Thailand

Thailand’s elephants, pretty much like the Thai people, live in a perplexing mix of old and new. Many aspects of many elephants’ lives remain the same as the past, but omnipresent modern influences have resulted in elephants being trucked into a megalopolis to wander the streets and elephants weaned at six months so as to greet guests at luxury hotels. Many happenings would have been impossible or unthinkable even ten years earlier: elephants slaughtered for meat, logging elephants fed amphetamines so as to work harder, an elephant sob story on CNN, and one elephant shipped to the US as a two-year old calf only to be flown back 25 years later to star in a Hollywood movie. When Michael Jackson arrived at his Bangkok hotel he was delighted to be greeted by, in the words of one reporter, a “talented young pachyderm” dancing to one of his songs. (He undoubtedly would have been less delighted if he had known of the training methods used.)

The Thai media has created many excellent video documentaries and the print media has published hundreds of stories in magazines and newspapers, ranging from inaccurate fluff to excellent articles in periodicals on Thai culture and history. The media are so efficient and competitive that stories about Surin elephants coming to make money in Bangkok’s congested streets snowballed into a media blitz arousing so much public outrage, skilfully stirred by NGOs, that the municipality prohibited the long-standing form of work.

· See “Street-wandering in Bangkok,” page 202.

The power of the Thai media was best exhibited by a three-month saga that began the night of November 3, 1993. A young female calf from Surin named Honey - foreign names have become a fad - performing with an itinerant show in the northern province of Lamphun was struck by a truck, breaking her pelvis and injuring vertebrae. While such accidents are not unusual, events conspired to ensure that Honey’s tragedy was not to end in the countryside mourned only by her owners. (There are no statistics, but probably at least one or two elephants a year is killed or grievously injured by vehicles while walking along highways.) After a week of prayers and magic (sayasaat) failed to deliver results, Honey was sent to the Dusit Zoo in Bangkok to be cared for by a team of Thailand’s best veterinarians, an event which became a huge television news story. The veterinarians soon diagnosed Honey’s condition as hopeless, but public sympathy shaped by a Thai Buddhist sense of karma prevented them from euthanizing the suffering calf, which by this time was daily news. Honey even managed an appearance on CNN before dying just after midnight on February 16, 1994 after nearly four months of agony. Honey had galvanized the attention and the sympathy of the nation, not just upon herself but upon all of Thailand’s domesticated elephants. Soraida Salwala, Secretary-General of the Friends of the Asian Elephant (as quoted by Dithajohn, 1995), said, “It was a lesson that carried a terrible price in terms of the suffering of a baby elephant.”1

The Thai media has become a potent force in conservation not so much as a dedicated reformer (though there is a trace of that) but simply because it is driven by an inexhaustible demand for stories. Some elephant stories are light-hearted but many are sad and lead directly to conservation issues. Ten years ago the general public was blissfully unaware of wildlife conservation but by 1996 the media has ensured that all young people and most of the influential middle class are quite aware of all environmental problems, including the unhappy plight of domesticated elephants. Government agencies, police stations, and NGOs are pestered by a regular stream of irate phone calls from the public complaining about mistreated elephants.

Thailand in the Information Age produces bitter incongruities, such as malaria-plagued Karen mahouts selling elephant rides to Thai yuppies talking to their stock brokers by mobile phone. The most biting irony is that while the most intimate moments of Thailand’s domesticated elephant - births, deaths, and even mating - have been shown on prime time television, very little is known about their actual status: their numbers and origins, their birth and death rates, the work they do, the ethnic composition of their keepers, and many other critical questions.

Hard information on the total number of domesticated elephants consists, as will be seen, of only two conflicting sets of incomplete data. In the cultural realm there is only one competent and reasonably complete anthropological paper in English on a tribal elephant-keeping culture, and even that talks very little about the day-to-day relationship with elephants. Anybody willing to write about domesticated elephants only from accurate scientific data and proper academic sources will write very little at all.

Many early travel books have a few amusing but inexpertly observed pages on elephants. Elephant Kingdom (Marshall, 1959) is ultimately infuriating because the reader senses that the writer knew a great deal about elephants and northern Thai keeping techniques, but he spends far more time with anecdotes and descriptions of village life, social mores, etc. A fine book on the elephant in Thai culture, history, and religion, Elephants of Thailand in Myth, Art, and Reality (Ringis, 1996), barely scratches surface of anthropology, sociology, and keeping technique. Regrettably, the same scarcity applies to literature specifically about conservation.

Wild elephants

Santiapillai and Jackson (1990) state that there are probably between 1,300 and 2,000 wild elephants in Thailand. Citing Mattana Srikrajang, Santiapillai (Pers. comm., 1996) states that there are probably between 1,200 and 1,500 wild elephants.

Domesticated-to-wild elephant ratio

There is nothing exceptional about the size of Thailand’s domesticated elephant population, which is a distant second to Myanmar and probably barely ahead of India amidst ‘The Big Three’. The one truly astonishing aspect of the Thai population is the extremely high ratio of domesticated elephants to wild elephants, as shown in Table 3, page 27. The domesticated population of about 3,800 numbers about 280% of the wild population (assuming that to be 1,350), whereas in Myanmar the figure is only 95%, a number which already indicates very high exploitation of wild elephants. The Lao PDR’s domesticated elephants constitute about 50% of the wild population. India’s domesticated elephants are only 15% of the wild population, which is probably closer to the historical norm (although regional differences obscure the issue in India).

Thailand’s domesticated-to-wild elephant ratio is intriguing food for thought. Unfortunately, those thoughts are soon frustrated by a near total absence of hard data, especially the numbers of elephants born, captured, and imported over the last 60 or 70 years.

Where have Thailand’s domesticated elephants come from? Certainly many have been imported from Burma, Cambodia, and Laos, but most are probably of Thai origin. (It remains possible, however, that Thailand has for long been regularly absorbing extraordinarily large but unremarked numbers of elephants bought from its neighbors.) Many elephants were born in captivity, perhaps even half of the recruits, but the present birth rate of no more than 2% of the total population (probably not very different from the past) cannot explain Thailand’s high numbers of domesticated elephants (Lair, 1988). Elephants that were neither imported nor captive-born must obviously have been captured in the wild within Thailand - and that can only speak of much higher numbers of wild elephants in the very recent past. (Olivier [1978a] often uses high numbers of domesticated elephants as indirect evidence for assuming very high past wild numbers.) A very high domesticated-to-wild elephant ratio strongly suggests very high rates of capture in the past. Since births are low and since there has been almost no capture within Thailand for twenty years, a disproportionately large share of the Thai population are probably wild-caught elephants of relatively advanced age, an unfortunate sign for future breeding.

Distribution of domesticated elephants

Regions are defined to reflect geography and ecology: the north, the south, the northeast, the southeast, the central region, and Bangkok. The regional breakdown presented, almost entirely the same as Lair (1988), is largely self-explanatory except perhaps for two arms of the north reaching down to Kanchanaburi and Petchabun provinces; these southerly extensions, the Tenasserim mountains in the west and the Petchabun range in the east, have been included in the North because they are contiguous stretches of forest - or the remnants thereof.

Elephants move between regions with great fluidity. Elephants have always been highly mobile creatures, even when they were moved under their own locomotion, but mobility is now greater than ever because of Thailand’s excellent highway system. To truck an adult elephant from Surin to Chiang Mai in 1995, for example, cost no more than 10,000 baht (US$400), perhaps two or three weeks’ income working at a tourist venue. A really long north-south haul across Thailand cost between 5% to 10% of the purchase price of an elephant. Consequently, trucking elephants is costly for poor owners but not prohibitively expensive when moving to work sites.

· See “Apparent population shifts by region,” page 175.

Numbers of domesticated elephants

Numbers can be looked at in terms of past numbers, the numbers presently available, and probable actual numbers.

Past numbers

In 1884 in northern Thailand alone there were said to be more than 20,000 elephants employed in transport, with 1,000 used between the cities of Chiang Mai and Chiang Saen (Seidenfaden, 1967). McNeely and Sinha (1982) state that at the turn of the century Thailand had nearly 100,000 domesticated elephants. Such numbers are likely somewhat high but not impossible considering that in 1900 Thailand was still 90% forest and nicely dappled with the rich ecotones favored by elephants. The Thai forests and grasslands could easily have nourished 100,000 elephants.

The factor limiting the number of elephants kept, rather than being ecological, would have been a human population too small to provide enough mahouts to handle more elephants. (And too small to create enough work to require more elephants.) For the year 1850, Ingram (1971) confidently gives a human population of 5-6 million within the borders of present day Thailand. Assuming that there were 100,000 domesticated elephants and that the human sex ratio was 50:50, then at least one adult man in every 25 males of all ages must have worked as a mahout. Such a high number of mahouts might sound far-fetched, but Olivier (1978b) wrote of the discoverer of Angkor Wat, “Mouhout ... noted that in 1861 every village in the east Petchabun [the Khorat Plateau] possessed 50 to 100 tame elephants.” Perhaps one man in 25 working as a mahout is not so preposterous, especially given that elephant work is often seasonal and many elephant people also have a second occupation, often farming. Thus, 100,000 domesticated elephants in Thailand in 1900 and earlier is not totally implausible and 50,000 is very believable indeed.

Table 18: Elephants sighted, exported, and vaccinated, Livestock Department, Ministry of Agriculture, 1965-94¹

¹ All data is from the Department of Livestock Development, Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives, (Anon, 1994d) and earlier years of the same annual publication.

² Vaccinated.

In 1950 there were said to still be 13,397 domesticated elephants in Thailand, and the number fell to 11,192 in 1965 according to Ministry of Agriculture data (Lekagul and McNeely, 1977a). Table 18 shows a steady decline since the 1960s. These numbers should be taken as minimums because it is likely that Ministry of Agriculture sightings, as they will be called, were consistently lower than the listings of the Ministry of Interior, just as they are today. Lair (1988) considered the data of both ministries for recent years and concluded that “there are probably over 5,000 domesticated elephants in Thailand.”

Present numbers

Two sets of data on domesticated elephants are issued annually, one by the Ministry of Interior (MI) and one by the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives (MA). Only the MI actually registers elephants; the MA figures represent ‘sightings’ or elephants seen by veterinarians and officials. There is no coordination between the two ministries and no attempt to correlate the two sets of numbers. Further, the quality of coverage in the field varies widely over the whole country even within each ministry; Lair (1988) wrote, “For both ministries, the efficacy of the registration-listing process probably varies greatly from province to province.”

Ministry of Interior

The Ministry of Interior annually publishes a book in Thai, pramuan statiti ngaan kaan thabian pii, which best translates as ‘Compiled Annual Statistics for the Year.’ This book of tables lists by province fourteen parameters ranging from the number of divorces to the number of handguns, including the number of draft animals: horses, cattle, water buffalo, mules, donkeys, and elephants. (See Table 19 for the elephant numbers for 1994.) These statistics are compiled from data sent by provincial offices to the Registration Division, in Bangkok, of the Local Administration Department (LAD). Provincial offices gather the data while issuing a pre-numbered document, called dtua ruupphaphan in Thai, as required by The Draught Animal Act of 1939. Owners are required by law to register their elephants at the age of eight.

Table 19: Domesticated elephants listings of the Ministry of Interior, 1994 ¹

¹ The source is the Local Administration Department, MI (Anon., 1994c.) Complete data for 1994, including elephants by gender and registration status for each province, is given in Appendix 2.

² The original publication gives a total number of 433 unregistered males, but adding the individual listings by province gives 453, the figure used here. The national total changes to 3,565 from 3,545.

The dtua ruupphaphan is a simple form of about half a page to be filled out by a LAD official. It includes a side-view drawing of an elephant and blank spaces for noting the elephant’s distinguishing characteristics. Though dtua ruupphaphan best translates as ‘document of physical characteristics’, the term will subsequently be quite freely translated as‘registration papers’ since that is the most central of its three different functions: identification, proof of registration, and proof of ownership.

Table 20: Domesticated elephants per province, Ministries of Interior and Agriculture, selected years, 1980-1994

¹ Provinces are strictly ordered by number of elephants descending from MI data for 1994, to 1986, to 1980; after the last MI listing, the same chronological criteria orders the MA data. The original data (Anon., 1980; 1986b; 1994c) is listed by province in Thai alphabetical order.

² MA sightings are given as a percentage of MI listings for the year 1994. It mainly points to matters of management, with low MA numbers possibly indicating minimal veterinary care and high numbers indicating either sites with much work for elephants or poor MI efforts.

³ This column shows all provinces where MA (Anon., 1985b; 1992; 1994d) has more sightings than MI has listings, possibly signifying enough unlisted elephants to significantly effect total national numbers.

Three years of data sets (Anon., 1980; 1986b; 1994c) taken from the MI’s ‘Compiled Annual Statistics’, sometimes augmented by Ministry of Agriculture data, are presented in Tables 19 to 23, each table arranged to highlight a particular management perspective. In the original documents the MI’s figures for domesticated elephants are given in two separate tables, “Registered elephants” and “Unregistered elephants,” each table listing elephants by province with a column for males and females; the sums of those two tables are given in Table 19. (The full data, including sex, is given in Appendix 2.) Henceforth, the numbers used in the following discussion, unless otherwise specified, are the sum of the registered and unregistered elephants for each province, as in Table 20. Registered and unregistered elephants, hereafter referred to as ‘listings’, have been combined for two reasons: first, in any broad discussion it is awkward to constantly give figures for both classes, and, second, because provincial officials must have had good reason for accepting the existence of the animals presented as “Unregistered.”

The percentage of registered elephants has increased somewhat, up from 68.1% in 1980 to 76.5% in 1994. The sex ratio is healthy, with 0.86:1 males to females in 1994.

Some perplexing questions arise from the nature of the data: If even the sex as well as the number of unregistered elephants are precisely known for each province, why are these animals not then registered? And if they are precisely known, then how many more elephants have totally avoided being listed? Evidence exists, particularly for certain provinces, suggesting significant numbers of totally uncounted elephants, but this is best discussed elsewhere. (See “Ministries of Agriculture and Interior compared,” page 175.)

The LAD’s data gathering is at present largely an act unto itself, a bureaucratic artefact of the legally mandated issuance of registration papers. After rearranging the data to highlight key perspectives (provinces by number of elephants, elephants by region, etc.), the data begins to raise unanswerable questions. The data is insufficient to be used for any larger management purpose such as analyzing population dynamics or assessing demographic trends. Clearly, the information gathered during the registration procedure needs to be both tightened and expanded so as to gather more data essential to long range planning.

The quality of the data varies greatly not only from province to province but also over time, according to the diligence of local officials and the willingness of local people to register. People engaged in criminal acts, such as buying smuggled elephants, might try to escape registration and the attention of the authorities, and even many owners with nothing to hide try to avoid registration on general principle. A veterinarian recently saw 12 elephants in a single village in the province of Phayao, where the MI listed only 16 elephants for the whole province in 1994, and was told that there were many others nearby {Phongkum, 1996}. Systematic interviews of provincial officials could shed much light on the accuracy and implications of numbers for both the present and the recent past.

Probable actual numbers

On two counts it can reasonably safely be assumed that actual numbers are somewhat higher than the MI listings (the sum of registered and unregistered elephants). First, evading registration or even operating with false papers is not difficult, particularly since elephants are not required to be branded or otherwise individually marked. Second, there are always many as yet unregistered calves because owners are required to register calves only at the age of eight; the LAD does, however, keep a list of calves under eight (banchi luuk khawk). (Some owners do choose to register calves younger than eight, primarily if the owner wishes to move a calf past Livestock Department quarantine stations separately from its mother.)

A few ‘phantom’ elephants are registered fraudulently, the easiest technique being simply to fail to report a death, which effectively leaves a vacant registration paper waiting to be used for a physically similar elephant smuggled in from a neighboring country. Although a problem, there are relatively few such registered but non-existent elephants.

Assuming that all MI listings represent living animals, and further assuming that 250 elephants is the least possible number for calves and other unlisted animals, there are probably no fewer than 3,800 domesticated elephants in Thailand, and possibly 4,000 or more.

Population trends or changes in registration efforts?

Thailand has 76 provinces and it would be unreasonable to expect equally complete and accurate listings from all provinces in all years. Thus, when analyzing numbers which change more than expected for a province over a spread of years, it is often not clear whether anomalies signify a genuine change in numbers as part of a population trend or whether anomalies reflect only an improvement or a lapse in registration procedures. Some illusory declines reflect the tenure of a lazy senior official and some rises reflect the efforts of an energetic official.

Table 21: Changes in Ministry of Interior listings in selected provinces between 1980 and 1994¹

¹ Sources and data are the same as Table 19. All provinces which had MI listings of over one hundred elephants in any year are cited.

² The MA figures (1994d) are given for comparison.

Three provinces with phenomenal rises in listings between 1980 and 1994 - Surin (+90%), Tak (+59%), and Mae Hong Son (+50%) - are probably due to more complete registration than to an influx of elephants. Elephants have always been present in large numbers in all three provinces but something, perhaps poor roads or insufficient officials or even simple indifference, hampered effective registration. Deforestation and the abrupt shift from a largely barter economy in 1980 to a totally cash economy in 1994 may have forced many owners to leave home in search of work, thus necessitating registration papers to be able to travel freely. (At home registration papers were normally not essential until the owner wanted to sell.) In Surin, in the author’s experience, there has certainly been no massive influx over those fourteen years. In Tak and Mae Hong Son, both remote and sleepy provinces in 1980, higher listings in 1994 are nearly all registered rather than unregistered, as seen in Table 22. Surin, Tak, and Mae Hong Son probably represent more energetic registration efforts; the possibility remains open for Tak and Mae Hong Son, however, that illegal logging has attracted an influx of elephants from other provinces and even from other countries. (See “The North,” page 178.)

Table 22: Registered and unregistered elephants in three provinces, Ministry of Interior, 1980 and 1994¹

¹ Local Administration Department data (Anon., 1980; 1994c).

While slow declines in MI listings are not only plausible but expected, severe declines inevitably raise many questions. Did many elephants listed in 1980 in the northern provinces of Sukhothai, Petchabun, and Uttaradit - which by 1994 had dropped to 10%, 18%, and 30% of 1980 levels - move to other northern provinces? What can be the reason for the drastic declines in 1994 listings in two southern provinces - Surat Thani (38% of 1980) and Nakhon Si Thammarat (34%) - over 14 years?

