(TH) Bangkok's street elephants

[Guest guest]

The elephants are back

ThaiDay

â´Â Lim Li Min

19 àÁÉÒ¹ 2549

(mid 2006)

 

Bangkok’s biggest beggars are walking the streets again. Why does this

problem with pachyderms persist?

 

As cars whizz past Victory Monument, five-year-old Lum Yai performs tricks

under a grimy flyover. She spins a multicolored hula-hoop on her front leg,

then squirts water at sopping Songkran revellers with her trunk. For this

she will get plenty of laughs and 40 baht. Streetside diners normally only

pay 20 baht for the privilege of feeding her a small bag of sugarcane.

 

Little taller than a grown man with an endearingly stumpy trunk, baby

elephant Lum Yai is a big money-spinner for her human handlers. Lum Yai

looks like a two-year-old but her keeper insists she is five years of age.

She sets off from her scrubby patch in Huay Kwang, walking to Victory

Monument each day to beg for food from captive diners. Her working day

starts at 5pm and continues until well past midnight.

 

But it was not always this way. Fierce bull elephants, capable of pulling

massive logs were once prized by timber workers and mahouts in Thailand’s

northern forests – babies were virtually worthless. However, as mercenary

keepers have increasingly taken the place of the highly skilled mahouts –

traditionally from Surin or Buri Ram – an ancient bond has been broken

between man and beast. Babies like Lum Yai are popping up all over the city

once again, despite the flurry of media publicity and government attempts to

corral the elephants in 2004.

 

“The elephants are back,” says Roger Lohanan, head of Thai Animal Guardians

Association. In 1992, Lohanan spearheaded a campaign to rid the city of its

more than decade-old problem, which began after the government banned

logging in 1989. Experts estimete that about 50 elephants ply the capital’s

byways to reach the lucrative tourist areas ofPatpong, Silom and Nana.

 

But the crucial difference this time around is that 90 percent of the

keepers are not mahouts with specialized knowledge of pachyderm control.

These keepers’ nocturnal wanderings are driven by the need to turn a profit

rather than to find food for their pachyderm charges.

 

To manage Lum Yai, Somsak, (a rice farmer from Surin who won’t give his last

name for fear of reprisals), keeps a short-bladed scythe in the gunny sack

on the young elephant’s back. One of three handlers, the 26-year-old earns

400 baht a night from Lum Yai’s sales, or about 12,000 baht a month. This is

many times what he would have earned from his job as a rice farmer in Surin.

Like many of these new-generation keepers, Somsak does not own Lum Yai.

Instead, the keepers collectively rent her out from a businessman for 1,500

a month.

 

According to government figures there are about 2,500 wild and domesticated

elephants in Thailand, although many non-governmental organizations estimate

that the wild elephant population hovers around 1,500. This number has been

gradually decreasing because of poaching.

 

It has become a huge business, reports Soraida Salwala of Friends of the

Asian Elephant. Businessmen with deep pockets have muscled in on the

elephant trade, buying up the pachyderms from the original owners in Surin

or Buri Ram, sometimes even renting the beasts back to the original owners

for monthly payments. Some big businessmen may own more than 100 elephants,

choosing to rent them out to keepers in Bangkok, rather than putting the

elephants to work in tourist parks or resort areas such as Chonburi or

Ayuttahya, where keepers would earn only 5,000 baht a month.

 

As human owners grow rich off their elephants’ earnings, animal welfare has

again taken a back seat, along with government attention to the problem.

“They treat elephants like taxis. If you don’t own one it doesn’t matter how

you treat it. You just try to get as much mileage out of it as possible,”

say the TAGA’s Lohanan. Non-governmental organizations report that some

elephants may be fed amphetamines to keep their stamina up. They are often

disciplined with sharp hooks and are seldom given drinking water while on

their downtown rounds for fear they might foul the streets.

 

Elephant babies (the beasts are the equivalent to humans in age terms) are

forced to walk for hours at a time. During the day, the elephants are

concealed in disused dumps, construction sites, or open patches of land,

with little of the shade that these forest creatures so desperately need.

Some babies are underfed to keep them looking small and cute, says the FAE’s

Soraida.

 

Many solutions to the problem have been proposed by the Bangkok Metropolitan

Administration and various officials, including an elephant sanctuary,

animal registration, or microchipping, job creation for the mahouts and

elephant parks.

 

But the problem has not abated. Due to a combination of poor management,

poor enforcement and corruption projects have either not materialized or

were only half-finished. “The situation is easy to solve but the people who

are involved are not sincere or are too busy fighting each other,” says the

TAGA’s Lohanan.

 

Pro-elephant advocate Pensak Chagsuchinda, a senator and vice-chairman for

the Committee on the Environment, argues that the laws regarding the mammals

are ineffective and vague and do not place enough emphasis on conservation

and protection. Adding to the elephants’ quandary is their complicated legal

status. The law, which distinguishes between wild and domestic elephants,

offers scant protection for domesticated ones, only lightly prosecuting

their human owners in cases of maltreatment. Elephants in the wild are

protected under a 1992 law, but a small amount of poaching continues to

occur in Thailand’s forests.

