Sakrebyle Elephant Camp | Towering Twenty

The elephant camp on the banks of the Tunga river at Shivamogga in Karnataka has 20 gentle giants living life to the full, feasting, wallowing and making merry

The Sakrebyle Elephant Camp, 14 km from Shivamogga in Karnataka, has been in existence from the pre-Independence days.

Nestling against the backwaters of the Tunga and surrounded by the Shettihalli Wildlife Sanctuary, the camp trains wild elephants and looks after captive pachyderms.

The camp was set up mainly to train wild elephants to move logs on difficult forest terrain. However, it has now been transformed into a rescue and rehabilitation centre and is part of an ecotourism zone. Sakrebyle in Kannada means “sugar field”.

The camp houses 20 elephants — 16 tuskers and four females — and they are cared for by 40 mahouts. Most of the caretakers are from the Jenu Kuruba tribe which has traditional knowledge in handling elephants. With the mahouts speaking a mix of languages, the elephants take their cues in Hindi, Bengali and Urdu, apart from Kannada.

This camp attracts a large number of tourists who come to watch the gentle giants playing in the water against the picturesque background of hills as the mahouts bathe them.

After their bath, the elephants are let into the forest. They are also fed with a nutritious mix of rice, salt, coconut, jaggery and paddy straw, along with ragi (finger millet) balls prepared in the camp, says Shivappa, a caretaker who has been working for more than 15 years in the camp.

Though a large number of people visit the camp, these elephants do not enjoy the presence of humans, barring the mahouts, says caretaker Imran.