Only speculation is possible; no hard information exists on the movements of individual animals because no procedure exists for tracking registered elephants which have been moved from one province to another. Speculation proves most fruitful thinking in terms of regions.

· See “Apparent population shifts by region,” page 175.

Ministry of Agriculture

The Department of Livestock Development (henceforth ‘Livestock Department’, as it is most often called) of the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives (MA) annually issues a publication which translates as Yearly Statistic Reports (in Thai, pramuan statiti prajam pii) which gives sightings for each province as gathered by each Provincial Livestock Office and then processed by the Statistics Branch of the Planning Division. Three years of data - 1985, 1992, and 1994 - are presented in Table 20 (Anon., 1985b; 1992; 1994d). While the MI registrations are mandated to take place in the province of the owner’s legal domicile, some MA sightings are elephants in their home province but others are elephants working in another province (or are simply in transit). Obviously, there is some possibility of double counting, with different ministries seeing the same elephant in different provinces.

Ministries of Agriculture and Interior compared

The two ministries’ divergent criteria for gathering data make it impossible to draw exact correlations between the two sets of data. Nonetheless, the MA data is invaluable for pointing out possible anomalies in the more stringent MI data. There are two different ways in which the MA and MI data help to elucidate each other.

First, the MA sightings must reflect the degree of contact with domesticated elephants in each province, and MA sightings significantly lower than MI listings likely indicate an inactive Provincial Livestock Office. Very low sightings by the MA as shown in Table 20 are found in Loei (the MA’s 1994 listings are only 6% of the MI’s), Petchburi (10%), Krabi (16%), Surat Thani (18%), Uttaradit (21%), Chumphon (25%), Nan (26%), and Buriram (30%).

Second, in most provinces where MA numbers are higher than MI numbers many of those elephants are likely not listed by the MI in that or any other province. MA sightings in 1994 outnumber MI listings in fifteen provinces, to the amount of 541 animals. In several provinces the MA’s higher numbers are easily explained by elephants which have left home to work at tourist venues: Chonburi, Phuket, Samut Prakan, and perhaps to some degree Sukhothai. But even counting Sukhothai’s few elephants, only 105 animals have been sighted by the MA in these four ‘tourist provinces’, leaving 436 MA sightings in provinces where MI listings are so low as to be difficult to explain. MA sightings are startlingly high, for example, in Ranong where the MA sights 215 elephants but the MI lists only 20; it is hard to imagine circumstances where the MA could manage to sight so many elephants while the MI lists so few. Chiang Rai is surprising, first, because the MA sights 126 elephants while the MI lists 12, and, second, because while the MI listings nose-dived between 1980 and 1994, the MA sightings more than doubled between 1985 and 1994. (Could this be an instance of MA veterinarians treating elephants working at illegal logging in one province while being legally registered in another?)

The only irrefutable conclusion to be drawn from a comparison of MI and MA data is that both procedures need to be improved and that the two efforts should be linked so as to clarify conflicting data. Although both agencies possess uniquely valuable resources, neither agency alone is equipped to make a perfect job of registering elephants and monitoring their movements. Lair (1988) wrote: “Numerous anomalies suggest that there should be some effort to coalesce, or at least coordinate, the efforts of the two ministries. Two separate efforts can initially be rationalized by their value as a [independent] cross-check, but it would be far better if the two sets of data were used to actually correct each other.” A coalescence of data between the two ministries would have been chaotic in the days of paper documentation but would be quite simple given contemporary computer and communications technology.

· See “Conclusions: Registration,” page 189.

Apparent population shifts by region

Over the last 15 years Thailand has apparently experienced some shocking population declines regionally and some disturbing shifts both within and between regions. Table 23 arranges data so as to enable easy comparison of regions over time.

Logging, whether legal or illegal, must surely be the impetus for most major demographic trends. Foresters with good understandings of the rates and the years in which various forests were logged might be in a better position to speculate on the motive forces behind domesticated elephant movements than are people generally knowledgeable about elephants. The best way to explore the question would be for each province or region to enlist the support of foresters, MA veterinarians, and LAD officials; and to then have them meet and thrash out opinions in search of a clear conclusion. Perhaps stored records at the provincial offices of the MI and the MA (particularly papers related to travel) could help clarify shifting populations.

Table 23: Domesticated elephants by region, Thailand

¹ All data is from the LAD (Anon., 1980; 1986b; 1994c). An “na” means ‘not applicable’ because not yet declared a province.

² This column gives the percentage rise or fall in elephant numbers in 1994 compared to 1980. Percentages are given only for populations of more than 50 animals in any one year since small samples may mislead.

³ Livestock Department sightings (1994d), given for comparison.

Deforestation is a powerful demographic force. At the turn of the century forest covered 90% of Thailand’s total land area (Kashio, 1997). Ngampongsai (1989) wrote, “Some 53% of the country was still under some form of forest cover in 1961. But by 1986, the percentage of forest cover had declined dramatically to 29%. In other words, Thailand lost about 24% of its forest during a quarter of a century.” The loss of forest must have forced some owners to move their elephants in a search for food and the loss of employment forced many others to move to find work. Still other owners have given up and sold their elephants into different regions - often to work at logging.

North

The north, which held about 75% of Thailand’s domesticated elephants in 1994, also has the country’s largest inaccessible and roadless areas, as well as the highest incidence of illegal logging. The north has maintained its numbers fairly well, dropping 24% between 1980 and 1994, but a few provinces have showed steep declines in MI numbers. Particularly low in 1994 were Sukhothai (down 89% from 1980 numbers), Petchabun (down 82% from 1980’s 467 elephants), Uttaradit (-70%) and Nan (-41%). Contrarily, two already large populations, Tak (+59% of 1980 numbers) and Mae Hong Son (+50%), showed spectacular rises which certainly did not come from a dramatically improved birthrate; the big question is whether the new listings, nearly all registrations, were elephants brought from outside or were simply resident elephants flushed out by a more energetic registration effort by provincial officials. (Or some of both.) To argue for higher numbers from stricter registration, both Tak and Mae Hong Son were extremely remote and sleepy backwaters as late as 1980 and higher numbers from more rigorous registration would not be surprising. To argue for many immigrants, both Tak and Mae Hong Son have much illegal logging, and the higher numbers could be logging elephants brought in from other northern provinces - such as Petchabun, Uttaradit, and Nan - or even Myanmar or the Lao PDR.

The explanation for the north’s relatively slow overall decline and for higher numbers in some provinces might even possibly lie in southern Thailand.

South

Very little is known about domesticated elephants in peninsular Thailand, even though in 1994 they constituted about 17% of the country’s population (in 1980 they had been 27%). Absolutely nothing has been written about the south in English. The south’s precipitous drop to only 44% of its 1980 MI numbers in 1994 is particularly disturbing because that drop, the worst of any region, is far steeper than can be explained by a low birth rate; even assuming a 2% annual natural decline (a 2% birth rate and a 4% death rate), the 1,394 elephants listed in 1980 should still have stood at about 1,050 elephants in 1994, not 616. Particularly severe declines were felt in Surat Thani (down 62% from 1980 levels), Nakhon Si Thammarat (-66%), and Phangnga (-77%). Where did these animals disappear to so mysteriously? There was no epidemic or any other obvious physical cause. Why is the decline so pronounced especially after 1986? The south suffered a decline of only 4.7% in the seven years between 1980 and 1986, but a 54% decline in the nine years between 1986 and 1994.

Two troubling possibilities present themselves. These conflicting scenarios ¾ massive sales to the north or lower registration ¾ richly illustrate the complexity of the situation on the ground and how essential it is to form some realistic understanding of recent demographics.

In the first and likeliest scenario, many elephants might have been sold into the north after the logging ban of 1989, spurred by extremely high prices for wood and, consequently, for elephants, the elephant being even more valuable under the conditions of illegal logging than legal logging. (See “Illegal Logging,” page 199.) Sales to the north would not have been distributed equally between sexes and age classes. After perusing Table 23, a perfectly sensible speculation to explain the south’s precipitous population decline and the north’s apparent stability is that the fittest portion of one regional population was sold into another region. If large numbers of elephants were sold into the north to log, nearly all were adults fit to work and there was proably a disproportionate number of males; of the animals left behind, a disproportionate number would have been young, old, unhealthy, difficult to control, or otherwise undesirable. Such a mass exodus of prime elephants, if it occurred, would have had an extremely destabilizing impact on population structures in the south. A corollary probability is that if the north received a massive influx of fit adult elephants and still managed at best a slow decline, then the birth rate in the north must be very low.

Second, and superficially more plausible, many of the south’s seemingly disappeared elephants might still be there, less natural attrition, but have simply ceased to register, their owners’ motivation being to evade authorities so as to freely engage in illegal logging. (The logging ban of 1989 had a stimulating effect on illegal logging in the south, particularly because it coincided with safer access to forests after the final defeat of a communist insurgency.) This hypotheses is appealing but procedural factors in registration argue against it.

Since there is no annual or periodic renewal of registration, registration papers are valid for an elephant’s life (or until it is sold or its owner changes residence), and thus theoretically any registered elephant spirited off into the southern forests between 1980 and 1994 should stay listed forever. Unless owners in the south reported a false death or sale to deceive authorities, disappearances into the forest should not have lowered MI numbers. Further, while it might seem logical for owners to not register elephants doing illegal logging, so as to not be implicated should their elephant be ‘arrested’, in reality the reverse is true. Most illegal logging elephants are registered because otherwise there is no hope of recovering them from confiscation. (If brought to court, the owner, usually an influential person, swears that he hired a mahout to take care of his elephant, never dreaming that the man, whose last name he cannot remember, would use it to violate the law.)

The decline of domesticated elephants in the south is very mysterious. The south’s MI listings, and probably actual elephants, have apparently sublimated at a rate far exceeding any other region. Local officials could probably do much to elucidate the south’s steep decline.

Northeast

The northeast, although holding only about 8% of Thailand’s domesticated elephants in 1994, is the region with the least decline. Probably a large factor in that stability is that most elephants in the northeast are owned by their mahouts, nearly always as an extended family. Some 85% of the northeast’s elephants are in the adjoining provinces of Surin and Buriram, which in 1994 listed 221 elephants between them, up from 134 in 1980. This increase was surely not a higher number of elephants but rather the result of a more rigorous registration procedure. The majority of owners are Kui, centered around amphur Tha Tum in Surin province, but Surin also has a Lao-speaking community of mahout-owners in amphur Chumphol Buri and even a sprinkling of Khmer-speaking mahout-owners.

Udon Thani has suffered a precipitous decline, down to 18% of 1980 numbers, probably because of deforestation, a country-wide problem especially destructive in the northeast.

The elephant population of the northeast is everywhere under great stress because of lack of work and because of the difficulty of feeding elephants, particularly in the dry season. Owners needing to make significant money from their elephants must leave the region to work. The only regular work in the northeast is in April and May during the weeks before Visaka Bucha, the Buddha’s birthday, when elephants can make good money joining in raucous but good-natured ordination parades.

One massive population shift out of the northeast occurred long before the data under discussion. Dr. Phongkum of the FIO states that upon delving into the histories of logging elephants in the north he found that many of the older animals had been sold out of the northeast in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s {Phongkum, 1996}. Undoubtedly they were simultaneously sucked into logging work in the north and driven out of the northeast by deforestation.

Central, southeast, and Bangkok

The southeast and central regions (including much of present day Bangkok) as recently as fifty years ago probably boasted domesticated elephant densities not much lower than anywhere else in Thailand - although by 1994 the center held only 2% of Thailand’s population. The main management distinction between the three sub-regions is that the elephants of the central and southeastern regions perform some traditional type of work or are unemployed; elephants in Bangkok and its environs work in tourism. Chonburi, geographically part of the southeast, is economically and socially a part of Bangkok, hosting three tourist venues totalling at least fifty elephants - although not a single elephant is registered there.

Conclusions: Apparent population shifts by region

In many provinces the MI data raises serious questions about apparent population shifts, questions which the data itself cannot answer, although the officials who gathered the data and other people knowledgeable about elephants and logging might be able to clarify matters somewhat. Especially in provinces and regions with pronounced anomalies, Thailand should make a serious attempt to gather all pertinent experts into fact-finding commissions to systematically interview officials about the implications of MI listings and MA sightings. (Examination of both the MI’s registration papers and the MA’s travel documents would take much time and effort but could reveal vital information.)

Clarifying the causes for population collapses in problem areas, especially the whole of the south and the declining provinces of the north, is critically important. The LAD data should for as far back as data exists, for all provinces and all years, be entered into a database so as to faclilitate detecting population trends and especially shifts between regions. Only improved registration which enables better tracking of individual elephants (and, through computers, elephants collectively) can track contemporary population shifts. Better registration, unfortunately, is most unlikely without changes in national law.

Legal status

In Thailand, the elephant in domesticity is presently both de jure and de facto a domestic draft animal. Some 98.2% of the population is in private hands and being worked and bought and sold in a manner in no way different from cattle, oxen, or water buffaloes. Nonetheless, in international wildlife law and in the hearts and minds of many Thai conservationists and animal lovers the domesticated elephant is also a wild elephant. The domesticated elephant has never gained from this unique dual role but rather has always lost, being given neither full protection as a wild animal in captivity nor full professional management as a domestic animal.

Laws relevant to elephants

Wild elephants have been protected since the beginning of the reigning Chakri dynasty in 1782, and even long before that all wild elephants had been deemed to be the property of the King (Lekagul and McNeely, 1977a; 1977b). Every Chakri monarch until 1921 had, as part of the Royal Household, a Royal Elephant Department (krom kochabaal) charged with the express duty to maintain all royal elephants, including procuring and training wild-caught elephants.2

The palace controlled the capture of wild elephants as best it could considering the distance and isolation of many wild elephant areas. The motive was partly economic, with either capture fees or some of the captives going to the palace, and partly strategic, to acquire the very best bulls during times of peace and to quickly procure large number of transport elephants in time of war.

Royal decrees, in later years published in the Royal Gazette (as they are to this day), periodically amended the basic laws. A story in the Bangkok Times on November 17, 1900, declared that “as a matter of law and custom” all wild elephants belong to the government, and thus, “There are three pages of the Gazette filled with these regulations for the preservation of wild elephants.” Of wild-caught elephants, “one in five of those so caught will be the property of the Government.”

Before considering the letter of the law in Thailand, it is important to understand how law is actually administered on the ground. Law is mostly arbited through traditional understandings mediated by policemen and officials vested with considerably more powers than their Western counterparts. The result is that written law, no matter how correct in theory, is rarely followed to the letter of the law. Most contretemps are settled by time-honoured customary law in the Thai manner, a practice with both good and bad aspects. The primary disadvantage is that the elephant does not always receive the strict protection it deserves. The primary advantage is that the police and judiciary are very adept at gathering information and reaching conclusions acceptable to the community and thus not resented as interference by outsiders. Thai customary law is very deep-rooted and thus even an ideal new law would not bring complete legal protection to all domesticated elephants without earnest community support.

The Wild Elephant Protection Act of 1921

In 1921 wild elephants came under the protection of a ‘special law’, a decree by King Rama VI (Vajiravudh). Called The Wild Elephant Protection Act of 1921, the law made all wild elephants government property with the Ministry of Interior as the representative of the absolute monarchy. Rather than to conserve a wild species in the modern sense, the primary intent of the law was to conserve a supply of elephants for logging and ceremony. (In earlier days elephants had also been needed for war, but by 1921 the last use of battle elephants, a tiny skirmish with Burma, was already 70 years in the past.) Elephants were not considered game animals, so hunting for sport was prohibited with the penalty for killing an elephant being a fine and imprisonment for up to three years (Lekagul and McNeely, 1977c). The 1921 law also required that all ‘white elephants’ must be presented to the King.

The Draught Animal Act of 1939

Under The Draught Animal Act of 1939 (phrarachbanyat sat phahana, B.E. 2482) the domesticated elephant was specifically classified as a draft animal (sat phahana in formal Thai) along with the cow, water buffalo, horse, donkey, and the mule. The Act of 1939 was written at a time when domesticated elephants were still found in great numbers, certainly several tens of thousands. Responsibility for enforcing the 1939 Act necessarily fell to the Ministry of Interior, the ministry that controls the police, because one of the prime motivations for creating the law was to suppress the rampant theft of cattle and water buffalo - and elephants. Registration thus became the duty of the LAD and its provincial offices.

The 1939 Act is still in effect today, although updated by over fifty years of instructions on implementation called kot krasuang or ‘ministerial regulations’. From its inception The 1939 Act made it mandatory for all owners of draft animals to register their animals with the LAD.Draft animals are required to be registered at different ages according to the animal’s species and sex; the age for registration of elephants is “going into the eighth year,” the oldest by far for any animal. This provision specifying the age of mandatory registration is the only section of the 1939 Act (other than fees, which are paltry) in which the elephant is treated any differently from the cow, the water buffalo, or any other draft animal. Like them, the domesticated elephant is clearly considered to be private property.

The sole intent of the 1939 Act is to define the rights and obligations of ownership. Five sections deal with subjects such as changing ownership, using elephants for security for loans, moving domicile, registration fees, etc.

The greatest shortcoming of the 1939 Act for modern management purposes (beyond the difficult question of jurisdiction) is that it imposes no obligations on owners to treat elephants properly. There are no provisions prohibiting cruelty, overwork, or unsuitable employment. As stated by Lair (1988), “Elephants in Thailand are basically private property to be treated howsoever the owner wishes.” This conception of the elephant as property is mirrored in other government realms; to this day, in inter-ministerial understandings between the Ministries of Interior and Agriculture regarding property confiscated from illegal loggers, elephants are classified as upakorn (‘equipment’) along with oxen, trucks, chainsaws, walkie-talkies, etc.

The Draught Animal Act of 1939 quietly held stead for over fifty years with nobody giving a thought to the legal status of domesticated elephants. In the interval, two bodies of law applying to wild elephants were passed by the Thai Parliament and signed by the King. The first law, the Wild Elephant Protection Act of 1960, had absolutely no impact on domesticated elephants except a slight increase in the fee to capture a wild elephant. Lekagul and McNeely (1977c) imply that the major force of law remained with the prior Law for the Conservation of Elephants of 1921, the so-called ‘special law’, but that, “Unfortunately, even the special law is not well enforced.”

