Elephants - Vanishing Giants
Sara Traub
I have always enjoyed elephants.They are unusual animals, huge, yet graceful, intimidating yet shy. I had the good fortune to be with these gentle giants and learn much more about them on a trip to Thailand. These Asian elephants, sometimes called the Indian elephant, are found in the dense forests and grassy plains of most of southwest Asia.
Before our trip we did, initially what most tourists do, we used a travel agent. They gave us some options and we made our choices. We chose a two day jungle treck in northern Thailand and we had the unexpected pleasure of experiencing the elephants at an elephant camp as well as a one hour elephant ride. Since modern machinery has taken over the job that elephants did for hundreds of years, elephants found themselves out of a job. Tourists, unknowingly, keep the elephant employed.
There are probably less than 30,000 Asian elephants in the wild, plus approximately 15,000 in captivity. Because of their smaller tusk size than their African cousins, poaching of Asian elephants for ivory is not too much of an issue. The decline of the Asian elephant has been mainly due to habitat loss. Elephants need a large amount of habitat because they eat so much. Humans have become their direct competitors for living space. Human populations in Africa and Asia have quadrupled since the turn of the century, the fastest growth rate on the planet. This has led to a tragic conflict between humans and elephants over space and resources. Humans do not regard elephants as good neighbors. When humans and elephants live close together, elephants raid crops, and rogue elephants rampage through villages. Local people shoot elephants because they fear them and regard them as pests. Some countries have established culling programs: park officials or hunters kill a predetermined number of elephants to keep herds manageable and minimize human-elephant conflicts.
Asia, particularly Thailand, has always had a strong cultural connection to the elephant. In Chinese, the phrase "to ride an elephant" sounds the same as the word for happiness. When Thailand was called Siam, the sacred White Elephant dominated the flag and culture. The elephant is so much part of the Asian psyche, that it is seen in their art, their symbology as well as their religion.
Only the elephant that is in the wild is considered endangered but the 15,000 in captivity is not included in this assessment even though the cruelty and abuse that is inflicted on these gentle creatures is quite inhuman and many die as a result. This is the paradox that I witnessed as I considered their strong cultural and religious attachment to these animals.
Due to my ignorance and that of the majority of tourists this abuse is perpetuated. Tourists marvel at an elephant strolling down a busy Bangkok street with his Mahout (trainer) and they quickly rush over to feed the elephant, pay the mahout just so that they can stroke it or possibly get a quick ride. Imagine an elephant strolling down a major downtown street. A downtown street has the same hazards anywhere whether it is New York City or Bangkok. These elephants feel all the vibrations of the city through their feet and those that survive the car accidents that they cause, live very high and abnormally stressful lives. An elephant has no place in a crowded, urban environment.
We had a ride on an elephant - that was fun but little did we know the degree of exploitation. The huge and heavy seats that are chained onto the elephant’s back can and do eventually affect the elephant’s spine. A tourist doesn’t give this a thought. The elephant camp was really, an elephant show. The elephants did many tricks - pulling a flag up a flagpole, hauling logs both forward and backward, etc. all very cute but what price did the elephant pay in order to perform for us? The “piece de resistance” was the part where the elephant used a paintbrush wrapped around his trunk and systemically placed colours on the canvas - colors chosen by the mahout. It resembled a Jackson Pollock style and was sold to someone in the audience. At the time, I thought nothing of it except how intelligent these animals were and then carried on my way. This was all good and wonderful until we spent the next day at an elephant sanctuary one and a half hours outside a large urban centre in the north of Thailand where we got a truer education and perspective of the elephant situation in southeast Asia. One of the things that we learned there was that the elephant is continually poked with a metal hooked mallet on the head in order to get them to paint. There is u-tube film showing an elephant’s trunk painting his self portrait. The reason we can’t see the whole elephant because the rest of him, I was told, is behind a curtain where the mahout has the freedom to poke the elephant in the head as much as the situation requires.
At the elephant sanctuary we met thirty-one elephants, each with his own name and personality, roaming freely doing nothing but being who they are. All of these elephants shared something in common with each other except for one elephant and that was that they were all severely abused. There was only one young elephant that has no prior experience of man being his enemy because the infant being only a few days old was taken from a village a short time after its mother had been killed by a villager because she had ruined some crops. This place was a haven for these abused and mishandled giants. These beautiful animals could roam about freely without a care in the world.
On the way to the sanctuary there were a number of us in a van that met at a market where we literally bought about 2,000 pounds of fruit for them. We had the opportunity to feed them these treats, bathe them at a nearby river and walk with these gentle creatures. We heard stories of their rescues which brought tears to most of us. It is there that I learned of the pre-programmed philosophy of taming an elephant that has filtered down through generations, which is that its spirit must be broken. In a documentary that we were shown, this abusive process was very disturbing to watch. All mahouts, except at the sanctuary have these same mallets with the metal hooks on the end of them to train and keep the animals in line.
The elephants’ amazing trunks have 40,000 muscles and perform many functions. They are fingers, hands, antennae, noses, swatting brooms, and they act as pails to cool themselves off. At a show in Bangkok we witnessed people paying money to be lifted up by the elephant’s trunk so that a photographer could take a picture. Each time, the elephant was poked in the head with the mallet to get cooperation. When the elephant was not lifting a person, he was pacing - the stress was quite visible.
Through gaining a perspective that we received at the sanctuary, we began to understand that these Asians are not in right relations with these animals that are so much part of their culture, landscape and psyche. Our role, as tourists is not to exploit these animals further by participating in these gimmicks, because they are not part of our everyday life, but instead, to honour, observe them and marvel at their inherent divinity.
