Elephants of dubious origin (& memories of an older journey)

By John Roberts
4 February 2012 04:08:00

It was the venerable Otto von Bismark who noted, some time ago, that only a fool learns from his mistakes, a wise man, the great German unifier noted, learns from the mistakes of others.

Well, it is generally accepted in the bars and restaurants of the Golden Triangle and in the halls of elephant power that there is no fool larger than a fool such as I and so one (possibly the only) justification for maintaining these pages of egotistical ranting may, then, be to allow you, oh wise ones, to learn from our mistakes.

One mistake we made in the early days was to buy elephants: from the owners of Tawan and Puang Phet we realised that putting money into the hands of certain mahouts (as time went on, we learned, most mahouts) only caused them to buy another elephant and continue doing what they had been doing with their new charge (in Tawan’s case that had caused him to be hit by a car, in Phet’s case to travel from town to town on a daily basis on the back of a truck).

As we developed contacts, met people, asked questions over the next few years we formed an implacable opinion that something even more sinister was going on, that the replacement elephants weren’t only being put in danger but that they were probably coming from the wild or, at least, the elephant camps of Burma.

Let’s fly back to 2005 when we were young and foolish, making mistakes with the boss’s money.  I got to spend the wet season driving around the bits of Thailand North of Bangkok; hanging out in forests, stumbling through wastelands, sitting in head-mans’ huts looking at elephants and, in the end, buying some.

This epic summer was a great introduction to the Thai elephant world and helped form some of the ideas that became our oh-so-shaky policies as time has gone on, it was a journey that fixed Northern Thailand in my brain as the place I want to be but, as happens, life kept moving and those forested kilometers went largely forgotten.

Then, by pure coincidence, the spotlight of Thailand’s media and, to a certain extent political attention became focussed on elephants and their activities, following the five dead wild elephants and the red herring of eating elephant penises, people have begun investigating elephant activities along a certain stretch of Thai/Burma border, bits of which are hugely remote, bits of which are easily accessible by car and large chunks of which are protected by National Park & Wildlife Sanctuary regulations under the blanket term of the Western Forest Complex - possibly the largest piece of contiguous protected forest left in this part of Asia.

A piece in the English language newspaper, The Nation, caught my eye, 51 elephants in a corner of Kanchanaburi were found to be under investigation under suspicion of having been caught from the wild or smuggled from Burma.

The tuning fork in my aging brain trembled, not only because we’re talking of doing some work with wild ele people (those who study wild elephants, you understand, the people themselves are quite civilised) down there but also because though not named, the camps down there were ones that I had visited in 2005 and had left an impression.

I dug out my old trip notes and they were full of terms like...

“...wretched creature...” “...never seen a more miserable bunch of elephants...” “... doesn’t deserve to be there....”

My naive self, John the younger, came to the conclusion, mainly because none of the mahouts could tell me the name and age of their elephants but the owner said they were all for sale, that the elephants themselves were just in from Burma and illegally so.

I’m not sure if the fact we didn’t buy the, possibly pregnant, Pang A, tied to a tree on a short chain but who obviously made an emotional impression on me (it turns up in my notes, written back in the days before I became an emotionless robot) points to the dawning the realisation that to buy would just put another in danger or just that I didn’t like the guy selling and didn’t want to give him money.

Probably the latter.

Either way, I’m not sure how the police investigation will turn out (though I hear on the jungle grapevine that another elephant has been confiscated from the area) nor is anyone guilty until proven so but, let’s just say, while the subject of police investigations into elephant smuggling was such a hot topic I wasn’t surprised to be reminded of the camps I visited way back in ’05.

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