The Wildlife Reservation and Protection Act of 1992

The passage of The Wildlife Reservation and Protection Act of 1992, however, soon provoked conservationists to turn their eyes to the status of the domesticated elephant. (The Act is in Thai called phrarachbanyat sanguan lae khumkhrong sat paa B.E. 2535, and is henceforth called ‘The Wildlife Protection Act of 1992’ or ‘The WPA of 1992’.) In 1994 an informal coalition of “elephant-loving NGOs” and environmentalists suggested that the domesticated elephant should be excluded from The Draught Animal Act of 1939 and included in The Wildlife Protection Act of 1992. The concept of applying to elephants in captivity a law devoted to protecting wild animals is very pleasing to conservationists, seeming to promise absolute protection.

The legal obstacle to bringing the domesticated elephant under The WPA of 1992 Act is that in defining ‘wild animal’ (sat paa), the Act very specifically states that the term does not apply to species required by The Draught Animal Act of 1939 to register as draft animals, nor to their offspring born in captivity. This exclusion is phrased very oddly indeed because while the law does not once use the word ‘elephant’, the elephant is clearly the animal intended because none of the other draft animals, all genetically altered for millennia, has a wild relative with which it could ever be confused. (Except just perhaps for the few remaining wild water buffalo, but even there the wild and domesticated animals have a quite different appearance.)

A close reading of The WPA of 1992 leads to two prime conclusions. First, in many instances the law, by Western standards, is not particularly clear, probably because traditionally such a law is seen primarily as a master framework on which to attach the ministerial regulations (kot krasuang) which define the duties required of civil servants. The intent of The Act of 1992 is not to establish premises on which to steadily build case law, the intent of most Western law.

Second, the intent of the parts of The WPA of 1992 pertaining to captive animals is to control the trade in protected wild animals (and the products derived thereof), and to regulate the captive breeding of protected wild animals by commercial businesses. These provisions were never designed or intended to apply to domesticated elephants, which in practical terms are little different from other draft animals except that elephants must normally move around to find work.

The possibility of using The WPA of 1992 to protect domesticated elephants poses so many complex questions that rather than lengthily examining both sides of many separate issues side by side, it makes sense to, perhaps exaggerating a bit, succinctly make the strongest possible arguments both for and against inclusion.

Arguments against the inclusion of domesticated elephants

A strong case can be made for why the domesticated elephant should not be included in The Wildlife Reservation and Protection Act of 1992. The WPA of 1992, just like The Draught Animal Act of 1939, has absolutely no provisions for penalties or confiscation in cases of owners conducting unsuitable work or severe overwork, much less mechanisms for preventing subtler forms of abuse such as premature weaning, keeping infants as solitaries, chaining elephants for long times, etc. Stipulations in The WPA of 1992 for licensing, breeding, buying, selling, and moving protected species would, if strictly applied to elephants, be not only extremely restrictive but, worse, ultimately unenforceable. The law divides wild animals into two types, “reserved wild animals” (sat paa sanguan) and “protected wild animals” (sat paa khum khrong), and for the elephants the nuances of enforcement would depend on how they were classified; the inclusion of domesticated elephants in the law might force Elephas maximus to be moved from “protected” to “reserved,” which is even more restrictive. Probably only wealthy entrepreneurs could meet many of The WPA of 1992’s requirements, and many conservationists and NGOs have questioned the domesticated elephant’s possible inclusion, fearing that some provisions could greatly impair the owners’ and mahouts’ ability to make a living. The provisions on travel, for example, could be interpreted to require owners to seek the written permission of the Director General of the RFD for any “transitory movement,” which makes good sense for rare animals or animals destined for international trade but would clearly be ludicrous every time a domesticated elephant left home. Even more unreasonable, strict enforcement would subject thousands of elephant owners to a lengthy licensing procedure before they could breed their elephants. Most absurd, if applied to the letter of the law, the 1992 Act would seem to require owners, mostly poor villagers, to surrender their elephants to the RFD; owners who refused would be committing a crime. Such an extreme will never happen, both because the RFD could not provide for over 3,000 elephants and also because such a mass confiscation is the goal of neither the law, nor the RFD, nor of society at large. Nonetheless, if, as many people wish, domesticated elephants were included and the law strictly applied, The Wildlife Protection Act of 1992 would be a nightmare not just for thousands of owners of domesticated elephants in Thailand, but also for the RFD.

Arguments for the inclusion of domesticated elephants

An equally good case can be made to explain why the domesticated elephant should be included in The Wildlife Reservation and Protection Act of 1992. Placement alongside wild elephants feels conceptually and morally right. One very useful aspect of The WPA of 1992 is that it requires licences and the RFD would thus be empowered to scrutinize owners for suitability, a screening procedure impossible under The Draught Animal Act of 1939, where anybody who comes along must be registered. One RFD official {Tunhikorn, 1996} pointed out that bringing all elephants under the 1992 law would close the loophole of easily absorbing illegally captured wild elephants, calves in particular, into the domesticated population; he added that another loophole closed would be the ability of people with fresh ivory to protest that it came from a domesticated elephant, a problem that has left Thailand open to criticism on CITES grounds. As for strictness of application, it can be argued that The WPA of 1992 need not be so restrictive as described in the section above because several provisions give the Director General great leeway in determining policy {Srikrajang, 1996}. Section 26 in particular allows the DG to waive some of the most restrictive aspects if the intent for keeping a wild animal is to survey, conduct research, protect, or breed wild animals. Another beneficial effect of inclusion of domesticated elephants would be greater involvement by NGOs, given the RFD’s long and productive history of working with private organizations. The empowerment of the RFD would also facilitate a seamless interface between the management of the wild and domesticated elephant subpopulations.

Objective analysis of the opposing arguments above shows that neither law is appropriate. Clearly, to adapt either The Wildlife Protection Act of 1992 or The Draught Animal Act of 1939 to protect and manage domesticated elephants would not only be incredibly complicated but would also violate the spirit of either law. The Draught Animal Act of 1939 could more easily be amended, but only by lengthily giving special privileges to one eccentric and aristocratic species amongst a barnyard of more plebeian animals. It would be much more appropriate and efficient to write a special law devoted solely to the domesticated elephant’s unique needs.

· See “The need for a special law,” page 185.

One class of domesticated elephants does indisputably deserve full legal protection by the RFD under both The Wildlife Protection Act of 1992 and CITES: elephants smuggled illegally into Thailand. Wildlife law for these elephants takes clear precedence over the law on draft animals. But in any case the RFD lacks the vast resources needed to police this shadowy trade, and very few elephants smuggled in from Myanmar, Cambodia, or the Lao PDR have been confiscated by the RFD. Outside of its own prescribed areas, the RFD is poorly equipped to do law enforcement.

Phlai Petch: A case study

The domesticated elephant’s legal status, a non-issue for many decades, in late 1995 suddenly and briefly flared into a contentious public debate in both the Thai and English language press. The Bangkok Post of October 16, 1995 headlined: “Cash demand to end elephant’s decade in chains.” The elephant in question was a 23-year old bull named Phlai Petch, ‘Tusker Diamond’, which had been kept by itself in a Buddhist temple, nearly always on chains, since purchased as a calf of nine months.

Phlai Petch is a walking showcase of a complex of problems newly arisen in modern times: physical and psychological aberrations from premature weaning, malnutrition, poor veterinary care, years in isolation, lack of training, and lack of exercise. His story begs the question of what, in Thailand, constitutes cruelty to animals generally and to elephants in particular, and whether law should be used as an instrument to prevent and punish cruelty. Cruelty is difficult to define anywhere but especially so in Thailand, where a large and vocal urban middle class mostly espouses the same humane values as the contemporary West while in the countryside, given the constant struggle to survive, there is little room for sentimentality towards animals owned primarily to make a living.

The plight of Phlai Petch had worried animal lovers and conservationists for some time. Over the prior year various organizations including the RFD had tried to negotiate with the abbot but he steadfastly refused to part with the animal, as was fully within his rights under The Draught Animal Act of 1939. The situation came to a head when it was noticed that Phlai Petch was being permanently tethered to a tree caught in long-standing floodwaters, and that his right foreleg had a wound caused by the tethering chain. At a press conference, Phongsak Vejjajiva announced that the Wild Animal Rescue Foundation wanted to buy the elephant but lacked the 100,000 baht (US$4,000) demanded by the abbot. (The abbot said he needed money to buy a baby to replace Phlai Petch, a dreadful prospect noted by many observers.) Mr. Vejjajiva “bitterly attacked present animal protection laws and said the elephant is not regarded as a protected animal in Thailand but a draft animal which anyone could obtain and exploit.”

The very next day, also on the Bangkok Post’s front page, the Minister of Agriculture was quoted as saying he “was in favour of a [new] law with penalties for people who restrain wild animals in this way.” The minister generously offered to donate 100,000 baht of his own money so that the foundation might buy Phlai Petch, but by that time the essential issue had already been obfuscated. The abbot had, entirely by himself, decided that Phlai Petch was a white elephant and must be given to the King. (Determining whether or not an elephant is truly a white elephant invariably involves many experts for many months.) Even as Phlai Petch’s seemingly crystal clear case became ever muddier, his story made Time magazine and the nightly television news in the US reported that an elephant was being kept in chains by a “cruel monk.” In fact, the beleaguered abbot was genuinely fond of Phlai Petch and could at worst be criticised as misguided or out of step with the times.

What promised to become a rising hurricane of indignation spearheading legal reform thus ended up as a non-story, leaving in abeyance the domesticated elephant’s legal status, at least in the public’s eyes. Phlai Petch’s saga made it clear that the legal questions are a non-story simply because they are too complex to succinctly convey in the popular media and too complex for there to be any easy answers. The practical value of Phlai Petch’s day in the sun was primarily to provide a public forum for NGOs to raise consciousness, to garner public support, and to greater influence government.

Legally, Phlai Petch’s plight made it clear that The Draft Animal Act of 1939’s lack of any provisions prohibiting cruelty made it impossible for the police to invoke the Act to prevent abuse. Article 381 of the Criminal Code could be invoked but its provisions are inappropriate, being intended primarily to prevent cruelty to household pets; in any case, Article 381 is very rarely used by the police. The RFD was totally powerless because the domesticated elephant is specifically excluded from being considered a wild animal by The Wildlife Protection Act of 1992. The legal status of the domesticated elephant in Thailand thus remains in an unhappy limbo, and this is the major importance of Phlai Petch’s story.

On December 29, 1996, Phlai Petch managed to free himself from his chains, as he had several times previously never coming to any harm (Sirorattanakul, 1996). He wandered to a nearby community “where his presence caused a commotion.” The police were called in, and their sirens and traffic sounds caused Phlai Petch to panic. He “went berserk” and damaged parked vehicles. Ten or more policemen fired a fusillade of over 100 rifle bullets before Phlai Petch fell into a canal and died. Many witnesses said that he was trying to make his way back to the temple.

Conclusions: The need for a special law

Thailand in 1995 graphically illustrates the inevitable contradictions of classifying the domesticated Asian elephant solely as either a wild animal or a domestic animal. It is patently absurd to classify the Asian elephant, an Appendix I animal in CITES, as a draft animal and to thereby be obligated to apply to elephants a body of law written for domestic cattle, water buffaloes, horses, donkeys, and mules. But equally absurd would be to take an animal with a 4,000-year history with man (including 3,800 elephants in Thailand today) and classify it as ‘wild’, and to then be obligated to apply a whole body of law written to regulate wild animals (such as tigers, bears, pheasants, and crocodiles) being bred, bought, sold, and shipped by commercial wild animal breeders and dealers. The provisions of neither law can logically be made to fit the realities of domesticated elephants. Any modifications to either The Draught Animal Act of 1939 or The Wildlife Protection Act of 1992 would need be so extensive and so contrary to the spirit of either law as to much better stand alone.

· See “Pre-packaged programs,” page 259, for a brief discussion of model law.

Unprecedented degrees of inter-agency cooperation and even shared jurisdiction are urgently needed and they will require new law. As Lair wrote in 1986, “Thailand has all the preequisites for a successful integrated elephant management program; the lack ... is clearly ascribable to institutional shortcomings (specifically the failure to launch an inter-agency program) rather than to a lack of skills.” The failure of the Ministries of Interior and Agriculture to initiate a cooperative project comes at least partly from the resistance of any bureaucracy anywhere in the world to share authority with others, but in Thailand the schism is exacerbated by the fact that the two ministries are generally believed to be to some degree mutually antagonistic (Dhiravegin, 1978). The elephant’s welfare can easily be forgotten amidst institutional rivalry or animosity.

Another perplexing ethical if not legal question remains: How does the domesticated elephant’s in-country status reflect on Thailand as a signatory of CITES? Thailand is legally bound to honor all CITES provisions on international trade in elephants, and this the RFD does quite well, as empowered by The Wildlife Protection Act of 1992. (Lyster [1985] says, “Treaties are normally implemented by national legislation, and national law is much easier to enforce than international law.”) It remains ironic, however, that while in the international trade it is virtually impossible for even the most reputable private party to export a Thai elephant to a model facility, in Thailand absolutely anybody, Thai or foreigner, can buy any elephant and then mistreat it or overwork it with full impunity from the law. (Of the elephants confiscated over the past 20 years while doing illegal logging, over 95% have been returned to their owners after court proceedings {Phongkum, 1996}.) Thailand’s national law for domesticated elephants is inconsistent with the spirit, though not the letter, of CITES.

Registration

Registration is of critical importance in Thailand, at the moment not so much to actually control elephants as to gather the biodata and socio-economic information essential to building an accurate picture of the problems faced by elephants and their owners. Well-planned registration is the unavoidable first step towards large-scale management of a gravely troubled elephant population.

Jurisdiction for registration and management

The question of legal jurisdiction and the right to determine policy - to manage - comes to a head with the first unavoidable prerequisite of any nation-wide conservation program: registration. A practical conclusion very easily drawn is that any efficient registration effort must be a cooperative project between the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Agriculture. Each institution has its own natural and historical interest, the MI in its mandated role as the enforcer of law regarding property and the MA in a dual role, the RFD as the caretaker of wild animals (even in captivity) and the Livestock Department as the caretaker of all draft animals. The legitimacy of all three of these interests is beyond dispute.

The Ministry of Interior

The Ministry of Interior holds the agency specifically charged by the Draught Animal Act of 1939 to register elephants. Law enforcement is another job of the Ministry of Interior, and its various police agencies would be indispensable in any concerted effort to register and regulate all of Thailand’s domesticated elephants. All officials and police working in provinces with many elephants should be educated on how to identify fraudulent registration papers, how to distinguish one elephant from another, how to enforce particular situations, etc.

The Local Administration Department (LAD)

The Local Administration Department (LAD) is the agency presently solely charged with registration. Unfortunately, the LAD by itself clearly lacks expertise in specialist realms, such as animal husbandry and wildlife biology, needed to register elephants in a way useful to science, conservation, and management. While some provincial LAD officials are very well-informed about local elephants and appreciate the importance of registration, many officials are ignorant of elephants and proud to be so, seeing the job as an unavoidable nuisance. (Elephants are only a very small part of the LAD’s job.) The LAD does have most of the physical resources needed to register elephants - vehicles, computers, staff, etc. - but in many provinces its heart is presently not in the job.

The LAD believed, at least as described by Inchukul (1994), that the department was “only responsible for the registration of elephants and had no duty to take care of the animal.” The LAD held that, “Although the department believes all domestic elephants should continue to be registered under this act, it maintains it cannot be responsible for checks on the lives of domestic elephants or ensuring the animals are not abused.” Because of its law enforcement role the LAD perhaps should be the agency to register elephants, but not if the LAD is gathering data purely of its own design and solely for its own purposes without cooperating with other essential agencies.

The Ministry of Agriculture

Two departments essential to domesticated elephant conservation lie within the Ministry of Agriculture and thus are used to cooperating. Further, many of the two departments’ professional staff graduated from the same universities and can call on long personal relationships.

The Royal Forest Department

The Royal Forest Department (RFD) is the agency which would automatically be charged with jurisdiction for domesticated elephants if, as many people advocate, the domesticated elephant was, as in Sri Lanka or India, included under national wildlife law. The RFD would in fact have a very difficult time if handed responsibility to as much as register domesticated elephants. (Full-scale management would be impossible; providing basic veterinary care, for example, would be incredibly costly and would take the department far beyond its expertise.) The RFD would, through no fault of its own, surely find itself in the awkward position of the forestry department in Sri Lanka; government through law assigned the DWLC jurisdiction to register domesticated elephants but government then failed to supply the funds and resources needed to do an expensive, specialist job. A comprehensive registration effort is a truly massive undertaking, at least by government standards. Not a single forest department on the subcontinent, including Thailand, presently has the manpower, the transportation, the expertise, or the funds needed. Further, to be effective in registration and, even more, management, the RFD would have to leave the confines of its national parks, plantations, and production forests to work in vast areas already in other agencies’ spatial jurisdiction.

The RFD does nonetheless possess one essential resource in a complete registration effort: the knowledge of biology needed to select the data to be acquired in registration and the ability to conduct subsequent scientific analysis. If registration should ever open the door to real management of domesticated elephants, then the RFD would also play a primary role as the interface between wild elephants, domesticated elephants, and forests.

The Livestock Development Department

When considered logically, it is quite clear that if the domesticated elephant in Thailand must fall under the jurisdiction of a single agency, then that agency should be the Livestock Department, which is responsible for other draft animals. (In 1994, when the Livestock Department had 2,502 elephant sightings, it sighted, and probably treated in some way, 7,637,350 cattle and 4,224,791 water buffalo.) The overwhelming practical arguments are that the elephants’ most pressing physical needs are much like the needs of their fellow draft animals, for which the Livestock Department already has massive resources deployed in the field. The Livestock Department has many veterinarians, veterinary technicians, and a vast pool of vehicles and drivers. The Livestock Department has sophisticated laboratories and even the ability to manufacture some vaccines. Further, the Livestock Department has Quarantine Stations strategically sited at ‘choke points’ on major highways throughout the country. These stations are ready-made checkpoints which could be invaluable in monitoring and regulating many aspects of elephant life, especially monitoring ownership and work patterns and discouraging the illegal smuggling of elephants from neighboring countries.

The Livestock Department is already the agency with which owners must arrange permission and travel documents before sending their elephants across a provincial border, at least when being trucked. The department therefore already has innumerable opportunities to inspect elephants and their registration papers.