 

When contacted regarding this matter, Schwann Tunhikorn, deputy director

general of National Parks, Wildlife and Plants Division at the Ministry of

Natural Resources and Environment, denied that poaching continues to occur.

Some campaigners say that baby elephants seen on Bangkok streets have been

captured in Myanmar and Laos to compensate for the low birthrate of

Thailand’s domestic elephants and to satisfy the tourist demand for cute

youngsters.

 

Currently, none of the government agencies is wholly responsible for the

elephants’ situation, although experts are recommending that one leading

government organization should have sole responsibility for them, says

Masakazu Kashio, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s forest resources

officer.

 

At present, the ministries of Interior, Natural Resources and Environment

and Agriculture and Cooperatives, take charge of different regulatory,

enforcement and registration responsibilities. Poor coordination between the

agencies has led to overall neglect of Bangkok’s elephant situation. “You

have to ask the Thai people: what do you want to do with your elephants?”

says the FAO’s Kashio. “Many people in the government don’t see the

elephants’ plight as a serious issue.”

 

Meanwhile, elephants like Mai continue to work in Bangkok. Starting out from

a patch of scrubland on a Thonburi construction site, Mai hits the roads

each day at 4:30pm. She doesn’t have far to walk to reach the main road, as

the field is located just next to a flyover which carries a steady stream of

buses, trucks and cars.

 

Lumbering onto the two-way lane, she takes her place among the vehicles,

which honk at her angrily. Some three hours later, she arrives at a busy

Silom intersection to beg the tourists for food again. – Additional

reporting by Jonathan Taylor

 

http://www.manager.co.th/IHT/ViewNews.aspx?NewsID=9490000051589

.............................

It's tough in the concrete jungle

Sydney Morning Herald

Connie Levett

Herald Correspondent In Bangkok

June 24, 2006

 

OLE, a two-year-old Thai elephant, stands side-on to traffic in the middle

of a four-lane street in central Bangkok, trunk swinging erratically as

buses, taxis and motorbikes whiz past on either flank. For eight hours each

night he walks through choking fumes, stopping only when a customer, Thai or

tourist, buys a 20 baht (60 cent) bag of sugarcane to feed him and snap a

photo. For the next few months, this will be his life.

 

The most passionate of Thailand's elephant activists, who successfully

blocked the recent attempt to export eight animals to Australia, don't want

to see even one elephant leave the country, but life for a domesticated

elephant at home is less than perfect.

 

Last week Ole and seven other elephants were trucked to the capital from the

Elephant Village, in Surin province, near the Cambodian border, where

drought meant there was little to eat for the animals. They now spend their

days on a leg chain in a desolate stretch of land under a tangle of freeways

in the Bang Kapi district.

 

Each night they do a 10-kilometre circuit with two mahouts through the

city's business and restaurant districts. It is illegal to parade the

elephants through the city but police turn a blind eye.

 

" There has been no trouble from the police, " said one of the elephant

handlers, Sawi, at the makeshift camp under the freeway. " I think the police

are aware of the situation for the elephants in Surin. "

 

Sawi, who accompanied the animals from Surin, said it cost 8000 baht to

bring the eight elephants to the city and they would return by November at

the latest for a yearly elephant festival.

 

" The elephants are happy in Bangkok because they have food. In Surin, there

is no food and no job, " said Ek, a twenty-something mahout who claimed this

was his first trip to Bangkok yet had an excellent knowledge of back streets

and shortcuts in the Sukhumvit commercial district. He and his brother Supot

work as a team, with Supot directing the young elephant, tugging its ear,

while Ek walks ahead to offer bags of sugarcane to pavement patrons at a

Starbucks coffee shop.

 

Supot said Ole did not seem disturbed by the traffic and fumes, yet every

time he reached an intersection, the elephant would swing his trunk wildly

from side to side.

 

Asked if they make 10,000 baht a month, Supot said, " Oh, I wish for 10,000. "

 

The brothers said they did not feel shame at being forced to bring their

elephant to Bangkok to make a living. " No one tells us we shouldn't do

this, " said Ek, who had only sold two 20 baht bags of sugarcane in the first

two hours.

 

" [but] if I could get a job at home, I wouldn't do this. "

 

Apparently he related the night's poor showing to our presence. " How long

are you going to follow us? "

 

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/its-tough-in-the-concrete-jungle/2006/06/23/115\

0845378966.html

 

_______________

Find out how to win FREE Fuel at tradingpost.com.au - Click here

http://a.ninemsn.com.au/b.aspx?URL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Etradingpostcompetition%2Ec\

om%2Eau%2Ffuelgiveaway%3Freferrer%3Dplace11 & _t=758874118 & _r=HM_Tagline_Oct06 & _m=\

EXT