PLIGHT OF THE PACHYDERM
Also see my trip to Thailand
Article from the Smithsonian
"Big Trouble"
September 1998
By Anthony Mecir
Len Homhuam is an old man but when he was young, he ventured into the seemingly boundless jungles of Thailand and Cambodia with his comrades to capture wild elephants with ropes. Back then, hundreds of thousands of the huge creatures were on the loose throughout Asia. Prized as beasts of burden, the elephants were rounded up, sometimes in entire herds, and put to work.
Today, due mainly to habitat loss and degradation, Asian elephants are an endangered species. With the wild population down to fewer than 45,000, the situation has become so urgent that the U.S. Congress recently authorized the expenditure of $25 million over five years for conservation and protection programs. In Thailand, only 1,350 elephants still roam free and another 3,800 captive animal s there have fallen on hard times. Nowadays, Homhuan reenacts his earlier hunting exploits for tourists at the annual Surin Elephant Fair and Round-up. Staged each November in the northeastern town of Surin, it celebrates a time when the elephant bestrode the Thai landscape and psyche like a colossus. For more than seven centuries, this intelligent creature served as Thailand's primary mode of transportation, penetrating precious teak forests, thundering across battlefields, performing ceremonial duties and serving the king and the royal court.
Marshaling what is probably the world's largest assemblage of domesticated elephants, about 140 in all, Homhuan and other elephant keepers, or mahouts, from all over the country show how the animals were once used as "armor" to advance against an enemy fortress. To the doomsday throb of drums, warriors sway in howdahs bristling with spears while swordsmen shield each elephant's legs. After the fortress is "taken", the victorious Thai king appears astride the neck of a richly caparisoned tusker, and an announcer tells the several thousand spectators; "These scenes are like a dream. They can only be found on the walls of ancient temples."
A modern scene involving Thai elephants is likewise apt to resemble a dream-a nightmare. This one is being played out some 335 miles north of Bangkok at an elephant hospital located on a secluded hillside near the town of Lampang. Consisting of an intensive care unit, a laboratory and several infirmaries and rest areas, the hospital is located in the That Elephant Conservation Center, a complex owned by the Forestry Industry Organization, a government- run timber enterprise. Here, a patient named Pung Kammee, nervous and fearful, is being treated for amphetamine addiction. Nearby, 45 year old Sidor Kamlar is recovering from gaping wounds on his hips and legs. At the very edge of the hospital grounds, four men with massive staves are trying to pry a 40-year-old cow named Suphan off the forest floor. Abandoned by illegal loggers, she had been worked almost to death, her once magnificent body reduced to a skeleton.
Since it was founded in 1994 by Soraida Salwala, a passionate conservationist, the world's first modern elephant hospital has treated about 300 cases. Among those in its care are victims of cruelty and overwork, dying orphans and aging castoffs.
Once elephant handlers were bound to their animals by respect, affection and mutual dependency. Now it's a different story. Illegal loggers hack elephants like Pung Kamee and Suphan with knives and spears to keep them working at top speed. Many animals are fed bananas spiked with amphetamine pills to push them far beyond their normal capacity. Tourism likewise takes a toll. Poorly trained animals tumble down hillsides while toting tourists on so-called jungle treks. Snatched from their mothers too early by ignorant hotel promoters and elephant show operators, cute calves are fed indigestible milk, pesticide-tainted vegetables and other foods that cause illness and even death. Some elephants are brought to the hospital by impoverished mahouts seeking an alternative to turning their charges loose in the rapidly developing countryside or having them slaughtered for meat.
Salwala became obsessed with the elephant's plight when she was 8 years old. One day she and her father happened on a tusker lying wounded by the side of a road, its stomach heaving, its owner weeping nearby. "Uncle Elephant was hit by a truck. Please, let's take him to the hospital," she pleaded with her father. It was, of course, impossible. Nothing could be done, "As we drove away," she recalls, "I heard a gunshot and father said, "Uncle Elephant is now in heaven. "Why did he have to walk on the road?" And that question remains with me to this day."