While interviewing and conversing with government officials it gradually became clear that nobody strongly feels that the Livestock Department should become involved in the registration and management of domesticated elephants in Thailand. When asked why not, the answer is invariably something like: “Well - they’ve never been called upon to do anything before.” This is true because the Livestock Department’s primary mandate has always been to work with economically important animals and because at the time of the department’s inception domesticated elephants had few problems. To outside eyes, however, past inactivity is no argument against becoming a critically important participant in the future. The Livestock Department could and should assume a leading role in the conservation of Thailand’s domesticated elephants, although only after being armed with new tools, special training, and appropriate funds.

· See “Livestock departments and domesticated elephants,” page 254.

Technical needs for registration

Two purely technical challenges must be addressed before a proper registration effort can be launched.

Affixing an identification number

Registration means nothing if it is impossible to distinguish one animal from another. Elephants in Thailand are not presently required by law to be visibly marked and numbered, a lack which obviously poses great opportunities for confusion, obfuscation, and evasion. Official investigations are often stymied because without an external identification number it is impossible to determine whether a suspicious elephant has been illegally captured, illegally imported, fraudulently registered, stolen, previously confiscated in illegal logging, etc. Each registration document (or dtua ruupphaphan) does list age and sex and provides space for officials to enter identifying details (torn ears, the number of toenails, tusk shape, etc.), but this information is usually poorly entered and rarely sufficient to positively identify any given animal. Beyond the regulatory needs of officialdom, the ability to positively identify individual animals is also a prerequisite of any large-scale scientific management.

Both of the Thai NGOs working to conserve domesticated elephants have begun to implant microchips in the elephants which fall in their spheres of influence; but however useful microchips might be to scientists and veterinarians, they are of no value to MI officials or police or forestry officials who lack the expensive reading devices, which cost about 30,000 baht (US$1,200). Both law enforcement and science urgently require a simple, quick, cheap, painless, and unalterable marking technique - which is not easy (Lair, 1993).

· See “Marking for individual identification,” page 244.

Improved registration forms

Another technical aspect of registration in need of reform is the totally inadequate nature of the registration document, which fails to collect essential data. Fortunately, the one aspect of management on which all parties agree is the inadequacy of present registration documentation, and thus the need to devise new forms is not contentious. Hopefully any new forms will be painstakingly designed, will require far more data, and will be modular enough to include matters as diverse as veterinary medicine and employment; the form should be designed so that information can easily be entered into a database. Only with much fuller information, both biodata and socio-economic data, will it be possible to sensibly consider larger management issues.

Conclusions: Registration

In the past a shared handling of registration papers would have been a paper nightmare, but modern computer technology would now make it very easy for all three agencies in both ministries - and any other party desired, for that matter - to maintain the same registration data. Although based on the same core Ministry of Interior data, each agency would be free to maintain separate but linked data in its own sphere of interest: judicial proceedings, veterinary records, estrous cycles, tracking the lives of wild-caught elephants, etc. Lair (1988) mentions many problems badly in need of research that “would be much aided by a registration-listing database shared by all relevant agencies and researchers.”

Improved registration cannot be accomplished by heavy-handed enforcement because official pressure will motivate many owners to avoid registration or, once forced to register, to be highly uncooperative. Registration will best proceed with substantial positive inducements which tempt rather than coerce owners into participating. Such inducements should primarily include free veterinary care but also possibly help in breeding, insurance, support for cows with nursing calves, and many other possibilities.

· See “Inducements to voluntary registration,” page 243.

Institutions involved

Beyond the government agencies already described - the Local Administration Department (LAD), the Royal Forest Department (RFD), and the Livestock Development Department - Thailand has one more government agency and many NGOs involved in the conservation of domesticated elephants.

The Forest Industry Organization (FIO)

In 1969 the Forest Industry Organization (FIO), a state enterprise with highly profitable logging concessions all over Thailand, established the Young Elephant Training Center (YETC) in Lampang province. By 1977 the YETC had seven calves and the FIO owned 113 elephants as part of its timber dragging operations (Lekagul and McNeely, 1977a). The logging ban of 1989 hit FIO very hard, virtually overnight stripping the organization of its major source of income - vast swathes of primary forest. FIO is presently struggling to survive in the face of bankruptcy and making a creditable job of streamlining and modernizing.

FIO in mid-1996 owned 79 elephants: 35 show and ride elephants, 42 logging elephants, one retiree, and a man-killing cow so unrelenting and so clever that nothing useful can be done with her. The FIO also regularly keeps under temporary care about 20-25 elephants confiscated by other agencies in the course of illegal logging. Except for a few elephants in zoos, FIO’s elephants, although technically the property of a state enterprise, are the only state-owned elephants in Thailand, a responsibility of which the organization is well aware.

FIO has four spheres of operation which involve elephants: dragging confiscated logs, caretaking confiscated elephants during judicial proceedings, the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, and the Elephant Hospital.

As for hauling confiscated logs, all 42 of FIO’s suitable veteran elephants still work at skidding logs seized by police and forestry officials. These operations are the only legal skidding still practiced in Thailand except for very minor village-level work.

As for elephants confiscated in illegal logging, the FIO still maintains a facility at Pang La, the site of the late and much missed Young Elephant Training Center. Pang La, 55 kilometers east of Lampang, is now used to keep a very few FIO elephants useless elsewhere (because crippled, retired, pregnant, uncontrollable, etc.) and also to temporarily caretake confiscated elephants until a verdict is reached in court; only if the owner is found guilty of illegal logging will the elephant become state property and stay with the FIO. Of the approximately 200 elephants confiscated over the last twenty years, 97% have been returned to their owners {Phongkum, 1996}. (The owner usually pleads that he rented out his beloved elephant to some stranger, or hired him to care for it, never dreaming the scoundrel would break the law.) Pang La offers a unique window to observe the aftermath of amphetamine use.

The Thai Elephant Conservation Center (TECC) was opened in 1992, largely in response to the logging ban of 1989. Although financially strapped by the ban, the FIO remained bound by law to pay its mahouts and all the other costs of keeping elephants, so officials decided they must find a new way to make FIO’s non-logging elephants pay for their own keep. The YETC had for some years done a morning show, but there had never been any admission charge and, in any case, the isolated Lampang-Ngao road brought very few visitors, whether foreign or Thai. FIO decided to move all of its young elephants in training and some safe, older animals to Thung Kwian, a 317 rai (50.7 hectares) site on the main highway between the town of Lampang, the provincial capital, and the tourist mecca of Chiang Mai. Two or three well-presented logging demonstrations are performed every day. The TECC has experienced some difficulties as officials trained mostly as foresters struggle to adapt to new roles, but by far the biggest problem is having to compete with private entertainment venues while still constrained by strict civil service regulations forbidding, for example, advertising or paying guides the kickbacks on admisions and souvenirs which are standard at private venues.

The Elephant Hospital, the most unusual of FIO’s elephant operations, is a cooperative project between a state enterprise, FIO, and an NGO, Friends of the Asian Elephant (FAE). Each organization realized that the other possessed resources it itself lacked, the FIO lacking the ability to solicit public contributions and to rally popular support, and the FAE lacking land, physical infrastructure, and trained personnel. The two organizations have created a well-designed facility which treats not only FIO elephants but also many privately-owned elephants needing intensive care.

NGOs

Thailand has two private foundations or NGOs devoted strictly to the domesticated elephant. Friends of the Asian Elephant concentrates its field efforts in the north around the Elephant Hospital at the TECC, while the Asian Elephant Foundation of Thailand focuses on the elephants of Surin and Buriram provinces. Roughly the same size, each organization is recently formed and each is concerned with nation-wide elephant issues as well as the regional focus of the veterinary work done by its volunteers. The field work of both NGOs is excellent but the impact is so local as to barely make a dent in the nation-wide problem. (Like the work of all ‘little NGOs’, when viewed from the inside their job is huge and exhausting, deserving far more space than given here.) The primary value of such pioneering NGOs is to educate, to raise public awareness, to lobby government, and to serve as model for future efforts.

Every conservation NGO with an interest in wild elephants has volubly expressed its views and concerns on the status of domesticated elephants: Wildlife Fund Thailand, the Seub Nakhasathien Foundation, the Wild Animal Rescue Foundation of Thailand, the Thai Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and several others. Even the Tourist Authority of Thailand became worried about cruelty to animals after receiving 372 complaints from foreign tourists in 1993. All of the NGOs and even the government agencies operate in a cosmopolitan environment replete with fashion galas, charity golf tournaments, TV spots, celebrity sponsors, well-attended press conferences, etc.

The National Identity Board, part of the Prime Minister’s Office, runs a committee promoting conservation and coordinating communications between government agencies and NGOs concerned about elephants. This committee includes many government participants, such as the LAD, the RFD, the House Committee on Environment, etc.

Veterinary care and health

Thailand, which proudly sees itself as a Newly Industrialized Country, had a Gross Domestic Product of US$164 billion in 1994. Thailand enjoys an infrastructure that is the envy of all of its neighbors except similarly-placed Malaysia. For four days in 1995, for example, Bangkok presented the Second International Trade Fair for Intensive Animal Production, which hosted 200 exhibitors from 40 countries with the intent to “showcase the latest technology.” Two universities, Chulalongkorn and Kasetsart, graduate about 270 veterinarians annually. Thailand clearly has the wealth, the technology, and the professional knowledge to take care of 3,800 domesticated elephants. Nonetheless, despite the country’s many excellent veterinarians, actual veterinary care for elephants in Thailand is mostly quite poor.

Acceptable veterinary care

To set the stage for discussing the reasons for poor veterinary care in Thailand, it makes sense to establish some idea of the needed size and nature of any effort able to provide an acceptable level of veterinary care. A common sense idea of minimal acceptable veterinary care might well be to provide an annual check-up and inoculations at or near every animal’s home or work site. (In fact, because of either remoteness or secretive owners, 95% coverage would probably be the widest possible). Acceptable care should also comprise sufficient veterinarians, medicines, and equipment to be able to treat every elephant in Thailand through any illness or injury of middling cost and complexity. What sort of resources are needed to provide such care?

The required number of veterinarians is the key limiting factor because skilled elephant veterinarians are the only essential component which money cannot immediately buy. In Teak Wallah days veterinarians usually had about one hundred elephants under their care, depending on travel and terrain. Today in Myanmar, where medical care is nearly ideal, the ratio of veterinary workers to MTE elephants and contracted elephants is one person for every 85 elephants. In developed Thailand, a modern infrastructure ensures that some elements of elephant-keeping, such as communications and travel, are easier than in the past, but modern medicine also requires more time spent doing paperwork, attending meetings, treating special cases, etc. Assuming that 100 animals remains an appropriate case load, then it follows that Thailand’s approximately 3,800 elephants (or the 3,500 or so that might be reached), would require 35 veterinarians, each with a driver-assistant, backed by sufficient administrative staff. A minimum of 80 to 90 people would thus be needed to adequately care for all of Thailand’s domesticated elephants. (So many veterinarians would be excellent but problematic in a country where the ratio of human patients to doctors is 4,000:1 nationally, and in some rural areas 100,000:1 [Bhatiasevi, 1996].)

To fund and build such an effort from scratch would severely tax the resources of even a huge government agency, such as the Livestock Department. For an NGO, to fund and build such an effort would prove impossible unless it could miraculously grow to roughly twice the staff and many times the budget of Wildlife Fund Thailand, the country’s oldest and largest conservation NGO. Clearly, the vast resources needed to provide acceptable veterinary care country-wide will require new players (particularly the Livestock Department), new funding sources, and unusual alliances.

If Thailand should opt for state-of-the-art techniques, veterinary care would be astronomically expensive. Benirschke (1980) notes that “the gap between the sophistication of human medicine and care for exotic species is narrowing.” Recent advances in radiography, ultrasonography, dental surgery, and the treatment of fractures, for example, all require very expensive equipment and training. Early efforts in Thailand should therefore concentrate on preventative medicine and the promotion of better everyday care by keepers.

Reasons for poor veterinary care

Five primary reasons explain how, despite Thailand’s high standards of veterinary medicine, most domesticated elephants receive inadequate veterinary care, both in quantity and quality:

1. Government has no program.

2. Few veterinarians in private practice deal with large animals in rural areas.

3. Graduates are usually unwilling to work at government salary scale.

4. Few veterinarians, whether civil servants or private, have sufficient special knowledge.

5. Owners are most often poor, ill-informed, and superstitious.

No government program

Neither the LAD nor the RFD is equipped to provide veterinary care, and what logically appears to be the most appropriate agency, the Livestock Department, has never had a mandate to care for domesticated elephants. Up until 1986 the Livestock Department did vaccinate a few elephants, averaging 28 elephants a year between 1980 and 1986 (see Table 18, page 168); but since 1987 the department has apparently not vaccinated a single elephant, at least officially. Nonetheless in 1992, the Livestock Department did vaccinate 4,728,271 water buffalo, mostly against haemorrhagic septicaemia, showing it has the capability if called upon (Anon., 1994c). The Livestock Department currently has no formal program for treating elephants, although in the provinces some erratic, quasi-official support does reach elephants through the dedication of individual veterinarians and officials.

The Livestock Department is a sleeping giant, the only Thai government agency with any hope of delivering country-wide veterinary care. (See “The Livestock Development Department,” page 188.) Even the Livestock Department’s massive resources could not immediately provide 35 full-time veterinarians along with administrators, drivers, and equipment; but with extra funds, special training, and specially written publications, there is no doubt but that the department could soon be doing an excellent job. Even before being formally charged with responsibility, the Livestock Department should be encouraged to attempt a structured, large-scale outreach program directed towards privately-owned domesticated elephants, particularly those of poorer owners.

Few veterinarians in large-animal practice

Thailand has relatively few veterinarians in private practice who specialize in large animals, which is unfortunate because in rural areas the general rule is that the veterinarian who treats water buffalo and cattle also treats elephants. Since the Livestock Department provides much preventative care to large domestic animals, there is not a strong incentive for aspiring private veterinarians to establish a practice based on the draft animals, particularly elephants, owned by poor people.

Graduates unwilling to enter government service

Certainly the best elephant veterinarians in Thailand are all civil servants, but unfortunately very few of them work full-time with elephants and, in any case, few of them are young. A growing trend in Thailand over the past five or ten years has been a kind of in-country ‘brain drain’ (samong lai) with recently graduated veterinarians shunning the insecurity of private practice and the poor pay of civil service positions for lucrative corporate jobs in Thailand’s huge agro-industry. (In 1994, for example, Thailand exported 10,286,360,000 baht or US$411 million in livestock products, even before preserved meats and animal oils [de Silva, 1995].) This internal brain drain runs across the board in the technical professions: medical doctors, engineers, computer programmers, etc. Whereas a young veterinarian entering government service in 1996 might expect a salary of just over 6,000 baht a month (US$240), his counterpart in the private sector (a poultry producer or pharmaceutical firm, for example) would get about 20,000 baht (US$800) a month, plus bonuses and commissions, and probably a new car as a sweetener {Mahasavangkun, 1996}. Consequently, Thailand presently has only one newly-entered civil service veterinarian working with elephants, and that young man knew he was making a sacrifice when he took the job.

Insufficient elephant-specific experience

Schmidt (1978) wrote, “Due to their unique anatomy and physiology, elephants ... have a small but distinguished variety of unique medical problems, solutions for which cannot be found anywhere in standard textbooks.” Besides bringing “unique medical problems,” treating elephants also brings unique human problems. Anywhere in the world, most veterinarians who have never worked with elephants are flummoxed when called upon to do so. Not only is the animal huge and often dangerous, but one’s largest instruments are useless, dosages are not known, elephants are not discussed in the standard manuals, etc.

For example, non-elephant veterinarians have been known to try to drip medicine into veins in the ear; unfortunately, a drip in an elephant’s ear often leads to infection and necrosis, sometimes destroying large pieces of tissue. (See Photo 9, p. 33.) Another unique medical problem suffered by Thai elephants is tusks cut off by thieves, a problem unknown before about 1981 but one which soon assumed epidemic proportions. (Photographs of elephants taken before the early 1980s invariably show tuskers with beautiful intact tusks.) In northern Thailand about four out of five tuskers have had their tusks ‘stolen’ by being sawed off in the middle of the night, usually exposing the pulp-and-nerve cavity to infection and often to tetanus. (See Photo 10, p. 33.) Tusks and the circulatory system are just two areas where extensive elephant-specific knowledge is essential for veterinarians.

Thailand has many excellent laboratory veterinarians and biologists to support veterinarians working in the field. Several people, all civil servants, are researching numerous aspects of the elephant’s reproductive biology, but most particularly artificial insemination (AI). Thailand’s challenge is clearly to get veterinarians into the field, not into the laboratory. Unfortunately, probably no more than four or five veterinarians in Thailand have the deep knowledge of the sort gained only by long years in the field - or about one ‘elephant vet’ for, at best, every 760 elephants.3

Owners are ill-informed and superstitious

“Many elephants [in Thailand] suffer debility or even death for the lack of proper care - though the cause is nearly always the owner’s poverty or ignorance, not cold indifference,” wrote Lair (1986). By “ignorance” is meant not stupidity but rather lack of knowledge, despite the fact that most mahouts and owners do have some modern education. Very few owners and mahouts in Thailand actively disbelieve in Western veterinary medicine, although far too many mahouts’ normal response to their elephant’s illness is traditional herbal medicine coupled with magic (sayasaat). Anon. (1984b) gives a good description of herbal medicine for domestic animals, including elephants, in Thailand. Herbal medicine, although not as effective as Western veterinary medicine, can be a valuable adjunct to it.

The greatest need is inoculations against common infectious diseases. Many private owners, especially poor mahout-owners, do not greatly concern themselves about getting their elephants vaccinated. The scant vaccinations administered by the Livestock Department since 1987 are frightening given that very few owners will actively seek out private veterinarians to vaccinate their elephants. In any case, only a few veterinarians in private practice are prepared to vaccinate elephants. NGOs do vaccinate some elephants.

Not all lack of modern treatment springs from superstition. Many owners simply lack money, particularly because the veterinarian will be expensive, normally having to make a long trip to the elephant. Other elephant owners might have good reason to distrust veterinarians, having earlier suffered a bungled treatment by a veterinarian inexperienced with elephants.

Lair (1986) suggested the creation and free distribution of a basic health manual written to the mahouts’ educational level and translated into Asian languages. Thailand would be a perfect place to test such an effort because of widespread literacy, the ease of distribution, and the traditional Thai openness to modern ways.

· See “Care manuals,” page 248.

