna butcher these words.
Yes, for once it's your turn.
Well, right, but they're... So, uh... Onging is pushing logs around with the forehead, and that's the majority of the work that's done.
So, you know, I'm thinking like they're hauling them with chains behind them, I mean, somewhat, but a lot of it, there's like pushing it with their head. And then, uh, the other part of the job is yeliking, which is clearing jam logs from the river, or pulling logs from riverbanks where it's so muddy that no equipment would be able to get there. So that's the process of logging.
The governments where the elephants work, in the countries they work, usually create laws saying how long they can work and how much they can work per day. So in Myanmar, they are allowed to work five hours per day, and the rest of the time, they forage with their family groups.
Which I think is pretty cool. Yeah, so it is a little bit more regulated.
It's intense work for five hours.
But also for Myanmar, the place where, like, the most illegal wildlife trade happens, that's like, at least that's regulated.
Oh yeah, yeah, definitely. And there is a working season too, so they don't need work, and they usually get, like, weekends off. So, like I said, Myanmar has the largest captive elephant population with about 5,500 logging elephants owned by both the government and private contractors.
However, they have majorly cut back on logging because the area is becoming so heavily deforested. And that is leaving many elephants and mahouts out of work, which is both a good thing and a terrible thing. So, I mean, it's great that they're regulating deforestation because, of course, we don't want them to be logged.
But there's now, like, the problem that now that we already have these elephants, now we're left with what happens to them and the people that work with them. Being out of work means that the Mahouts don't have any income. They cannot properly take care of their elephants anymore.
And, like, the government elephants, their owners are actually given money, whether the elephants work or not. And they have vets that visit them and everything. But the private contractors, which is, like, 2,000 of those elephants, they are left either, like, trying really hard to take care of the elephants, or they're forced to sell them to other countries where they might not be treated so well, or they actually are forced to kill their elephants and sell parts because they just don't have the money.
And rewilding isn't really an option.
No.
5,500 elephants is too many. They've tried 12. They've tried 12.
But only because it's so dangerous for humans and elephants to co- Elephants like to hang out in your crops. They're not going to...
Yeah, they're not going to go very far.
So there's a lot of human conflict. And then also, it's dangerous for the elephants because they're being poached because nobody's protecting them anymore. So some positive aspects of using elephants for timber is that it is far more sustainable to use elephants than using large equipment.
Large equipment, you need to make roads to get into places. You're tearing up roots and polluting the earth. So elephants are much more sustainable.
Yeah, I was going to say... I mean, everybody needs timber unless you're going to go completely... Not wood, you have timber wood products in your home everywhere.
But yeah, so elephants is a little bit more of a sustainable way to go about it than diesel burning.
They can actually, at least in Myanmar, they were doing a system where they were allowing things to regrow for 30 years before they got back. And the elephants can do that because they can navigate those spaces. Some countries have limits, like I said, on how much they're allowed to work in a day, and in a week, they are given vet care.
And they actually, moms have maternity leave for a year.
That's nice. We don't even get that. We don't even get that.
And it creates a ton of jobs. Myanmar, I think I was reading about 50% of people rely on the forest, like, for harvesting. So it's a lot.
But of course, there are some negatives, and that's where we get controversial with using elephants for any kind of job. Because although this is so well regulated, and I am really impressed with how regulated it all is, at least in Myanmar, in other countries, it is not. In Thailand, it is particularly rough for elephants from what I was reading.
And even in Myanmar, conditions can be very harsh and very stressful. 25% of elephants do not live past age six. If you remember, they start training at age five, or at age eight.
So the stress of training can be a lot. In many cases, if you think about it, it's pretty messed up that elephants are contributing to their own species decline, because they are deforesting the places where their wild animals live. So it's like burning down their own world.
They are cheaper, but they are not as economical.
They are cheaper.
They have the cheaper option for logging, but they are not as economical as elephants cannot be rushed. Oh my gosh, yeah, no. And they have to supplement captive populations by continuing to capture wild elephants.
Yeah, which there's an issue there too.
So there is definitely some ethical issues here. Am I completely against elephants and humans working together for jobs? No, I think it's a great idea.
I think we've been working with elephants, just like we've worked with our other domestic species for thousands of years. But I do think that we need to be very strategic in how we do it. Especially because, as anyone who's familiar with elephants knows, they're incredibly intelligent animals.
Too intelligent.
Yeah, which complicates matters and also gives added responsibility to the people that work with them. If you want to learn more about this, I actually stumbled across a thesis written by somebody. It's 156 pages.
I didn't read it all. But if you really want to know a lot about timber elephants, it's called the Demography. How would you say that word?
Demography.
Demography. It sounds weird. The Demography and Life History Strategies of Timber Elephants in Myanmar by Kain Yu Mar.
Lots of information if you want to learn more. But that's kind of how elephants are used for timber, the timber industry.
Yeah, I think, again, most of the negative gets out. It would be interesting, though, to see, like, it seems from the outside that it is very regulated, but being on the inside, is it as regulated as it appears? It would be interesting to see, you know, if there is a disconnect from it.
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, like, of course, right, you're never going to know much until you're on the inside. But of course, these elephants, too, they work with one person.
They work with one person. They become very close with that one person. And like, just like people, some people mistreat cows and other people love cows, it's the same with elephants.
So in some of the hoots, it's going to be their family.
Others not so much, yeah. All righty, guys. Well, that's how a variety of animals have worked alongside humans and served a variety of purposes, whether it's legitimate or not so legitimate.
But yeah, this would be another episode, another cool topic to do, because there's tons of stuff to talk about for this one, too.
There's so many animal jobs to choose from, and so many really weird ones, and then so many ones that we see actually all the time and never really think about.
Yeah, don't think about it.
Yeah.
All right, guys. Well, that's it for today, and we will talk to you next week. Make sure to check us out on Patreon and our social media.
We'll talk to you next week.
Tune in next week.