Salwala's Friends of the Asian Elephant, one of several small but vocal Thai groups bent on preserving the animal, is hard-pressed to keep the hospital going. The monthly expenses of more than $5,000 must be covered by private donations. Everything comes in jumbo sizes. The open-sided operating theater is half as big as a tennis court. Vaccination against tetanus, a lethal disease for elephants, requires a 200-cubic-centimeter drip in saline solution (humans take 0.5 cc). A recent procedure required on vet and a half-dozen assistants, including two who were needed just to depress a two-foot-long syringe. The patient, Bua Thong, a 64-year-old bull with sad eyes and long lashes, stood quietly as a paste of calcium hydroxide and sterile water was injected deep into his right tusk cavity. Ivory poachers had sawed off the tusk, causing an infection that had lasted a decade. "For hundreds of years, men treated elephants as friends," Dr. Preecha Puangkham, the medical director, told a visitor after the operation. "Now people treat an elephant like a car. If it breaks down, they get rid of it and find a new one."
At the turn of the century, forest covered as much as 90 percent of Thailand and accommodated as many as 300,000 elephants, a third of them domesticated and holding down essential jobs. Among princes and peasants, in courts and rice paddies the elephant was deeply enmeshed in the fabric of traditional life. Its image graces scores of Buddhist temples as well as royal palaces; a white elephant was once the symbol that appeared on the national flag, which is why Westerners called the country, the Land of the White Elephant. Many of Thailand's proverbs are couched in elephant terms. A father might counsel his son: "When inspecting an elephant, examine its tail. When looking at a prospective bride, examine her mother." Every schoolchild was taught about Queen Suriyothai, who in 1549, disguised herself as a warrior and, maneuvering her agile war elephant in front of a Burmese attacker, took a mortal blow that was intended for the husband.
Three centuries later, King Mongkut of Siam, as Thailand was then known, offered to give some elephants to the United States, "They would multiply into herds, Mongkut said and become "beasts of burden, making them of benefit to the country." President Lincoln declined the gift because, he noted, "steam has been our best and most efficient agent of transportation."
Today Thailand's green canopy covers less than 20 percent of the land, and elephant numbers are plummeting. "It's a straight curve down." says Richard Lair, author of Gone Astray: The Care and Management of the Asian Elephant in Domesticity. "It's a grim situation."
It's the same story across the rest of the continent. Like its larger African relative, the Asian elephant is in decline throughout its range. The once teeming herds vanished as farmers stripped forests and lush grasslands. The fragmented populations that are left have been boxed into several dozen scattered national parks, all of which are under unremitting attack by poacher, woodcutters and influential land-grabbers. When the creatures stray beyond these inadequate confines, angry farmers often respond with gunfire or poison to protect their crops from the big gobblers, who may consume as much as 400 pounds of vegetation in a single day.
Over the past, five domesticated elephants-all female-have been let loose in the wild in Thailand after two years of preparation. The animals wear radio collars that enable scientists and rangers to track their movements. If the five adapt well to the forest, scientists may conclude that reintroduction of domesticated elephants to the wild is one way to reinvigorate dwindling populations in several wilderness areas in Asia. "There could be problems with crop raiding," warns Michael Stuwe, a biologist with the Smithsonian's Conservation and Research Center who specializes in tracking. "But so far, so good."
The bad news is that elephants are still being used by log poachers to help destroy much of what remains of their precious habitat. This is happening in some of Thailand's last great forest reserves, like the 625 square miles that make up the Salween National Park and the Salween Wildlife Sanctuary, Both located on the border with Myanmar (formerly known as Burma). There, outlawed logging is a business rife with treachery, corruption and death, for men and elephants alike.
Recently a team of forest rangers, recovering logs felled illegally, demonstrated how hard elephants must work. Their three animals first had to gingerly slide the massive logs down a dangerously slick slope. Using chains, they then dragged the logs along a rocky streambed to a trailhead, where tractors waited. Jungle juggernauts they may be, but the elephants heaved and struggled to tow the logs through that deep, narrow, gorge, a netherworld of dense teak trees through which only slivers of sunlight could penetrate.