Conclusions: Veterinary medicine

Thailand has never been forced to extensively manage its domesticated elephants in the past. Historically, through many different kingdoms and many dynasties, the palace has always protected and regulated both wild and domesticated elephants, but very high numbers in the past ensured that the palace never needed to worry about the health of individual elephants. Today’s declining numbers suggest that the time has come for central government to provide basic veterinary care for every domesticated elephant in Thailand.

Lair (1986) suggested developing “fully equipped mobile veterinary teams to make annual visits to each animal.” The Friends of the Asian Elephant now runs a program called sattawaphet sanjorn or ‘Travelling Veterinarians’. Any systematic provision of nation-wide veterinary care must create a corps of specialist veterinarians through seminars, scholarships, training sessions taught by ‘elephant vets’, liaison with Western experts, providing access to the literature, etc.

· See “Veterinary care and health,” page 247, for region-wide conclusions.

Recruitment

Throughout Thai history most recruits have probably been captured in the wild, although given the tolerant attitude toward breeding in all the Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia, many calves were also born in captivity. The best guess for the historical ratio between captures and captive births for Burma, Thailand, and countries further east might be 50:50. There is a psychological, if not numerical, truth here because breeding and catching have long been equally possible.

Capture with high levels of exploitation has ocurred since well before the earliest mention of trading in elephants in the 13th century. One royally sponsored kheddah in 1681, if the observations of Tachard (1688) are to be believed, employed over 40,000 men as beaters; unfortunately, he gave no figures for elephants captured. The last authentic kheddah under royal auspices occurred in 1906, but there was a largely staged and ceremonial kheddah in 1938. (There was for long a Royal Elephant Department, a part of the Royal Household, but that ceased to exist in 1921, and it seems that all of its records of captures have been lost or destroyed.) Various traditions of mela-shikar were until a few decades ago practiced all over the Khorat plateau of the northeast (Giles, 1930b).

The last legal capture was in the early 1970s, but a small amount of illegal capture still occurs. In 1984 in Thailand, for example, two elephants appear to have been captured outside of Phu Kradung National Park in the northeastern province of Loei. One mela-shikar hunter from Chaiyaphum boasted of having captured over 20 elephants between 1966 and 1988, a few in Burma but mostly all over Thailand including the far south (Kanwanich, 1988). As harmful as such captures are to wild elephants, one cannot help but feel grudging but genuine sympathy and respect for any catchers using traditional techniques. On the other hand, from the Myanmar border there are convincing stories of wild cow elephants being shot dead so as to capture their calves. Despite such horrors, illegal captures within Thailand are so few as to contribute very few recruits to the domesticated population, although those few captures must have inflicted grievous damage on some small and fragmented wild populations.

Significant numbers of smuggled elephants, a few older animals but many calves, are entering Thailand from Myanmar and, to a lesser extent, Lao PDR and Cambodia. Spurred by tourist and entertainment venues, recent demand for calves has been great. A Kui mahout well versed in the market told the author in 1995 that each year about fifty calves are smuggled into Thailand. The birth rate in Thailand is at maximum about 1.8-2% a year (Lair, 1988), or at very most 60 or 70 animals a year. A well-placed veterinarian says that there are no more than two births a month, or about 25 calves a year {Phongkum, 1996}, so Thailand’s birth rate could even be well under 1%. Thailand thus probably more than doubles its recruitment rate by supplementing births with illegally smuggled elephants. Improved registration, including mandatory registration soon after birth, would make the recruitment picture clearer.

Rather than depend on illegally imported elephants from its poor neighbors as a sort of reproductive subsidy, on first thought it would seem wise for Thailand to consider methods to increase the low birth rate. Lair (1982) wrote, “The breeding of elephants in captivity [in Thailand], traditionally discouraged because of the long time ... it takes calves to reach working age, should be encouraged through Captive Breeding Centers and supporting decentralized, local private breeding.” In fact, before encouraging breeding calves in 1997 it would be wise to consider the likely fate of the not-so-cute adolescents in ten years and the unemployable adults in twenty.

Prices

In northern Thailand in the late 1960s elephants were a good investment, according to Kunstadter (1978), who added that, “The demand for them has increased, and the price rose from perhaps 9,000-10,000 baht (US$450-$500) in 1964 to 13,000-16,000 baht (US$650-$800) or more for an adult elephant in 1969.” The Karen reared young elephants “for sale or trade at markets as far away as Lampang [170 km away].” Storer (1981) states that in 1981 elephants could be bought for US$1,250.

Even allowing for decades of inflation, it would seem that elephants are presently more expensive than in the past. Current prices in 1996 are somewhere between 100,000 baht (US$4,000) for an unfit, older, or troublesome elephant, and 200,000 baht for a highly desirable animal. (By the time of printing, prices as high as 300,000 baht were being bandied about.) The average price is thus about 150,000 (US$6,000). A very strong 25 year old tuskless bull who had already killed three mahouts was bought for 160,000 baht (US$6,400) in 1994 (Phongkum, 1995). (The purchaser, a mahout-owner, soon became the fourth victim).

Traditionally, the most expensive animals were bulls, then cows, and finally calves, which could do no heavy work for years to come. Calves in the old days were often considered such a nuisance that they were sold very cheap or even given away. Disregarding superb logging elephants destined for illegal work, a disturbing recent trend is that the historical price structure has turned topsy-turvy with very young calves being quite expensive (because of their attractiveness at entertainment venues), cows still in the middle (because of their general tractability), and bulls, except for particularly docile animals, the cheapest (because there is no legal logging where their behavioral problems matter little and their superior strength matters much). The author knows of one 18-month old calf smuggled in from Myanmar in 1994 which was bought for 150,000 baht (US$6,000), taught a repertoire of basic ‘tricks’, and re-sold after six months to a new tourist venue for 220,000 baht (US$8,800). Training thus produced a value-added profit amounting to nearly 50% of the purchase price, or almost US$3,000 income for six months of part-time work.

The illegal market for young elephants along the border with Myanmar is so orderly that, by contacting certain well-known brokers, buyers can order in advance exactly the calf they want, by sex and by age. Buyers must specify whether they want a ‘grass elephant’ (chang yaa) or a ‘boiled-rice elephant’ (chang khao tom); a grass elephant is a young elephant that will eat grass, whereas a boiled-rice elephant will have been weaned from its mother so early that it must be fed mostly on boiled-rice as a milk substitute {Phongkum, 1996}. A healthy grass elephant costs about 80,000-90,000 baht (US$3,200-3,600) whereas a healthy boiled-rice elephant costs only 70,000-80,000 baht (US$2,800-3,200), the price difference being based on the assumption that on average the grass elephant is likelier to survive.

· See “Prices” (page 123) and “The market” (page 124) for Myanmar.

· See “Trend to a preference for young calves,” page 205.

The market

Thailand once had a flourishing export trade in elephants, selling 1,138 animals overseas between 1950 and 1969 (Lekagul and McNeely, 1977a). Thailand exported at least 694 elephants between 1965 and 1974, as seen in Table 18. Bain and Humphrey (1982) state that 223 elephants were exported between 1967 and 1971 although Livestock Department figures show 350 (Anon., 1985c). Some exported elephants are not shown by Livestock Department figures in Table 18; Storer (1981), for example, states that in 1979 two young females were sent to Ireland by the Dusit Zoo. Nothing was ever recorded, or at least saved, regarding these emigrants’ final destinations and it is thus impossible to say where they now are - except the four corners of the earth.

The few elephants exported from Thailand in recent years have all been government-to-government trades or gifts. A ten-year old tusker was sent to Sri Lanka in 1986 to join in Buddhist religious processions, reflecting a centuries-old, two-way interchange deeply rooted in the Theravada Buddhism shared by both countries. In 1995, when a newspaper story announced that four calves were to be gifted to a government zoo in Israel, public outrage caused the number to be reduced to two. Government-to-government exports are nonetheless so few as to have little detrimental effect on the health of the Thai population and, in any case, are entirely legitimate (except to haters of zoos) under Article VII(6) of CITES, which exempts the non-commercial exchange or gifting of ‘specimens’ between bona fide scientific institutions.

An instructive economic perspective on prices and the contemporary market is to consider the total monetary value - the macroeconomics, as it were - of Thailand’s domesticated elephants. Assuming that all transactions could be kept secret so as to prevent spiralling prices, to buy every domesticated elephant in Thailand in 1996 would cost about 570,000,000 baht or US$22,800,000. This sum assumes that Thailand has 3,800 elephants with an average price of 150,000 baht (US$6,000). Twenty-three millions dollars is a vast sum from a conservation perspective, but it is not quite enough at 1996 prices, for example, to buy a 26-million dollar F-16 jet fighter, of which the Royal Thai Airforce has 18 planes. (To put an international spin on it, the 1990 budget of the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park could have bought all of Thailand’s domesticated elephant population three times over.) Twenty-three million dollars is a tiny 0.42% of the foreign exchange garnered annually by tourism, or 0.014 % of the Gross Domestic Product. (From a microeconomics perspective, it takes two average elephants to buy a new lightweight pick-up truck.)

Such fanciful comparisons serve as a brutal reminder of how totally insignificant the elephant has become economically, although only fifty years ago it was still an irreplaceable mainstay of the traditional Thai economy. Such comparisons also suggest that a huge modern economy could painlessly contribute relatively small sums to help manage Thailand’s domesticated elephants, for elephants helped to lay the foundation of much of today’s wealth.

None of the above comments are intended to suggest that vast amounts should, or even could, be spent on ‘saving’ Thailand’s elephants. Much money will be needed to conserve domesticated elephants, but finesse is far more important than throwing money at the problem.

Employment

A hundred years ago, the transportation of goods and people employed far more elephants than logging ever did, probably engaging 20,000 animals in northern Thailand around Chiang Mai. Giles (1930a) wrote, “In the everyday life of the people, elephants not many years back were very generally used for the transportation of heavy articles of commerce and today are still used for dragging timber from the forests and for freeing timber jammed by floods in the streams.” Today the very few jobs in transport are giving elephant rides at show venues or trekking tours for foreigners. (As late as 1993, however, in Kanchanaburi province the author saw over ten elephants which had just stopped regularly carrying tin ore from a mine near the border with Burma, a trade route probably centuries old.)

· See “Employment (I),” page 24.

Even as elephant numbers decline, job opportunities are declining - both in number and in kind - at an ever faster rate, and thus all job markets are highly competitive, as they probably have been for much of history. Fierce competition means that employers are usually able to pick and choose and ultimately to force rock-bottom rates for both elephants and mahouts. Except for star entertainers and elephants working in illegal logging, it is difficult for one elephant to pull in more than 15,000 baht a month (US$600) and that money must usually be spread between several mahouts, each of whom must feed many mouths.

Working with elephants - at least as anything other than a big owner - has never been lucrative, with even the glorious teak days being at best of a distinctly feast or famine nature. Just making a living, much less turning a profit, has become very difficult in modern Thailand because elephant work is so scarce. Where barter economies thrived a few short years ago, today everybody has a pressing need for hard cash. The difficulty in making money has a trickle-down effect on the elephants, sometimes compelling even good and conscientious mahout-owners to overwork their elephants or to put them to inappropriate work.

Referring to Karen owners engaged in piece-rate logging, Kundstadter (1978) suggests that low income and high costs had combined to make it very difficult to squeeze a profit out of elephants skidding logs. He implies that most of the profit was “capital gains” earned by recouping the purchase money and owning the elephant. But an elephant itself is a dubious profit unless one sells it, which only few people would do since they would either have to immediately buy another elephant or turn to another kind of work.

It is impossible to overemphasize the damage brought to elephants by the shortage of well-paying, humane work. The decline in legitimate jobs has thrust elephants into dangerous clandestine logging and caused calves to be kept as solitaries at entertainment venues. For a few recent years many owners wishing to humanely divest themselves of unprofitable elephants were able to donate them to the FIO’s Thai Elephant Conservation Center, but this model facility must now turn elephants away because it cannot afford to hire more mahouts. Some unemployable elephants have been released inappropriately near settled areas, causing problems for local people, and some elephants have been slaughtered for meat {Phongkum, 1996}. The possibility of imminent mass divestitures is a question which should greatly concern the Thai authorities and public. Poor people will quit keeping elephants when there is no profitable work, and if there are no buyers, the fate of the elephants must be very obscure.

Past logging

Starting as early as 1835, the local chao, or feudal lords, of Chiang Mai leased teak forests to Burmese contractors (Ramitanondh, 1985). In 1893 the main rivals for teak around Chiang Mai were the Borneo Company and the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation (Bristowe, 1976). Timber companies with concessions would arrange with contractors to skid logs to a roadhead, and contractors often made subcontracts with other elephant owners. Field conditions of concessions varied widely, so the business demanded great skill and a certain amount of nerve. As late as the 1980s, the Karen played a large part in logging operations all over the north. Around Mae Sariang in 1978, according to Kunstadter (1978), “most of the contractors are Karen, and the ownership and driving of elephants is practically a Karen monopoly.”

No statistics have ever been published on how many elephants worked at logging, and the surviving archives of defunct teak companies are the only hope of shedding any light on the matter. Ingram (1971), who wrote definitively on the economy of Thailand, including the teak business, says, “The Thai as private individuals have not written much about the facts and figures of their own economy ... and before 1900 government records are few and far between.” The teak trade seems to have peaked in the five year period of 1905-1909, when a yearly average of 122,000 cubic meters were exported. Trying to use the available numbers on exported teak to extrapolate the number of elephants employed is difficult because much uncounted teak was consumed internally and, further, because teak was only a modest portion of total timber production (for example, in 1947 only 17%). Ultimately, the number of elephants which once worked in the timber trade is thus anybody’s guess. Numbers must have been at most in the low thousands, nowhere near the number of elephants employed in the less glamorous but, before railways, equally useful job of transport elephant.

Of the recent past, Lair (1986) states that, “A preliminary analysis of current teak production figures indicates that all of the teak legally logged in 1982 [32,278 log tons] could have provided work for only about 215 elephants.” Three years earlier the figure had stood at 99,777 log tons, an amount sufficient to employ over 600 elephants. Another perspective on declining work in the timber trade is that while in 1982 Thailand’s domesticated elephants numbered about 80% of Burma’s, Thailand’s teak production was only 2.7% of Burma’s. Of course, softwoods and hardwoods other than teak are logged, but it is clear that as long ago as 1982 there was a pronounced decline in demand for logging elephants.

Two ‘Teak Wallah’ books treat elephant logging in northern Thailand rather disappointingly. Campbell (1935) is short on detail, and knows little about elephants. Marshall (1959) obviously knows elephants but unfortunately spends many pages making charming observations about Thai rural life.

Illegal logging

The most dangerous and debilitating form of work for mature elephants in Thailand is to skid logs in the vast illegal logging industry centered in the north. Given the rugged terrain, the lack of roads suitable for heavy equipment, and the need for large logs (to produce lumber of marketable size), the illicit trade would be almost impossible without elephants.

The clandestine logging industry existed long before the total legal ban of 1989; in 1982, for example, the RFD reported that it had confiscated two elephants. In 1988, the department confiscated four elephants, along with 153 cattle, 313 bicycles and 778 motor vehicles. (The ratio of vehicles to elephants does not indicate relative numbers used but rather the elephant’s superior ability to melt away into the forest.) A total ban on logging came with a government decree to assuage public outrage following the damage inflicted by a fierce three-day tropical storm which struck southern Thailand in November of 1988. In the province of Nakhon Si Thammarat mud flows, landslides, and flooding left 236 people dead and 305 missing, 4,952 homes lost, and great damage to roads and bridges; Brooks (1993) says that some people believed the damage was the result of “illegal and unwise logging.” In response, the decree of 1989 basically made all logging illegal as of January 1990, although Achakulwisut (1992) quotes a villager as saying, “A few weeks after the ban, the forest almost exploded with the roaring sound of chainsaws.” Suksamran (1994) echoes that perception, saying, “But no sooner had the ban gone into effect, log poachers were busy devising ways to beat it.”

In northern Thailand, the illegal loggers have a bundle of tricks to avoid arrest: souped-up trucks, spotlights to blind pursuing officials, nails cast on the highway, and the use of scout vehicles (maa thang) equipped with high-tech electronic gear for eavesdropping on police communications. (The loggers’ communications have leapfrogged beyond the police by using conventional mobile phones, which are far more expensive but far more secure than law enforcement’s radios.) Bribery to officials manning checkpoints is rampant; the deputy governor of Phrae province, Sak Kiatkong, was quoted as speaking of “hundreds of thousands of baht paid out to officials manning the checkpoints to allow passage of illegal log-laden trucks....” When caught, little people go to jail but, according to Achakulwisut (1992), “At no step along the way can the real man behind the activity be reached.” To avoid elephants being confiscated, according to persistent rumors heard by one person interviewed {Salwala, 1996}, they are sometimes fed opium to keep them quiet when law enforcement officials are nearby.

The dire situation had long been known to the informed public but literally hit the headlines when a light airplane carrying a very important banker crashed alongside an illegal logging site, as proven by fresh logs and abandoned tools. In the Chae Hom area of Lampang province, according to Suksamran (1994), the situation became so serious, including the involvement of government officials and senior military officers, that an anonymous letter to His Majesty the King provoked the Royal Household Bureau to order a crackdown conducted jointly by the Ministry of Agriculture (including the RFD), the Police Department, and the Third Army region.

Illegal logging is very dangerous to elephants not only because of the physical hazards intrinsic to skidding but also because of the violence inevitably spawned by criminal enterprise. Numerous officials of the RFD have been killed trying to stop the trade (Anon., 1993a). Men working in such a brutal ambience are obviously most unlikely to take pity on animals.

Domesticated elephants have been thrust willy-nilly into this maelstrom, which is quite unlike elephant logging before the forests were closed. Prior to the ban, most local people, however erroneously, had seen logging as a sustainable source of income; therefore elephants, though often lightly overworked, were rarely dangerously overworked. Most upper-class owners and all mahout-owners closely regulated the amount of work done by their animals. But the 1989 ban simultaneously brought skyrocketing wood prices with a massive loss of legitimate jobs; desperate mahout-owners were forced to choose between working illegally, thus risking their elephants and their own freedom, or selling their elephants, which would probably continue logging but at the mercies of a hired mahout and an absentee owner.

