They’re trained in in captivity. They may have links to the wild, but seeing real wild populations that are don’t hang around for, for you to observe them is something I wanted to see. But my interest in elephants actually started in Nepal because we had the Tiger Ecology project and I was the scientific advisor on that project starting in 1977 and going into the eighties when it pretty much ended. And so I would go over there every year once at least once, sometimes twice a year. And we had a stable, the Smithsonian had a stable of four elephants that were purchased to help capture wild tigers for the radio telemetry studies that were being conducted by American and Nepalese biologists for PhD dissertations. It was a joint, a joint project between Nepal and the Smithsonian institution. So it was called the si Smithsonian Institution, Nepal Tiger Ecology Project. And they used those four elephants for hauling in the beat cloths that they set up in the field in the grassland and carrying personnel, getting the personnel up into the trees where they were gonna dart the tigers and all that sort of thing.