"When I'm here, the log poachers are over there," one of the rangers complained the other day, pointing to the other side of the hill. "And when I am there, they're here." The almost daily skirmishing began in 1989 when Thailand, alarmed by the rapid disappearance of its forests, banned all logging. The edict sparked sky-high wood prices, a massive loss of jobs and a dramatic increase in illegal cutting. Many elephant owners, already living on the edge of poverty, chose to break the law rather than sell, abandon or kill their animals.
Able to tread where machines cannot go, these slave laborers are essential to illicit loggers, whose equipment also includes souped-up trucks, spotlights used to blind pursuing officials and high-tech electronic gear for monitoring police communications. The animals, forced to work at breakneck speed at night, are often injured. Extreme fatigue leads to internal bleeding and susceptibility to disease. The lucky ones get caught and end up at a holding facility in northern Thailand, where they are well cared for while the courts decide what to do with them. As many as 300 animals have been impounded there in recent years.
Dr. Puangkham estimates that more than 1,500 elephants are presently involved in illegal logging in northern Thailand alone. As nasty as the work is, it may be better than no work at all. If the authorities are ever able to suppress the undercover business, the animals would lose their jobs, and their value; the overall population would then plummet further. "The only viable alternative for elephants is tourism." says author Richard Lair, whom the Thai people call "Professor Elephant" for his intimate knowledge and love of the species. "It's not a bad life if the operation is well run. The animals are in a natural setting and they get plenty to eat."
Elephant tourism has proliferated in recent years. If you choose, you can ride atop an elephant to view the ruins of ancient capitals, the villages of the hill tribe minorities in the so-called golden triangle, or the notorious Death Railway built by Allied prisoners of the Japanese during WW II. The novelty of an elephant ride appeals to many visitors, but those who respect the dignity of the animals criticize some of the more humiliating shenanigans for which they are being enlisted, such as performer Michael Jackson being greeted by a baby elephant "rock 'n' rolling" to one of his songs at a Bangkok hotel not long ago and a recent "fashion show" that featured elephant "models" wearing makeup, earrings and sunglasses.
Then, on the other hand, there is Sangdeun Chailert's Elephant Nature Park, near the northern city of Chiang Mai. On a cool morning there, chattering tourists from Japan, England, France and Italy clamber excitedly aboard a dozen elephants for a trek through and idyllic valley. The distinctive sound of wooden clackers, strung around the elephants' necks like cowbells, identifies the animals and alerts villagers should the beasts stray into the rice fields.
"Pai, pai!" "Go, go!" The mahouts prod their charges whenever the animals decide that foraging is more fun than walking. Nobody bothers to discipline 9-month-old Yindee, who presses up against her mother during the excursion and later butts the visitors after hey dismount in quest of bananas to feed to the elephants. "You can tame elephants with love," Chailert says as she watches her herd luxuriate in the river that runs by her camp. Actually, she knows as well as anyone that it takes discipline as well as love to tame and elephant, but the discipline must be balanced with rewards for good behavior. Chailert's rules are tough: elephants can't work more than two hours a day, someone must care for them around the clock, and goads for hooks must be used sparingly.
Chailert likes to go on occasional elephant shopping trips at the Thai-Myanmar border, where a healthy specimen between 8 and 12 years old currently sells for about $6,500. This is the logging region where so many domesticated animals are treated harshly. It's also home to some of the country's traditional elephant keepers, the Karen tribes people. When Chailert buys or rents an elephant, she tries to obtain the services of its mahout in order to maintain the lifelong bond between keeper and animal, and thus preserve the storehouse of elephant knowledge and myth accumulated over the centuries by people like the Karen.
Bonds to the past are also being maintained in Thailand by the royal household and King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the caretaker of an elephant culture that dates back to ancient mythology. Says royal veterinarian and nobleman Dr. Phiphatanachatr Diskul: "Thailand is the last place where the customs of the white elephants have been preserved. In Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, these traditions have vanished."