Nobody knows the exact number of elephants (or men, or trucks, or specially-fitted mountain bikes) working in illegal logging but in 1992 just 13 villages surrounding Mae Yom National Park, an area heavily poached for teak, were estimated to hold more than a hundred elephants (Achakulwisut, 1992). The best placed observer from the law-abiding side of illegal logging, Dr. Preecha Phongkum, is a government veterinarian of 20 years experience in the north who does volunteer work with an NGO, Friends of the Asian Elephant. By treating many elephants logging illegally, he has gained unique access to this underground world. He estimates that there are at least 1,000 and possibly as many as 1,500 elephants working outside the law in the north {Phongkum, 1996}, just about half of all the elephants listed by the Ministry of Interior for the north. He regularly sees group of 30 to 40 logging animals (and some of 80 or more) all over the north and is usually told of another sizeable group nearby. He further states that a large majority of elephants logging illegally are bulls, the reason being that nearly all teak, which after girdling is light enough to float, was extracted long ago, leaving only dense and unfloatable hardwoods. Mai pradu (Pterocarpus macrocarpus) and mai daeng (Xylia dolbaiformis), Ironwood, are so heavy that only the strongest bulls can skid them. Dr. Phongkum states that most bulls employed are highly dangerous and many are man-killers, the risk being tolerated - even sought out - because only aggressive elephants possess the power and stubbornness to haul such difficult logs.

Elephants working at illegal logging will suffer far more injuries and deaths from dragging-related accidents than will elephants working under humane management, whether for forest departments or for private owners in less greedy times. Dragging logs over steep hillsides and rocky river bottoms is intrinsically dangerous even in ideal conditions but when elephants are worked at night to avoid the authorities or worked when exhausted, then accidents will increase astronomically. Many misused elephants ultimately become badly crippled in accidents, typically a tumble down a steep slope or a log sliding downhill to break a hind leg. While it easy to conceptualize that skidding logs can be performed only by strong and healthy elephants, there are at least some old, injured, and unhealthy elephants working at illegal logging. The Forest Industry Organization has for years cared for a succession of badly crippled confiscated logging elephants, including one bull with a badly broken back and another with a self-healed hind leg that must be dragged behind at a 30° angle.4 (See Photo 16, p. 35.) The author once saw an elephant with an equally grotesque, self-healed broken hind leg forced to work, and work hard, dragging logs.

A new cause of accidents over the last few years is that many owners and mahouts logging illegally have started to drug elephants with amphetamines. The powerful stimulant is given orally in tablet form, initially hidden in a tempting food such as bananas although elephants soon accept the bitter taste. Called yaa maa (‘horse medicine’) in Thai, amphetamines are illegal but widely available in Thailand, originally at petrol stations for long-haul truckers and factories for workers but increasingly lately for students as well. The police have launched a vigorous drive against the drug, but their efforts are unlikely to ever stop the drug from reaching elephants - particularly given the power of the bosses behind illegal logging.

When interviewed in a highly popular television program, a high-ranking RFD official stated that giving drugs to elephants to stimulate them to work harder was not uncommon. Both the English-and Thai-language newspapers have published a proliferation of articles about doped elephants; one story (Dithajohn, 1995) averred:

In May 1993, the country’s media reported the cruel abuse of numerous elephants by a tycoon in northern Thailand’s illicit logging operations. He had ordered his mahouts to feed amphetamines to their elephants to speed their work in dragging smuggled timber. Many of the elephants had become addicted to the drug.

Drug-taking is not limited to elephants. Milling the wood and transporting the cut lumber out of the forest is such hard work that many laborers also take large amounts of amphetamines. Tales of mahouts and sawyers running amok or driven mad are quite common.

Dosages for elephants are not much more than required for humans, which is not surprising since amphetamines work on the brain and the elephant’s brain, about 3 kg., is not all that much larger than a human brain. One tablet is enough to produce the desired effect initially, and even after addiction, the required dose rarely exceeds five tablets, which in 1994 cost 30-50 baht (US$1-2) at street prices and far less in wholesale lots. One mahout interviewed in 1995 said that tablets five times normal size are being manufactured especially for elephants.

Elephants certainly do become addicted. The author has four times witnessed confiscated elephants being unloaded from trucks as they arrived at the former Young Elephant Training Center at Pang La. Perhaps just a day, and no more than three days, after being cut off from amphetamines they were like no other elephants except perhaps those at death’s door. Walking slowly and stiffly but well enough if prodded, they rarely swung their tails or flapped their ears, as healthy elephants do constantly. Many addicted elephants, particularly those over forty, never recuperate, even with a regimen of good food and total rest, and one morning they are found dead by their mahout. A front-page newspaper story (including a sad photograph) told of a 40-year old cow elephant overworked and then discarded by loggers; brought to Ngao by sympathetic villagers, she collapsed and could not get back on her feet (Gray, 1996). It took four men and a big bull elephant to help her get upright, “her once powerful muscles flabby, her body skeletal. She managed to step forward slowly on wobbly legs.”

The veterinarian in charge of these confiscated elephants says that about 200 elephants have been confiscated over the last twenty years. About half of the elephants were ‘hooked’ on amphetamines, and of the addicted animals about one in five died after confiscation {Phongkum, 1996}. Amphetamines presumably played a role in both many elephant deaths and the many mahouts killed by elephants. Dr. Preecha Phongkum estimates that at present some 200 mahouts are killed in Thailand each year, with only fifty or so of those cases being reported to the authorities. (Many mahout deaths nowadays are because the men employed are not real mahouts but rather country boys taking risks for the good money.)

The abuse of elephants - and people - will cease only with the end of illegal logging, but the business is simply too lucrative. Profits are so high that even an elephant which dies within months of purchase is already amortized (a gruesome term in the context). Mahouts, mostly hired and mostly working at piece rate, have no interest in coddling the elephant; on the contrary, their best survival strategy is to try to gouge as much money as possible out of somebody else’s elephant. (And whereas a healthy man can easily work ten hours a day, seven days a week, such a regimen will soon kill an elephant.) Elephant owners, if not themselves working in the field, are normally in no position to supervise. Many elephants involved in illegal logging are owned not by a single person but rather by many shareholders, thus chang hun or ‘share elephant’ in Thai; most shareholders will never once see their elephant. An elephant with many owners goes unloved and unprotected, a piece of equipment no different from a chainsaw or a truck. Dr. Preecha Phongkum is quoted (Gray, 1996) as saying of logging elephants, “People treat them like a car - if it breaks down, they get rid of it and get a new one.”

Trekking tours

Transportation was undoubtedly Thailand’s largest employer of elephants until well into the 20th century, utilizing tens of thousands of elephants to transport both goods and people. Trekking tours are the last vestige of that once vast network.

In the north, trekking tours on elephant-back probably employ many tens of elephants at any one time. Using elephants as transport animals exhibits many aspects of eco-tourism: the work is traditional (carrying goods and people through mountainous terrain), mahout-owners often get a decent share of the profits, the work is done at or near home, and the elephants are normally able to find good food in a natural environment. Further, trekking uniquely provides suitable light work for many older animals unemployable elsewhere. Many of the mahouts in the trekking business are Karen, with some being mahout-owners and some working for wages.

Street-wandering in Bangkok

A form of work newly arisen over the last thirty years is that the Kui people of the northeast now seasonally bring elephants to wander the streets of Bangkok. At peak times between 40 and 50 elephants roam the streets of the capital of 8,000,000 people pulling in good money doing simple tricks, selling trinkets, selling food to be given to the elephants, and letting people walk three rounds under the elephant’s belly to bring good luck. Hard on the elephants, such urban vagabonding also brings definite risks to the men: armed robbers who know the mahouts are carrying all their earnings, official harassment, and the constant risk that an elephant might get hurt or killed by a vehicle. Equally disastrous, an elephant might even kill a spectator, as has happened at least once.

Street-wandering in Bangkok is now under threat because the Bangkok Municipal Authority, spurred by media accounts and complaints from NGOs and private citizens, has banned elephants from entering the city. The ordinance is well-intended but difficult to enforce because normally the police simply shoo the elephants off into the next police district. (Pity the poor policeman faced with administering the law; he probably sympathizes with the mahouts and, in any case, if he arrests the mahout, what is he to do with the elephant?) The people who wish to ban elephants from the city are sparked by a genuine concern for the elephants’ welfare, and, indeed, it is deeply disturbing to see elephants amidst the cars, the pollution, the heat, and the noise. Many animals, especially the younger ones, are noticeably under strain. But the hard fact remains that Bangkok is a prime source of cash in a country where it is very difficult to make money from elephants. All Kui mahout-owners are normally desperate for money, their whole life being a scramble to pay school fees and to clear last year’s fertilizer debts only in time to acquire new ones. Most mahouts go home to Surin for the annual rice crop, itself a measure of their poverty since there is little profit in growing rice.

The Kui come to Bangkok because of absolute need. The supreme irony of these men and elephants coming to Bangkok between rice harvests is that as recently as thirty years ago they would have trekked into the forests of Cambodia to capture wild elephants to rough-break and sell. Giles (1930a) foresaw the problem 65 years ago when he wrote, “The introduction of railways and roads, hidden by the dust of motor traffic, into the provinces of the Korat plateau and the seaboard provinces will in the course of a few years cause men to change their methods of earning a livelihood and the profession of elephant hunting will become a thing of the past. The new generation will know nothing of how their forefathers voluntarily faced the dangers of the hunt....”

· See “Kui,” page 214.

Another irony of urban vagabonding in search of cash is that while the public assumes that the elephants are starving in a concrete jungle, with some strategic thinking the city abounds with swamps, vacant lots, and construction sites which provide far better forage than what is available at home. Ecological conditions are so bad in Surin that every hot season there is little food and in some rainy seasons feeding areas are flooded, forcing owners to take their elephants wandering for much of the year. As Pittaya Homkrairart of the Asian Elephant Foundation of Thailand has been quoted (Inchukul 1995b) as saying, “the forests from which the animals usually seek their natural food products have been replaced with eucalyptus plantations [forced on the villagers].” Starting several decades ago, many mahout-owners in Surin have ceased to keep elephants simply because of the great difficulties in finding food for them near home (Sotesiri, 1972).

The question the mahouts have to ask themselves is: Where to go? Which place will best provide both enough food for the elephant and enough money for the men? Bangkok is by far the most profitable town but certainly not the only town. Banning elephants from Bangkok will not return them to some idyllic backwoods life but rather send them trudging along major highways far more dangerous (as witnessed by Honey) than Bangkok’s congested streets to visit poor provincial cities that provide much less income. Banning elephants from the city solves no problems but simply shifts problems to equally perilous places, although places where sensitive, self righteous Bangkokians will not be outraged.

The governor of Bangkok was quoted in a February 12, 1995, story in the Bangkok Post as saying that “if mahouts have a problem feeding themselves and their animals, they should apply for jobs in zoos or private parks in Bangkok rather than bring their elephants into the city.” Unfortunately, this suggestion is unrealistic because none of Thailand’s five government-owned zoos is prepared to provide food and space for another single elephant, much less many hundreds, and all of the tourist venues have all of the elephants they need. Further, many mahout-owners wish to maintain their rural lifestyle and they can hardly be blamed for that, particularly since country life is also best for elephants.

Allowing elephants into Bangkok is a very complicated and emotive question, not unlike whether to cull elephants in Africa or whether physical force is justifiable with North American zoo elephants. There are no easy answers. The one absolute certainty is that poor mahout-owners will simply stop keeping elephants when they can no longer eke out at least a survival income from them. ‘City people’ are quick to self-righteously call for bans or prohibitions while very rarely giving substantial material support to elephants or troubling themselves to learn about the mahouts’ struggle for survival.

(Shortly before going to press in 1997 the ban on elephants entering Bangkok seems to have become effective. Mahouts and owners interviewed in Surin greatly resent the NGOs which stimulated the ban, and many of the elephants which once ‘worked’ Bangkok have been sent to Phuket, a tourist center in the far south, where competition for work is very fierce and traffic is very dangerous.)

Entertainment and tourism

In 1994 Thailand was visited by 6,166,496 tourists who brought 127.8 billion baht (just over five billion US dollars) of foreign exchange into the Thai economy (Muqbil, 1995). Not surprisingly, tourism has put many elephants to work, mostly working in shows or giving rides to tourists, both foreigners and middle-class Thais.

Three areas each have several entertainment venues offering shows: Bangkok, Pattaya, and the north, centered around Chiang Mai. Thailand never having had a circus tradition, all performances fall far below the standards of a circus in Europe, North America, or India. Shows performed in the Bangkok area are fairly polished, shows in Pattaya often a bit rough, and the shows in the north are always downright rudimentary except for a polished demonstration of traditional logging at the FIO’s Thai Elephant Conservation Center. Many of the elephants at show venues, especially in the north, do not perform at all but rather give rides or simply stand around as set-dressing.

Approximately 300 elephants are employed at fixed show venues, about 85 in Bangkok and Pattaya and at least 220 in the north. This is approaching 10% of Thailand’s total population, indicating both the importance and the limits of tourism and entertainment as elephant work. (As for wandering shows in rural regions, their numbers are anybody’s guess.)

In the north there are three large venues with about 40 to 50 elephants each and many smaller ones. The largest venues in the Bangkok-Pattaya area have only about 20 elephants, and an educated guess would say that about half the elephants are owned by the proprietor of the venue while the other half are owned by mahouts working under contract. Generally speaking, elephants working at central region show venues are well cared for and the mahouts receive reasonable pay, the contracted elephants with the most behaviors or ‘tricks’ pulling in as much as 30,000 baht (US$1,200) a month.

In the north, the situation is not nearly so happy. At the larger show venues, most proprietors are purely businessmen out to cash in on the tourist dollar. Two or three places would seem to have the big money cornered, being swarmed everyday by tour buses and minivans; smaller venues depend on a drop-in clientele consisting of budget travellers and people with their own transportation. Many proprietors decide it makes more business sense to buy elephants than to endlessly waste good money paying mahout-owners, and one proprietor now owns about 90 elephants. Ownership by businessmen is generally bad for elephants since businessmen will rarely have either the ability or the conscience to hire good mahouts, pay them well, and then supervise them carefully.

Sadly, there are relatively few traditional northern Thai mahouts still working, most of them having graduated to better jobs. Many show venue owners hire tribals, often illegal immigrants, some with prior elephant experience and some without. Most often Karen but occasionally Shan, illegal-immigrant mahouts from Myanmar are particularly desperate and will work very cheaply, as low as meals and 500 baht (US$20) a month. Proprietors can easily squeeze illegals, being able to provide protection from the police. Even mahout-owners under contract are easily squeezed because of fierce competition for work; very few mahout-owners make more than 10,000 baht (US$400) a month out of an elephant in northern Thailand. Mahout-owners working on contract must pay for all supplementary food and veterinary care.

There is no insurance, whether for visitors, mahouts, or elephants. In one tragic instance known to the author, a mahout-owner and his family brought their elephant to give rides under contract at a barely developed performance venue at Mae Sa valley, near Chiang Mai. In the very first week, the elephant slipped off a dangerously steep walking path and fell to its death. The proprietor, although quite wealthy, gave the family 500 baht (US$20), just enough for bus fare home, and sent them packing.

Problems brought by performance

Performance is a new form of employment for Thai elephants, at least at large scale. Not surprisingly, performance has spawned a host of new problems.

Trend to a preference for young calves

A particularly corrupting effect of performance as a work type in Thailand is that the showman’s perception of what pleases the public has begun to distort buying patterns. Today’s show owners often prefer very young calves for two reasons. First, they recognize that most people see all calves as intrinsically ‘cute’ (while in fact some are quite dangerous) and most people see all adults as dangerous because of their huge size (while most are perfectly safe, at least those animals chosen to work in public). Many showmen feel, undoubtedly correctly, that the ‘cuteness factor’ of calves will pull in more money than will adults - and the younger the calf, the better. Second, for travelling shows, calves up to three or four years can be transported in light-weight pick-up trucks, which saves wasted time walking from city to city and is much cheaper than leasing the 10-wheel trucks needed to transport adults. Some calves are too large for pick-ups but small enough that three or four of them will fit in a 6-wheel truck.

An extreme example of the results of the preference for young elephants has occurred in the area of Ban Khai, near the provincial capital of Chaiyaphum. Coincidentally, Ban Khai is the community from which the RFD chose the mahouts and elephants sent to re-establish elephant keeping in Indonesia. (See “Cultural Dimensions,” page 87.) For years Ban Khai has been a sort of cottage industry sending small groups of elephants wandering all over the country doing simple performances which rarely progress beyond a hind-leg stand. (The real attraction to small-town Thais is, in any case, simply to be near the elephants.) In the past wandering groups mostly walked - a form of transport which costs nothing but time - and so elephants of all sizes were productive. Ban Khai until recently kept a healthy age mix of fifty or more elephants but now keeps primarily very young elephants. Whenever calves get too big they are sold, the money being used to buy new infants.

Early weaning

In a traditional setting the greatest pressure after birth was to get the mother back to her paying work as quickly as possible, but usually the calf was allowed to remain at her side. Calves had so little value that there was little reason to sell them, and thus the only motive for early weaning was to stop a calf from interfering with its mother’s work.

A truly insidious effect of the growing preference for young animals is that more and more calves are being weaned far too young in order to be sold into ‘show business’. Whether touring upcountry towns or simply standing in front of a hotel, mortality rates are probably very high among prematurely-weaned calves, “probably” only because there are absolutely no studies or statistics. The author has seen some tens of calves weaned between six months and a year and interviewed many of their keepers in the guise of casual conversation. All too often the impression has been that such calves had a 50-50 chance of survival.

In well-managed forest departments, to generalize for purposes of background, most veterinarians feel that weaning at three years is safest and best, although one eminent Asian veterinarian feels that calves can be weaned safely at one year (but only if all other aspects of care are excellent). In Myanmar, the calves of the Myanma Timber Enterprise are weaned at four or even five years {Mar, 1995}. So as to side-step long argument, let us assume that two years should be an absolute minimum for weaning and that three years is preferable.

Case studies

In a typical example, the author once acted as the agent buying and temporarily caring for a 14-month old calf which had been weaned at seven months and, at the time of purchase, had just finished seven months on the road doing ‘shows’. The calf, a male named luuk kob or ‘Tadpole’, was purchased by a private person, out of sympathy, to be donated to the Thai Elephant Conservation Center. Upon his post-weaning purchase, Tadpole had been separated from his mother, forced into a dilapidated pick-up truck with no proper support-stall, and driven off to spend a life on the highway. His health was soon severely damaged by drinking human-formula powdered milk (which often leads to diarrhoea and even death), eating too much sugarcane, and travelling hundreds of kilometers a week. (Tadpole was lucky only in having a companion, a perfectly healthy and robust 2-year old female.)

