BEIJING - An Asian elephant that became addicted to heroin at the hands of illegal traders will return home in China after a three-year rehab program.

China’s official Xinhua News Agency says that Xiguang, a four-year-old male Asian elephant, became addicted after he was captured by smugglers along the Chinese-Myanmar border in March 2005.

The traders fed the elephant bananas laced with heroin as bait and to pacify the creature.

When Xiguang was found two months later along with six other captured elephants in China’s southwest, he was suffering from withdrawal and was sent to a protection centre in China’s tropical Hainan island.

Xiguang received daily methadone injections in doses five times larger than those given to a human and has now fully recovered, Xinhua said.

He is expected to return to the Yunnan Wild Animal Park in the capital of Yunnan province, Kunming, on Saturday.

The Asian elephant is threatened with extinction, according to the World Wildlife Fund conservation group, with only 25,600 to 32,750 left in the wild of Asia’s tropical forests - fewer than a tenth of the number of wild African elephants.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/WeirdNews/2008/09/04/6661296-ap.html

What a terrifically stupid idea to drug a male youth elephant in the first place since young male elephants are very like human male teens.  Saying that he’s cured would be, in my opinion, doubtful and later problems may well develop as he grows.

unbelievable…..

hulitoons - 04 September 2008 04:27 PM

What a terrifically stupid idea to drug a male youth elephant in the first place since young male elephants are very like human male teens.

Actually it makes sense (in a rather unethical way) from the elephant traders’ point of view.  Dose the elephant up with heroin so it acts like a perfect docile animal, and then sell it off quickly.  What do the traders care if in a short while the elephant becomes erratic, violent, crazed, or falls over dead?  The traders will already have taken the money and gone their way.

It’s pretty much the same as the used car salesmen who perform a few cheap cosmetic repairs to a car to hide the horrible defects, then sell it off to unwitting people.  Sure the car’s basically a flaming death-trap, but that then becomes the customer’s problem.

Usually I wouldn’t give advice to illegal elephant traders, but here’s an exception: if you’re going to illegally trade elephants, plan ahead so you don’t have to do something illegal (and possibly traceable) to the creature before you sell it.

I hope the elephant is okay. At least he found himself with people that care.

......
Heroin eh…
Maybe i can get elephants to work for me:)