The Last Tusker

2000 A Natural World For BBC and Discovery

The Last Tusker is a huge wild male elephant living on the Buddhist Island of Sri Lanka. He is one of the last of his kind, in fact he was the only one with tusks in a group of 400 elephants living in this part of Sri Lanka. He is a survivor, despite a bullet wound in his head. This film follows the fortunes of this mature bull and a family of females and youngsters. These wild elephants are fortunate as, despite their ancient religious associations, an increasing number of elephants are being injured or deprived of a life in the wild, as pressures from man mount. Many elephants end up in the country’s elephant orphanage where they take a daily stroll through the local high street on their way to the river for a bath and a scrub down with a coconut shell. The life of the wild and orphanage elephants is compared and their future assessed.