When the author first saw him, Tadpole was emaciated, with a hollow backbone and gaunt ribs, and his skin was thin, smooth, and paper-like. He had no appetite and walked with a listless stagger. His survival looked very precarious. The owner, who was not a mahout, kept asking for medicine to heal Tadpole, as if the calf was suffering from an infectious disease. A veterinarian called in also feared that Tadpole might not live. In the end, one of very few elephant good luck stories, Tadpole survived and today is a rambunctious and thriving young calf at the TECC, except for the lingering results of a calcium deficiency. (See Photos 5 and 6, p. 32.)

A similar tale occurred in March of 1995 when Bangkok’s Dusit Zoo was given a 6-month old female calf named Jieb by an anonymous donor. The zoo’s chief veterinarian, Dr. Alongkorn Mahanop, said it was impossible to determine if Jieb was wild-caught or captive-born, so it was impossible to ascertain the cause of her premature separation from her mother. Jieb was malnourished from being fed only bananas, and she suffered from inflammatory sores and a low immunity, probably from a lack of antibodies found in mother’s milk.

Jieb very likely represents the handiwork of a new class of owners who inadvertently cause young elephants to be weaned too early: wealthy animal lovers with no knowledge of animals. Kochabal (1993) tells the story of another elephant, Phlai Mongkol, which some 17 years ago was prematurely weaned and taken from its mother to become a wedding present. Mongkol was kept in a rural area that gradually became a suburb of Bangkok. Though now well cared for at the TECC, Phlai Mongkol, still suffers severe residual health problems, including the effects of malnutrition from having eaten only one kind of grass all of his life and aberrant behavior from having been kept for 15 years without even seeing another elephant. (See Photo 12, p. 33, and Photo 13, p. 34.) Mongkol’s story is reminiscent of that of Phlai Petch. One rich, hobbyist owner caused a calf, Pepsi, to die a lingering death from pesticide poisoning by feeding it only expensive but toxin-loaded vegetables bought in the market. (See photo 15, p. 35.)

Nowadays most Thais, at least most urban Thais, will feel that even though baby elephants are indisputably private property, there should be laws against premature weaning. Whichever law finally prevails - a modified Draught Animal Act of 1939, a modified Wildlife Protection Act of 1992, or a new special law - that law will be a failure if it does not specifically make it illegal to wean an elephant before the age of two, a perfectly sensible law, although undoubtedly difficult to enforce. A parallel law, far easier to enforce, would be to prohibit calves under the age of two or three being shown publicly for money except under exceedingly strict conditions: they are with their mothers, they are nursing, they have been properly transported, etc. The public could, as they do now, serve as informants against violators. Strict regulation of the exhibition of young elephants would eliminate the incentive for ‘showmen’ to pay high prices for young calves and thus eliminate the incentive for owners to sell them.

Mandatory registration very soon after birth is essential in order to monitor young calves with an aim to discourage premature weaning.

Calves in isolation

As a sub-set of the performance industry, one particularly heinous practice is to keep solitary calves to welcome guests to hotels and restaurants. (“Particularly heinous” because hoteliers are presumably educated enough to know better; further, hotel owners cannot plead poverty, as might excuse traditional owners desperate for work.) In 1991, one international hotel chain proudly advertised in an in-flight magazine that it kept “baby elephants” as “a uniquely Thai aspect” at all of its resort hotels in Thailand. Most of the keepers for these ‘hotel elephants’ are not real mahouts, but rather convivial young men chosen solely for their personality; usually they receive no salary but work for whatever tips they can charm or cajole out of guests {Phongkum, 1996}. Such young men mostly neither care for elephants nor do they know how to care for them. Rich people who buy calves as pets often keep them as solitaries.

Keeping calves in isolation amounts to psychological cruelty given that elephants, especially young ones, are such social animals. Marshall (1949), who worked for four years in the forests of Thailand, wrote, “It is axiomatic that the nearer a captive animal’s living conditions can approximate to those of its wild cousin the fitter it will be.” Keeping young elephants as solitaries is totally contrary to nature. When finally introduced to other elephants, elephants kept alone from an early age are invariably socially inept, at best. Most will remain abnormal until the day they die. A law is needed which strictly prohibits keeping young calves in isolation and regulates the conditions under which older animals can be kept alone.

A unique health problem which faces calves kept as solitaries is the lack of opportunity to eat the dung of other elephants. Calves absolutely need to eat dung to infect themselves with beneficial microbes, especially bacteria and protozoa essential to breaking down cellulose in the intestines, where nearly all digestion takes place. (Even adults will periodically eat other animals’ dung, most noticeably after a bout of diarrhoea or a heavy course of antibiotics.) Kochabal (1993) describes the life history and physical condition of an elephant, Phlai Mongkol, deprived of essential microbes as a calf.

Trend to secrecy

A subtle but insidious effect of the performance industry springs from the fact that it is fiercely competitive: if your animal knows more behaviors than the other fellow’s, you will make more money. Consequently, people who in the past would have cooperated naturally, perhaps being of the same tribe or village, are now often very secretive, particularly about helping to train. Some secrecy might be understandable in teaching marketable ‘tricks’ but the author knows of instances where people have refused to help teach a neighbor’s calf even to couch and to lay on its side on command, a posture essential to veterinary care. The performance industry is eating away at far older and more cooperative social patterns.

Sanctuaries

As a response to elephants in Bangkok, sanctuaries for elephants have been proposed by diverse organizations (not just NGOs but airlines, shopping malls, etc.) and a procession of highly diverse people (millionaires, members of parliament, actors, singers, policemen, etc.) Sanctuaries, for want of a better word, might seem an unlikely subject for discussion under employment, but it is important to remember that the primary intended residents of today’s sanctuaries, both functioning and proposed, are not sick, old, injured, or orphaned elephants but rather perfectly fit elephants, many adults, employed at unsuitable work.

Sanctuaries are a laudable goal but potential sponsors soon discover a mostly fatal flaw: they are extremely expensive to maintain. Even assuming sufficient start-up money for land and infrastructure, there still remains a huge monthly overhead in salaries because sanctuaries will succeed for healthy, privately-owned elephants only if the mahouts’ earnings within the sanctuary equal what they can make outside, such as working the streets in Bangkok or giving tourists rides in Phuket.

Consider that each adult elephant needs at least three mahouts to care for it when away from home; each man has his own family, so it follows that each elephant must substantially help to maintain three families. Assuming that each of three men needs to make a very modest 5,000 baht (US$200) monthly to survive, then each elephant must generate at least 15,000 baht (US$600) a month after expenses. To run a sanctuary large enough to rescue only the approximately 50 elephants normally working in Bangkok would thus cost 750,000 baht (US$30,000) every month in mahouts’ salaries - and once the news was out, such a sanctuary would be besieged with applications from many hundreds of owners with elephants either unemployed or under-employed. Administration becomes a problem. Thoughts must soon turn towards receiving tourists to generate income to meet costs, but a tourism operation large enough to be effective would not only require considerable investment and superb business skills but would also, near tourist centers, bring large sanctuaries into head-on conflict with long-established and highly successful commercial entertainment venues.

Sanctuaries have another often fatal flaw in that, being by definition fixed in place, sanctuaries in urban areas will require that food be brought to the elephants, an expensive business involving human labor, vehicles, fuel, etc. (Elephants will soon eat all the food at any fixed urban site.) For political and ‘ecological’ reasons, official sanctuaries will be placed in suburbs, which might or might not have enough food but are surely poor in cash income for mahouts. If the food brought to elephants is lacking in quantity or quality, the mahouts will find themselves totally legal but much worse off in both money and elephant food.

The Kui mahouts who appear to be haphazardly ‘wandering’ Bangkok streets are in fact efficiently finding forage for their elephants. Over many years these men have built an encyclopaedic knowledge of Bangkok, or a favored corner of it, much like urban pastoralists returning year after year to seek natural food in the same rich ‘meadows’: swampy areas, vacant lots, under freeways, etc.

The man-elephant relationship in this hostile environment can be seen as one of symbiosis. If the humans overwork or underfeed the elephant, they will - like an overly virulent disease - destroy their own host. The mahouts determine movements and survival strategy, constantly balancing two conflicting goals: to get the most money for themselves and to get the most good food for their elephants. Very complex trade-offs are involved because Bangkok’s residential areas and suburbs are rich in natural food but poor in cash while downtown areas are lucrative but pose problems both in finding food and setting up camp. The prime constraining factor is the travel between the work site and the rest site, primarily in time and energy expended but also in exposure to danger from traffic and from officials. Since much of the profit of being in Bangkok comes from selling food (sugarcane, bananas, cucumbers, etc.) for people to give to the elephants, the elephants regularly receive some high-energy foods that will keep them going for a varying amount of time, but they can only go for so long without real fodder.

Similar trade-offs between food, profits, and danger are faced by elephants in entertainment tourism work all over the country, not just Bangkok. The hazards of air pollution are certainly greater in Bangkok, but the author would suspect that actual traffic hazards are lower in Bangkok than many of the alternatives: wandering the highways of the northeast, being trucked to Phuket to wander dangerous rural highways, etc. Bangkok traffic is internationally famous for being slow and the metropolis’s drivers are far more wary and respectful of elephants than are reckless upcountry drivers. (Honey was struck in Lamphun, not in Bangkok.)

Sanctuaries are the superficially obvious answer to the problem of elephants doing inappropriate work. There is a ‘feel good factor’ because donors can see and touch the elephants, even be photographed with them. A lot of money goes into facilities or equipment which people can be seen to donate personally. Many donors are happy to regularly contribute money for elephant food - though often only to their elephant - but virtually no donors are willing to help pay for mahouts’ wages.

Individual sanctuaries, if they can manage to survive, are wonderful and useful places, but so long as sanctuaries rise and fall in piecemeal fashion they can never exist in sufficient numbers to solve the problems of unemployed and unsuitably employed elephants. The only hope for the sanctuary concept to succeed nation-wide in Thailand is probably to create a model program and to then encourage or establish a network of local ‘franchise sanctuaries’ (perhaps jointly run by local NGOs and local government), with each province or community taking care of its own elephants - and mahouts.

Ownership

The only state-owned elephants in Thailand outside of zoos belong to the Forest Industry Organization (FIO), which had 79 elephants in mid-1996. Over 98% of Thailand’s nearly 4,000 elephants belong to private owners, many of whom are quite poor. As stated by Lair (1988), “Elephants in Thailand are basically private property to be treated howsoever the owner wishes.”

Information on ownership is badly needed. One critical question is how many elephants belong to mahout-owners and how many belong to non-mahout owners, a ratio that varies regionally; the north, for example, has many non-mahout owners and hired mahouts while the northeast has a very high percentage of mahout-owners (which is good). Some troubling signs suggest that rarity value and a changed work environment are driving many elephants into the hands of non-mahout owners. Unambiguous data could be easily collected as part of an improved registration procedure.

Mahoutship

Mahoutship in Thailand is entering a crisis. Until twenty or even ten years ago in northern Thailand, for example, the traditional path to becoming a full-fledged mahout - specifically within the timber industry, although other settings were similar - was very long and difficult. Typically, a young man would start by doing general work such as hooking drag chains or trimming logs. If he showed energy and ability, he might then become an assistant mahout or ‘foot mahout’ (khwan tin), so-called because he works mostly at the elephant’s feet. Only after an apprenticeship of years might he be promoted to full mahout, a khwan khaw or ‘neck mahout’. When age and hard work begin to take their toll, he might be taken off of riding and further be promoted to kae, or foreman.

Most of the work occurred far off in the forest, perhaps two or three days march from the nearest village, with nothing but rice, salt, red pepper, and tobacco supplied as sustenance. Any meat or vegetables had to be gathered in the forest. Normally work teams consisted of five or six elephants and about fifteen men: two mahouts per elephant, a foreman, and probably a cook and general factotum. If there was a village nearby it was probably a poor hill tribe village with little in the way of food or entertainment. (Being the only ones with any cash at all, the mahouts were virtually millionaires.) The men often spent three or four months in the forest before emerging for a brief visit to their homes.

Such a life was incredibly harsh and dangerous, but it was also an ideal training ground. Given the total lack of diversion outside of the group, there was very little to do except talk, and much of that talk concerned elephants. To become a master mahout means observing endless technical detail and listening to thousands of campfire tales. Learning and working in the forest produced superb mahouts, tested both by elephants and by the older mahouts.

Today, in a matter of a decade or two, the situation is quite different.

Even the most inaccessible logging sites in Thailand are invariably within a few hours walk from a good road. Most mahouts have motorcycles, and electricity has reached nearly every village. At the end of the day, rather than gathering around the campfire to eat and talk, most modern mahouts will go to town, go home to their wife, or watch boxing on the television. A whole body of absolutely irreplaceable knowledge is being lost as the older mahouts sit quietly, highly respected but not sought out for their knowledge.

Uneducated country boys with no prior experience of elephants seek to become mahouts as a tempting alternative to unrewarding work in the rice fields. Given a shortage of mahouts, young men often become full mahouts far younger than the old days. Although often brave, the young mahouts of today almost universally lack the massive knowledge of earlier generations. Even if they have acquired a modicum of technical competence, few young mahouts are genuinely interested in perfecting their work skills. To most young mahouts, being a mahout is just a job, and not a very good job at that.

To informed observers, whether officials or researchers, the decline in mahoutship is appalling and - in terms of the future - frightening. A massive decline in skills has occurred in one short generation and the situation can only deteriorate further. One Thai observer says that conserving mahouts is even more difficult than, but just as important as, conserving elephants {Yodmani, 1996}. A growing shortage of journeyman mahouts in Thailand will increasingly pose problems, particularly in controlling the third of the population that might be categorized as ‘problem elephants’ or ‘dangerous elephants’. Any fit young man with a bit of training can handle a docile cow elephant, but a recalcitrant animal, whether a bull or a cow, requires the skills and the spirit of a master mahout. Only a special breed can control elephants such as a bull in Petchabun province in 1992 who killed his mahout, then his owner, and finally both the master mahout and the khoonkie called in to capture him. He systematically mangled all the human corpses before an inept fusillade of hundreds of shots from M16s finally brought him down.

The author once spent a long evening interviewing three older FIO mahouts who were able to piece together a list of 15 FIO mahouts who had been killed by elephants between 1959 and 1991, two being killed by cows (one of which bit and crushed the mahout’s head) and thirteen by bulls, nearly all tuskers. One tusker was said to have had a history of killing ten mahouts and another tusker had torn the legs off his victim’s corpse.

Clearly, the work of being a mahout is daunting, but the real reason for not wanting to be a mahout these days is not so much the physical danger as the low social status and, closely related, the low income. The FIO, for example, has about 150 mahouts, all of whose children’s tuition fees are paid for by the organization. Consequently, almost all of the mahouts’ sons study to at least secondary level or vocational school. When FIO polled all of its mahouts, it became clear that not a single boy out of hundreds was going to follow in his father’s footsteps and, further, that not a single father wished for his son to do so.5

The future will surely bring a steady decline in the ability to keep bulls at a time when bulls, the most desirable animals in the old days, are of falling utility because of the imminent end of illegal logging. Because bulls are on average far more dangerous than cows, they will simply be kept less and less. Proportionate to the past, more and more bulls will be shot as uncontrollable simply because a good mahout cannot be found. (An elephant, no matter how strong or handsome, is of no value whatsoever so long as there is not at least one man who can control him.) Equally, increasingly more men will be killed as brave but incompetent mahouts become the order of the day. The bull elephants’ loss of usefulness combined with a reduced ability to control them is sure to bring many very nasty incidents.

Parallel declines in mahoutship, different in detail but similar in effect, are occurring in most of Thailand’s elephant-keeping traditions, whether the Kui, the Karen, the Shan, or the Chaiyaphum keepers. The author once worked with an ethnic Khmer mahout-owner from Surin province who, although a superb mahout with his own adult cow, did not know how to teach his four-year old calf how to lay on her side. Nor did he know where to seek out the knowledge. He had asked some Kui neighbors who could have helped but they rebuffed him, not out of animosity but rather for latent fear of competition for work. In the old days, large and cohesive communities ensured that such lapses in knowledge did not exist.

Hundreds or even thousands of years of tradition are being lost in a single generation when sons decide not to follow their father. Managers in Sri Lanka and much of India complain vociferously of the same deterioration. Contemporary mahoutship in Thailand is a warning for the relatively intact traditional elephant-keeping cultures of Myanmar, Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Cultural dimensions

The elephant once totally permeated the Thai cosmos. Huge tomes could be written on the elephant’s place in many realms of Thai culture, including Buddhism, art, history, literature, folk tradition, and iconography. (Elephants of Thailand in Myth, Art, and Reality [Ringis, 1996] does an excellent job of succinctly conveying the elephant’s role in Thai culture.)

The oldest surviving example of Thai writing, an inscription carved on stone in 1292, tells of the young King Ramkamhaeng who gained the title “the brave” through victories in elephant-back combat. Every Thai school child is still taught of decisive duels fought on elephant back by royalty, including King Ramkamhaeng, Queen Chamtewi, King Naresuan, and Queen Suriyothai. In the seventeenth century the Siamese king, according to two independent European observers, possessed three thousand elephants. In the later kingdom of Ayutthaya, the head of the Royal Elephant Department during the political tumult of 1687-88 violently seized the throne. A white elephant, in profile, appeared on the national flag until 1917 and still appears on the Royal Thai Navy’s ensign. One of the country’s highest honors is the Most Exalted Order of the White Elephant, always presented directly by the King.

Such facts could be listed endlessly but the reality is that while history still colors people’s perceptions, traditional values no longer have much effect on people’s motivations and actions. Until a few decades ago, Ganesha was widely revered all over Thailand, but Thai teenagers today have no idea who Ganesha is. Teenagers know all of the rock stars on MTV but none of the lovely elephant stories found in the Jataka tales. Thai teenagers are only slightly more familiar with elephants than Western teenagers, having seen a few more elephants on television.