The Thai people have long revered the so-called white elephant as the earthly manifestations of Erawan, the many-headed celestial elephant of the god Indra. In the 16th century, a jealous Burmese ruler went to war when the Thai king refused to give him two white elephants from his stable of seven. One Dutch trader chronicled how a grieving 17th century Thai monarch ordered the execution of all keepers of a young white elephant that had died suddenly while in their care. They he staged a sumptuous cremation ceremony because, the trader said, "the Siamese pretend... there is something divine in these animals."
By law, every white elephant in the realm must be presented to the king, but it's not easy for an animal to get into this exclusive club. When someone comes up with a prospective member, experts delve into arcane texts that detail the unique qualifications to be met. A mellifluous call, a beautiful tail, a long trunk, even pleasant-smelling droppings, are among the characteristics that are considered before the elephant is presented to the royal ruler. Although these creatures are often, and incorrectly, referred to as "albino" elephants, they are not devoid of pigment and do not have pink eyes. In fact, only one of the 11 white elephants in royal collection is strikingly pale. The other 10 look like normal elephants. The proper name for these creatures, chang samkan, means "important" or "significant" elephant.
White elephants are treasured and pampered but not strictly according to custom. Ten of the kingdom's whites have been moved from the palace grounds in Bangkok to Thai government facilities; six are housed at the extensive Elephant Conservation Center, which includes the aforementioned hospital. Here, four keepers are assigned to each animal. Accompanied by their retinues, the elephants mosey into replanted teak forests each morning for a day of foraging. At dusk they return to the compound, where they frolic in a reservoir like babies in a tub. An evening snack of sugarcane and tamarind awaits them in their individual sleeping pavilions, each immaculately maintained and ringed by neatly manicured lawns.
Along with the royals and the Karen, the other surviving guardians of the elephant lore in Thailand are the Suay, who live in the northeastern part of the country. These are Len Homhuam's people. Once they were fabled elephant trappers and trainers who mounted yearly expeditions into Cambodia's jungles with little besides bamboo poles and ropes. Those forays ended in the early 1960s. They Suay hunting grounds in Cambodia were turned into Khmer Rouge killing fields, the frontier was strewn with land mines and the trumpeting of elephants gave way to the chatter of gunfire.
A month after the elephant festival at Surin, one of the participants, a bull named Denchai, showed up at an outdoor bar in the seaside resort of Hua Hin. His trunk was draped around a European tourist and a Thai prostitute. His mahout was trying to cajole the couple into buying a small bag of cucumbers, which they could then feed to the hulking tusker.
This is what the elephant has been reduced to in Thailand. You can see the degrading spectacle on display every day in Bangkok, of all places, where, technically, elephants are banned but where, in reality, authorities often look the other way. The animals show up on Silom Road, Bangkok's "Wall Street", or at the notorious nightlife strip on Patpong Road or at the huge suburban shopping center called Future Park. It's a surreal scene: an elephant stands amid traffic jams and exhaust fumes while a chic, pregnant woman walks under its belly. She hopes this will bring her a safe delivery, and gives the mahout some change. As legend has it, the mother of Buddha conceived him after dreaming that a white elephant touched her right side with a white lotus that it was holding in its trunk.
Just a short walk from Future Park, one is startled to come upon a tiny village that is an oasis of old Siam. A wooden bridge spans a tree-lined canal. There, a Buddhist temple shelters a 10-year-old elephant named Ploy. Only a jumbo jet descending toward Bangkok's airport, and the distant high-rises, serve as reminders of the encroaching 20th century. Abandoned several years ago, Ploy may remain here until the end of his days. "We took pity on him", says a young novice. "Elephants are our legacy."
A good-natured animal, Ploy eagerly scoops up his toy, an auto tire, with his trunk and tucks it between his front legs. "It's like a doll." explains one of the village boys. "If you take it away from him, he cries."
