(TH) City elephants run tourism gauntlet

[Guest guest]

*City elephants run tourism gauntlet *

 

http://www.dispatch.co.za/article.aspx?id=346957

 

 

DWINDLING: Many elephants are smuggled to Thailand from Burma.

 

*2009/09/23*

 

A DRUNKEN tourist staggers about as he repeatedly drops his bags of elephant

feed on Bangkok’s Soi Cowboy boulevard.

 

Beneath the neon lights advertising Thailand’s bars and bar-girls, the man

teases the two-year-old elephant as the beast tries to take a few sugarcane

snacks from his shaking hands.

 

Finally the distressed elephant lets out a cry and her handlers pull her

down the street to the next group of paying tourists.

 

“They get beaten because they’re tired; they don’t want to walk, it’s one

o’clock in the morning,” said Soraida Salwala, who runs a charity to rescue

elephants such as this one.

 

Elephants first arrived in Thailand’s cities about 40 years ago when the

Tourism Authority of Thailand brought a number of them to Bangkok for an

exhibition to attract visitors to the kingdom.

 

Once the elephant owners realised their money-making potential, they started

coming to the cities more often.

 

In 1993 there were fewer than 10 elephants on Bangkok’s streets.

 

Now, says Soraida, about 100 regularly come to Bangkok, and more than 1000

are used for profit in cities nationwide.

 

The demand is so great that elephants are also smuggled in from abroad.

 

A report released by wildlife charity Traffic revealed that more than 250

live animals had been smuggled from neighbouring Burma in the past decade,

in contravention of national and international laws.

 

“Females and juvenile elephants are particularly targeted to supply the

demand from the tourism industry in Thailand,” said Chris Shepherd, senior

programme officer with Traffic.

 

Soraida, who set up Thailand’s Friends of the Asian Elephant (FOAE) in 1993,

said there were now only 4600 wild and captive elephants left in Thailand,

compared to some 40000 50 years ago.

 

Car fumes and narrow streets often leave the elephants with eye callouses

and tuberculosis and make them vulnerable to leg injuries, said Soraida, who

treats some of the animals at an elephant hospital she founded in northern

Lampang province.

 

The owners, mainly from Thailand’s impoverished northeast, defend their

actions as necessary for their survival.

 

Muang Salangam, 59, from northeast Surin province, says his 29-year- old

elephant “Nam-whan” earns him up to 1000 baht (about R216) walking 12

kilometres a day.

 

That compares favourably to the average monthly salary in factories of 7329

baht per month in the last quarter of 2007, according to the National

Statistical Office.

 

“I have to bring my elephant to Bangkok because I have no money at home,”

Muang said at his campsite behind a car park off a main Bangkok highway.

 

“Some people condemn me for bringing my elephant to Bangkok but I tell them

if we stay there, we and the elephants will starve.

 

“ I tell them there’s no food over there, it’s difficult.”

 

Soraida bemoans a lack of government support in dealing with the problem.

 

Traffic said that despite its findings on the Burma border, no cross- border

trade of live elephants had been reported to the Convention on International

Trade in Endangered Species by either Burma or Thailand.

 

More than a dozen laws exist in Thailand for prosecuting elephant handlers,

know as mahouts, in legislative areas as varied as transportation and public

health, said Soraida.

 

But though a police task force set up in 2006 periodically sweeps the

streets for elephants, they continue to ply the tourist trade.

 

Two government projects that aimed to take elephants back to the countryside

have also failed, with one in 2002 that encouraged elephants to work as

scouts in national parks canned due to a lack of funding.

 

Another project in 2006 failed to encourage mahouts to return to Surin

province with the offer of a monthly wage of 12000 baht because, Soraida

said, the handlers rent the elephants and so would not receive the money

themselves.

 

She is not hopeful change will come but vowed to continue her fight to rid

the urban streets of elephants.

 

“The government doesn’t really care,” she said. “But we cannot have them as

beggars on the road.” — Sapa-AFP

 

 

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" Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man

will not himself find peace. " -Albert Schweitzer