While it might be chic to quote traditional culture as a force in conservation, and while culture might have some residual influence amongst country folk and older people, in 1996 the primary moral force towards reform in the governance and management of elephants comes from educated, urban, and middle-class Thais whose motives are little different than those of a concerned populace in the West. The elephant’s roles in both Buddhism and Hinduism might slightly color conservation efforts (for example, Honey not being euthanized because of the Thai sense of karma), but religion is no longer a compelling force. Today Thais concerned about elephants are motivated both by simple sympathy and by a sophisticated understanding that their own future, and that of their children, is linked to the survival of the elephant.

Amongst the keepers, it can only be said that traditional values are everywhere in decline. No point proves this decline better than that elephants are now beginning to be slaughtered for meat, an act that never would have been allowed in old Thailand. Some owners now believe that old or injured elephants of no use in producing income might as well be sold for meat. At 60 baht a kilo (US$2.40), an elephant of normal size will bring just enough money to buy a new moped {Phongkum, 1996}.

Tribal keepers

As in most Asian countries, a large but unknown proportion of Thailand’s owners and mahouts are tribal peoples including the Karen, Shan, Khmu, Kui, and the Bimi. One tribe, the Lua’ (Lü), has not kept elephants since the late 1940s.

The Lua’, through the 1930s, worked for European timber companies around Mae Sarieng in the province of Mae Hon Son, doing quite well until World War II totally shut down the teak trade except for local consumption. After the war, unsettled conditions and high taxes caused the Burmese border to be closed, resulting in a “low demand for work in the lumber industry and low prices for elephants.” The Lua’ sold the last of their elephants in the late 1940s (Kunstadter, 1978).

The Khmu have dwindled away or, more accurately, gradually assimilated into northern Thai society or Lao society. (The Khmu seem to have originated in what later became Cambodia and dispersed widely to the north in waves, the last perhaps not long ago.) The Khmu have a universal reputation for being honest and hardworking but also for being stupid and naïve - to the point that, to this very day, many Khmu in northern Thailand will try to hide their ethno-linguistic origin. The Khmu also have a well-deserved reputation for being superb mahouts. Nothing has been recorded about their particular elephant-keeping techniques.

The Bimi (also called the Mpimi) evidently still have a small settlement near the airport in the provincial capital of Phrae and still keep a few elephants {Chamberlain, 1995}. There is nothing in the anthropological literature documenting their relationship with elephants. Like the Lua’ before, the Bimi are the possessors of a unique tradition that will likely vanish before it is even described, much less studied in depth.

Extensive travels throughout the northeast and conversations with mahouts show that there are still a few small groups of both ethno-linguistic Lao and Khmer elephant-keeping families. These intriguing pockets of apparently dominant-culture keepers give rise to many questions which will probably never be answered, including how many of them are assimilated tribals.

· See “The dominant-culture keepers” page 22.

Even thirty years ago, Seidenfaden (1967) bemoaned the number of cultures and languages which were rapidly vanishing, placing the blame on “the Siamese language ... and the ubiquitous motor lorry....” He said that there was much work to be done “for anthropologists and philologists alike, and it should be done now before it becomes too late.” Anthropology has since continued to give but scant glance at the man-elephant relationship, and three decades later some elephant-keeping traditions have become extinct.

Karen

Much has been written about the Karen in Thailand generally, but seemingly not so much as a single short paper deals solely with the Karen relationship with elephants. The Karen, whose language belongs to the Sino-Tibetan stock (which includes Chinese), are a ‘hill tribe’ found in Thailand and Burma with a total population of approximately 2,500,000 people, about 200,000 living in northern Thailand and another 100,000 living further south along the border with Myanmar (Walker, 1986). The Karen in Thailand keep elephants along hundreds of kilometers of the mountainous border with Myanmar from Mae Hong Son to at least Prachuap Khiri Khan. Rarely venturing down from the hills, in the past most Karen elephants worked in transport and general village work; the last century of working at teak logging was atypical.

The Karen have two unusual attitudes in their relationship with elephants. First, according to many observers the Karen seem to be more genuinely kind towards elephants than are most other elephant-keeping peoples. (Giles [1930a] writes, “In some of the backward jungle districts especially amongst the Karen, elephants take a place somewhat akin to the horse or ox, living with their owner on easy terms of intimacy.”) Second, as opposed to the clear preference for bulls shown by many cultures, especially dominant lowland cultures, the Karen generally prefer cows and there are never aspersions of a mahout being less virile because he rides a cow rather than a bull. Marshall (1959) refers to the Karen and “their preference for female elephants and passion for calves,” a fondness which is easily observed after only a short visit with them. A Karen mahout asked by the author why his people preferred females answered: “Cows can have babies!” A preference for cows might also stem from the fact that cows are generally easier and safer to work with than bulls.

Owning an elephant brings great prestige to a Karen, even conveying a special title. Most of the Karen questioned by Kunstadter (1978) preferred to use their meager surplus cash to buy elephants rather than to buy irrigated fields, build substantial houses, or perform costly animal sacrifices. Nearly every Karen boy begins to play with elephant calves from a very early age and steadily becomes more competent with time. One result of this universal training is that most Karen elephants can be ridden by any number of mahouts, in contrast to the two-man, one-elephant pattern typical elsewhere. The author once saw a very handsome and powerful 40-year old bull which, it was said, could be ridden “by every man in the village.”

Relatively few elephant-keeping Karen, however, become master mahouts. Kunstadter (1978) says that, “Training elephants to work ... is a highly complex, carefully protected professional skill, surrounded by a great deal of ritual.” Even as long ago as 1978 he noted that, “Only a few older men in the area have the proper technical and ritual knowledge, including knowledge of the proper chants, to train elephants.” If that was true twenty years ago, then a mass of traditional knowledge - both ritual and technical - must have been lost in the interval. Nonetheless, as recently as 1988, according to Karen mahouts interviewed in Kanchanaburi province near the Burmese border, some Karen still captured elephants by building small kheddahs. (For mystical reasons capture teams must consist of 7, 9, or 11 men, no more and no less.)

Life is presently exceedingly difficult for many Karen owners and their elephants. On the Myanmar side of the border the Karen are still enmeshed in what amounts to the world’s longest civil war. Elephants transport military supplies, a dangerous pursuit, and also skid logs being sold into Thailand to supply hard currency for the insurgent movement. Many of the elephants currently being smuggled from Myanmar into Thailand were captured or bred by Karen.

On the Thai side of the border, the resident Karen are somewhat better off, although making a legal living with elephants has become very difficult since the 1989 logging ban. The degree of involvement of Karen mahouts and elephants in illegal logging is unknown but at very least some must work in that shadowy trade.

Some Karen from Myanmar have illegally brought their elephants into Thailand, partly to avoid the turmoil at home and partly to make money offering rides to tourists very near the border. In 1994 in Mae Hong Son, there were about 25-30 Karen elephants selling rides only a few kilometers from town; groups consisted almost entirely of young men with very few women and children. They invariably appeared to be malnourished, malaria-ridden, and bewildered by the strange world in which they found themselves. Another sad group of illegal immigrant Karen are young men who have no elephant to risk and so move further inside Thailand to work as mahouts in elephant shows around Chiang Mai; they end up working for a pittance and protection from the police.

Kui

The most famous elephant people in Thailand, at least to the average Thai, are certainly the Kui (‘human being’ or ‘the people’) as they call themselves, or the Suay, as they are called in Thai, Lao, and Cambodian. (‘Kui’ and ‘Suay’ both have many variant spellings in both English and in French.) Around 1970 there were said to be just over 100,000 Kui in Thailand (Sotesiri, 1972). The elephant-keeping Kui, a small portion of the total, make their home in two provinces of northeastern Thailand, Surin and Buriram, and the adjoining northern parts of Cambodia’s Siam Reap and Kompong Thom provinces. The Kui in the past made a profession of capturing wild elephants and disdained conventional work, keeping only khoonkies.

The Kui are thought by most academics (whether historians, anthropologists, or linguists) to have occupied the region long before the arrival of both the Khmer and the Thai. One authority (Anon., 1970) states that, “Most sources agree ... that the Kui were the original inhabitants of parts of Thailand and Cambodia, predating invasions of the region by the Mon-Khmer, Cham, Thai, and other peoples.” The same source speculated that the Kui “may be the descendants of an ancient Veddoid migration eastward from the Indian sub-continent.”

The Kui language, which has no alphabet and no written form, evidently belongs to the Mon-Khmer language family, although this association does not imply an ethnic identity. The Kui also have a special language spoken only when capturing wild elephants in the forest - where it must be spoken exclusively. Called phasaa phii paa in Thai, meaning ‘forest spirit language’, the use of such a sparse and special purpose language appears to be shared by many mela-shikar capturing tribal groups in a swathe reaching from northern Thailand, through southern Laos, down to Cambodia and southern Vietnam. Giles (1930a) gives a tantalizing description of the forest spirit language tradition on the Khorat plateau.

· See “Forest spirit language culture,” page 222, for regional aspects.

The Kui were until recently masters of mela-shikar, catching elephants both near home and in Cambodia. They preferred to hunt in flat, relatively open areas (Salmela, 1980) which favored their technique of slipping the noose on a hind foot, unlike noosing the neck as favored in mountainous northeast India. The noose and rope, affixed to a bamboo pole, were made of male buffalo hide attributed with magical properties. The nooser sat on the khoonkie’s neck and the mahout on the back so as to offer free movement to the noosing pole. After carefully scouting the wild elephants on foot, perhaps twenty teams of two men on a khoonkie would run down a wild herd, usually trying to catch pre-selected animals. Once a foot was noosed, the pole was released and men following on foot tied the loose end of the rope to a tree. Many of the elephants noosed would have been fairly young, confused, exhausted, and thus relatively easy to catch.

Capturing an average of 20 to 30 elephants on their annual rainy season expeditions, the Kui spent the rest of the year rice farming at home. In 1917, according to Seidenfaden (1952), just three Surin villages possessed “more than 90 big hunting elephants.” The Kui sold their captives cheap; and Burmese, Shans, and northern Thais “came from far away to buy elephants from the Kui to sell to the European timber companies for work in their teak concessions.” The Kui caught their last wild elephant in Cambodia in the early 1970s, although Sotesiri (1972) says, “Since 1957 the [Thai] government has not allowed hunters across the Cambodian border to catch them....”

The Kui are the victims of a well-documented environmental decline, the ground being literally changed under their feet. Four or five decades ago the land of the Kui was perhaps the single place on earth closest resembling the great diversity of large mammals surviving today only in east Africa savannah. There were vast numbers of wild elephants, two species of rhinoceros (Javan and Sumatran), water buffalo, three species of large cattle (banteng, gaur, and kouprey), plus a host of smaller herbivores and a full range of predators, including tiger, leopard, and Asian wild dog. The Kui had to build elevated guard houses to protect their rice crops from wild animals, including elephants. Seidenfaden (1952) states that soon after World War II the region was “teeming with wild beasts, among them many wild elephants” but that it was “a poor country made poorer still by man’s wholesale destruction of the forest.” Even into the 1950s and ‘60s the region still had wild elephants, with the last capture in Surin province being in 1961.

Coincidentally, 1961 is the first year for which the RFD has accurate estimates for forest cover. In 1961 some 33.7% of the land area of the two ‘elephant-Kui’ provinces was forest, but by 1982 that number had declined to 8% (Anon., 1985b). The loss of forest impacted severely on domesticated elephants as well as wild elephants. Of the tambol of Krapo in Surin, Sotesiri (1972) states that “many hunters have sold their [khoonkie] elephants because of financial difficulties or problems associated with feeding their animals. Those who still keep them complain there is not enough forest land left for feeding their elephants.”

The environmental decline has brought a parallel deterioration in traditional culture. The Kui people have already for centuries been absorbing Khmer, Thai, and Lao cultural influences. Sotesiri (1970) says, “Most of them have lost their Kui identity, especially those who live in the districts and towns ... they speak Cambodian [or, increasingly, Thai], never Kui, and have forgotten their Kui heritage.” The elephant-keeping Kui would seem to have retained their language fairly well, although it would not be surprising if a survey of children and youth proved otherwise. As a minority struggling to survive amongst dominant cultures, all Kui men can speak - in the order which they are learned- Kui, Khmer (‘high Khmer’ or khmer suung), Lao, and central Thai. This polyglot capacity and the degree of assimilation perhaps suggest why the elephant-keeping Kui have been of so little interest to anthropologists with the single notable exception of Sotesiri (1972). (Linguists researching Kui language would seem to have had a stronger interest.) The Kui are a largely absorbed culture, although the elephant-keeping Kui have retained some of their identity longer than their neighbors.

The Kui homeland has been turned from rich forest and grasslands into one endless rice field dotted with a few shade trees, and the once proud hunters have been reduced to wandering the streets of Bangkok. Men whose fathers once captured elephants communally now actively keep secrets from each other about training methods and work opportunities. Largely assimilated into the Thai culture and economy, even the poorest mahout will be literate and own a television set. The young men have little concern for magic and ritual, and the last solid traditional knowledge resides in the memories of a few Kui elders, both men and women. (Many elderly Kui women have exceptional knowledge of elephants.) These elders are dying at a rapid rate and without a concerted, systematic effort to record their wisdom it will surely vanish without a trace.

· See “Street-wandering in Bangkok,” page 202.

Conclusions

Within an elephant’s life span, 50 years or a bare moment in the history of elephant-keeping, the environment and the society surrounding Thailand’s domesticated elephants has changed as if they had been transported in a time machine. Enormous new threats are warping the demographics, economics, and culture of elephant-keeping much faster than those threats can even be understood, much less be practically managed so as to avoid ill effects on elephants.

Many traditional institutions essential to keeping elephants have vanished, particularly tribal and palace traditions. Thailand’s mahouts, and particularly its mahout-owners, suffer from very low income and severe competition for scarce work. Many of Thailand’s nearly 4,000 elephants suffer from inappropriate work, periodic overwork, lack of veterinary care, declining food sources locally, and most frightening - just as in India and Sri Lanka - a steep fall in standards of mahoutship. Tragic elephant stories (Honey, Jockey, Phlai Petch, and others) are distressingly frequent newspaper headlines and lead stories on the television news. Thailand is presently faced for the first time in its history with unemployable and unwanted elephants being killed for meat. The next five years is likely to bring many unplanned releases of unwanted elephants and, in a great reversal back to an early pattern, could even witness Thai logging elephants being sold into Myanmar.

Many people, both within and without government, have become aware of the desperate need for a systematic program to redress problems and extend help to individual elephants. Thailand’s primary need, as in all Asian countries, is for a two-pronged program to register and provide basic veterinary care for all of the country’s domesticated elephants. Thailand possesses all the essential resources needed to mount a massive national program. Blessed with an excellent educational system, Thailand possesses all of the needed scientific and management skills. Thailand also has a sophisticated infrastructure and even the money needed to significantly help ease its domesticated elephants through a troubled decline or demise.

Unfortunately, Thailand is embroiled in confusion over the question of who should have jurisdiction for domesticated elephants, a confusion which keeps urgent matters in suspended animation. At no point in the past has any government agency ever been mandated responsibility to provide actual care for domesticated elephants. (The Ministry of Interior’s rudimentary registration program has for fifty years been concerned solely with supervising elephants as property.) Various government agencies and NGOs are talking, and occasionally arguing, about who should have jurisdiction or responsibility. But because solutions to the elephants’ living conditions and problems are so poorly explored, the more helpful approach would be to first define the job that needs to be done - and only then decide who will do the work.

The best way to define the task at hand is to form a neutral coalition of technical people from all interested agencies and parties to create a model program, including a model law, built to satisfy the elephants’ proven needs and deliberately ignoring existing legal and administrative obstacles. The three essential stages to helping domesticated elephants are, first, to scientifically study and determine the elephants’ irreducible needs in the field; second, to develop technical and social programs for addressing those needs; and, third, to create law which enlists the institutional resources, even across departmental and even ministerial lines, needed to institute those programs. Even before starting, it is possible to define the most essential tasks: law enforcement, registration, and basic veterinary care.

Any neutral fact-finding and planning coalition will surely determine that the only hope lies in an unprecedented degree of inter-agency cooperation. Domesticated elephants need sound law enforcement, which only the Ministry of Interior can provide. Domesticated elephants need healthy forests and a sophisticated interface with wild elephants, which only the Royal Forest Department can provide. (The RFD is also Thailand’s largest potential legal employer of domesticated elephants, particularly as ride animals in national parks.) Domesticated elephants need regular monitoring and veterinary care in the field, which only the Livestock Development Department could provide. NGOs and academics are needed to play powerful support roles.

Improved registration is the essential first step and need not wait for new law. The Local Administration Department of the Ministry of Interior should continue to register elephants, but not entirely unto or for itself. The RFD is needed to help to design and analyze the results of a sophisticated registration form. The Livestock Department should be legally required to offer veterinary care, an essential inducement to voluntary registration, and should be legally guaranteed the resources needed to do the job. All three agencies could use the same core computer database while enjoying a high degree of autonomy and posing no conflict of interest. If an LAD or an RFD official or a police officer notices a sick elephant, he reports it to the Livestock Department; if a Livestock Department veterinarian treats an elephant he suspects to be unregistered, he reports it.

To break the present institutional deadlock, the easiest way is to pass a special law which assigns jurisdiction according to the elephants’ needs, not the traditions of civil servants. The difficulties posed in modifying present law are, as current dissension shows, unsurmountable. Both The Draught Animal Act of 1939, now in effect, and The Wildlife Reservation and Protection Act of 1992, which many people advocate, are designed to cope with needs and conditions of animals totally irrelevant to the domesticated elephants’ unique situation. Each law assigns sole jurisdiction to a single ministry, a disaster in any country where found, because exclusivity invariably deprives the elephant of at least one essential component of management. Neither existent law has any provisions against cruelty, particularly in work, an essential component of any meaningful reform. If a specially tailored law was possible for wild elephants in 1921, then surely in 1997, a time of far greater need, a special law should be possible to protect and conserve Thailand’s domesticated elephants. Or, most unlikely but better, so as to quickly respond to the elephants’ dire need, all parties could agree to table the question of jurisdiction in order to informally and voluntarily work together.

The challenge facing Thailand is unprecedented. Conserving domesticated elephants is far more complex socially than conserving wild elephants because it involves more scientific disciplines and more diverse institutions, as well as unusual cultural and ethical aspects. The challenge facing Thailand is to create a vast, multi-disciplinary project to for the first anywhere in the world attempt to systematically improve or rehabilitate the living conditions of a large, development-ravaged elephant population almost entirely in private hands.