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Giants in the Concrete Jungle
by Cindy Tilney
It is 11.30 p.m. on a Tuesday night in Chiang Mai city. The traffic on Nimmanhaemin Road has begun to thin out, and for Boonsap and his mahout Somchai, it is almost time to head home. Somchai is neatly dressed in a navy blue, mandarin style shirt, one hand gripping the expansive ear of Boonsap, the five year old Asian elephant who earns his nightly income. Unlike many mahouts, Somchai does not use an ankush (a curved hook used to discipline uncooperative elephants), and Boonsap is in relatively good condition, but he sways slowly from side to side – a sure sign of stress in elephants. The pair stop briefly at the entrance to Fine Thanks bar and restaurant, where blaring music and multi-coloured neon lights announce a still crowded interior – potential to up the night’s takings. Boonsap in Thai means ‘to get more money’ and Somchai’s elephant does just that – the mahout says he can make around 1,000 baht a night selling overpriced fruit to tourists eager to feed his charge.
The number of elephants roaming Thailand’s streets soared after the logging ban of 1989, which put thousands of domestic elephants simultaneously out of work. After severe flooding in ’88 sparked governmental concerns about soil erosion, logging was outlawed in an attempt to prevent further deforestation. The ban was good news for the rain forests that support Thailand’s wild elephants, but bad news for domestic elephants and their mahouts. Obsolete animals were sold to tourist resorts and trekking camps or taken over the border to Burmese logging operations. The balance took the streets in search of an alternative means of survival. “At the time of the ban, some domestic animals were company owned, while others were family owned and used to make a living for mahouts and their families. You can imagine that with the logging ban and an elephant to support that eats roughly 250 kg of food a day, the mahouts must have been pretty desperate,” says Tom Ellis, a British ex-patriate who spent six weeks studying street elephants in Bangkok with his girlfriend, Sarah Waters.
Street elephants have the lowest life expectancy of elephants in Thailand. The polluted air and scorching tarmac of city centres are a far cry from their natural rainforest habitat, and life on the streets takes its toll. Elephants are simply not designed for the concrete jungle. The banana or sugar cane rations used to evoke the sympathy and open the wallets of unsuspecting tourists often fall far short of the 250-odd kilograms of food needed to satisfy the nutritional needs of an adult elephant, and many are malnourished, dehydrated or battle stomach infections contracted from contaminated food or water. Respiratory problems from traffic fumes are common, and some elephants are struck deaf from the din of the city or go blind from the harsh, undiffused light. “A lot live on garbage dumps, without any shade or water,” says Waters. “We saw one baby elephant in really bad shape, collapsed on a heap of rubbish in the sun. We got within 10 yards of her and she still didn’t get up.”
Approximately 15 elephants per month are injured in traffic accidents, says Lek Chailert, while others develop mental disorders from isolation or stress. Maltreatment by mahouts is common and includes vicious wounds inflicted with the ankush. Some even feed their animals drugs. “The average day for most Bangkok elephants starts at about 4 p.m. - when the streets are still so hot that they burn the bottom of their feet - and finishes about 2 a.m.,” says Ellis. “That’s a long night, so a lot of mahouts give their elephants amphetamines to keep them on the go. We saw lots of elephants who had been drugged. You can see it in their eyes – they have a glazed look, with dilated pupils, just like a druggie.”
Public safety, too, is compromised by the phenomenon of street elephants. There have been several incidences of enraged or mentally unstable elephants attacking their mahouts and bystanders unfortunate enough to be an obstacle in their path of destruction. One classic case is that of Petch, a male elephant who developed a neurotic disorder during the 17 years he was chained up at a temple. Later sold to be used as a street beggar, Petch finally unleashed his fury on New Year’s Eve 1995, running amok for five hours in a violent rampage before he was gunned down by police.
A most disturbing aspect of the street elephant issue is the presence of ‘elephant lords’ – wealthy businessmen who buy up troops of elephants and rent them back to mahouts for a monthly fee of 9,000-12,000 baht a month, depending on the elephant’s age, health and ability to perform tricks. “We often heard rumours about elephant lords, but it’s a difficult thing to prove that they exist,” says Ellis. “There were a few times that we came across beautiful elephants and we asked the mahouts how much it would cost to buy them, but they said ‘It’s not my elephant. It belongs to the big boss.” According to Lek Chailert and Roger Lohanan, Chief Director of the Thai Animals Guardians Association, there is nothing fictional about the existence of these elephant lords: it is pure fact. “A local politician and businessman admitted during a Police Commissioner Seminar that he and his business friends had invested in buying elephants from poor mahouts and renting them to whoever wished to come and make money in the city,” says Lohanan. While the notion of a poor mahout providing for a hungry family lends at least a degree of comprehensibility to the issue of street elephants, the idea of the rich getting richer off the blood, sweat and tears of these smart, sensitive creatures paints an entirely different picture.
Getting elephants off the streets is a convoluted issue. For one thing, there is little cohesion between various organisations working to protect elephants in Thailand. “Unity is the problem,” says, who believes that government agencies and environmental bodies should cooperate closely to find a solution to the issue.
For another, mahouts earning a decent living from city elephants are reluctant to relinquish this earning potential. After legislation in March 2000 outlawed the use of elephants for begging in urban areas, over a dozen mahouts marched their elephants through the streets to protest the ban they claimed would strip them of their incomes. Lek, though she often works with mahouts, tending to their sick, wounded or malnourished elephants, is less unsympathetic regarding their claims. “The mahouts blame the logging policy for keeping their elephants on the streets; they blame the government for not providing alternative options for them, but the truth is they are not willing to lose out on the money they make from using their elephants as beggars,” she says. “There are places that will accept street elephants, even pay for them. The elephant resort in Surin will take them; Anantaraburi Sanctuary in Chiang Rai is begging for elephants and will pay 10,000 a month for them, but mahouts can make between 1,000 and 2,000 baht a night from working elephants on the street – 30,000 to 60,000 baht a month - so they don’t want to accept that.”
Equally obstructive to solving the problem is the lack of legal protection given to elephants in Thailand. Though their plummeting numbers indicate that they should be classified – and protected – as an endangered species, wild elephants are classed only as ‘protected animals’ under the Conservation Act of 1992. The legislation protecting domestic elephants is even less effective. Under the Beast of Burden Act – an archaic piece of legislation that has seen no revision since 1939 – their rights are equivalent to those of cattle or buffalo.
Another problematic factor is presence of corrupt officials who accept minimal bribes from mahouts, or assist smugglers with registration fraud for elephants taken illegally from the wild. As elephants travel in matriarchal herds and are fiercely protective of their young, stealing a baby elephant from the wild can result in slaughtering. “The government doesn’t care about the elephant issue,” says Lek, who was arrested for ‘damage to the country’ a day after filing a police report regarding the activities of an elephant trader at the border. “Many tourists see elephants treated badly and complain to the TAT or the police, but nothing is done. And I have checked with the mahouts – they pay fines regularly to the police for having their elephants in the city, but they never receive receipts. Anyway, the fines are so small that they just work for an extra hour and they make up the money. It is a shame for Thailand that the national symbol has ended up this way – a beggar on the street.”
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