Thai Elephant Beggars

We had dinner again with AM. She's going to be busy for the next couple of weeks and wanted to be sure we saw each other again before we leave.

We ended up at a Chinese Thai street restaurant where we talked till late. During dinner we were interrupted by a visitor. We'd seen an elephant walking down this road late at night a couple of times when we were in song thaews coming home. This was the first time it was up close.



Andrew Lam wrote for the Pacific News Service back in 2004:

The Asian elephant may still be a revered cultural icon in this country, gracing bas-reliefs of temples and ancient paintings of battle scenes, but it is woefully underemployed. Worse, in a country whose civilization was more or less built on the elephant's back, the mighty creature is fast disappearing. More than 100,000 existed at the beginning of last century. At the beginning of the 21st, there are less than 5,000 -- 2,000 of which are still in the wild.

Classified as an endangered species, the Asian elephant is expected to disappear from the country altogether -- except perhaps in zoos -- around 2050.

Here's the routine. The mahout (elephant handler) hands down bags of cut up sugar cane to his helper who then sells the bags for 20 Baht each. I'd been able to say no to the various kids selling flowers and the stump armed beggar who'd approached us while we were eating, but this was different. How do I justify saying no to people but not to an elephant? I'll have to ponder that. But looking into this elephant's eyes, I know there is a sentient being inside there and I think I'd never pass up a bag of sugar cane if this team came to my dinner table every night.

Then the helper gives the elephant the 20 Baht bill and it hands trunks it up to the mahout. Then you feed the sugar cane pieces to the elephant. I gave it one, then gave one of the kids working at the restaurant the rest to give to the elephant. [19/4/08: See follow up comment from an elephant expert on this topic in this post.]


Then, this environmentally conscious team has you give the elephant the empty plastic bag which he trunks up to the mahout. And then they went to the other side of the restaurant.

This is a modern elephant who gives us the real meaning of tail light while walking the night streets of Chiang Mai. This is a sad decline for the once very proud elephant (and mahout) that is a symbol of Thailand and was instrumental in Thai life over the centuries. As a reminder, here again is one of the pictures that I took ( and recently posted) in Kamphaengphet back around 1967 or 68 of those proud working elephants



This is one of the side effects of globalization, the speeding up of life around the world. The replacement of living work partners like elephants and water buffalo (kwai) by machines. Yes, we can talk about the advantages to people's lives, that people wouldn't buy the new things if they didn't want them and all that. But the main reason that people have introduced these things was to make money for themselves, not to improve people's lives. And they've done it in ways that have seriously eroded the spiritual richness that was the birthright of all Thais fifty years ago.

Alaskans can understand this too, as we still celebrate sled dogs in the face of snow machines, log cabins in the wilderness as concrete big box stores replace trees and mountain views in town, and small family fishing boats in a losing battle against factory trawlers that ravage the sea beds.