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The guests at the Elephant Hospital in Lampang tend to be difficult patients. Batang suffers from depression, insomnia and a nervous twitch. Umpah can't be alone, even for five minutes, or else she bursts out crying. Kahew is a finicky eater and is probably going to need a few more months of psycho-therapy. And the new arrival, whose name is still unknown, is a real trouble maker. Whenever she sees a needle she thrashes around and throws dung at the mahouts, the elephant handlers. Neuroses, nervous ticks, and anxieties, these are "the ills of society"--says doctor Pricha Pungkham, director of the Elephant Hospital. "Nobody wants to understand that elephants suffer as much under modern development as human beings. And with the same results: unemployment, poverty, homelessness, drug-addiction." The doctor's sorrowful eyes stare into space. All too often he has given the same speech. To journalists, officials, investors, scientists. When he tells them that elephants risk extinction, that they have to be vaccinated, that they need anti-biotics, financial backing for breeding programs and habitat reserves, they are still able to get what he's saying. Yet when he begins to demonize the results of modernization, then they just shake their heads. What exactly does he want, this veterinarian from the jungle. He sounds like a sociologist, a psycho-therapist, and trade-unionist all in one. He talks about his little creatures as if they were neurotic metropolitan city-dwellers. He can get really dramatic: "For centuries there was a bond of friendship between human beings and elephants. Within just a few years, this bond was suddenly torn apart." He takes it a long way back, talks about the worker elephants that helped build the kingdom, back when Thailand was still called Siam. About the war elephants of the 18th and 19th centuries that used to plow through the fighting ranks like wrinkled grey battleships. About the white elephants that, even today, automatically belong to the King. And then he groans about the decline of culture. That young people in Thailand scorn the elephant trainer's art and care about nothing but fashion, mopeds and money. That work-elephants go begging in the cities, since there is no more work for them in agriculture. And that they are threatened by extinction because the jungle has been chopped down and there is hardly anywhere left where elephant herds can live. He says not one single offspring has been produced by a tame elephant. "With a gestation period of twenty-four months, no elephant trainer can afford to breed offspring." Thirty years ago, the forestry office counted thirty-thousand wild, and eleven thousand tame elephants in Thailand. Today, there are barely two-thousand in the wild and only four-thousand in captivity. "Elephants should be sacred, but no one wants to take responsibility. Once a year some tourist in the city of Surin gets to see Thailand's glorious elephant culture. Beyond that, nothing happens." Eight years ago, Doctor Pungkham was contracted by the Friends of the Asian Elephant Foundation to build a clinic for work-elephants on the government nature reserve. Here, twenty miles north of the town of Lampang in the North of Thailand, he and two other doctors look after forty-five resident and a few hundred "walk-in" patients. "As sad as it is -- our hospital is the only one of its kind," says the doctor. We're sitting on the terrace beneath the palm-thatched roof of the main building, drinking coffee. The sun has just risen, and the mahouts have set off on foot to pick up the first patients of the day. The thick woods all around seem like a jungle, with their vines and surging under-growth. In front of us there's a gravel courtyard, to our left an open hall with scaffolding made out of steel poles in the middle -- the operating room -- to the side, the laboratory, and just right of the courtyard, the straw huts of the mahouts. It is utterly calm, you can hear the wind rustle through the leaves, and from the thick of the woods comes every once in a whilez the trumpeting of an elephant. Here, in the hospital, the mistreated patients are supposed to recover. Long strolls through the woods, a balanced diet, daily medical visits. They are to go without nothing. The first patient arrives. The nameless cow elephant. She has an abscess the size of a melon on her left hind leg, , a sure sign that she has been overworked and mistreated. Slowly she trots across the gravel path. Her trunk swings restlessly to and fro. The mahout sits astride her neck. With his left hand, he pats her head soothingly, with his right, he nudges her behind the ear with an iron hook. That's how he steers her into the hall. Four mahouts stand waiting with chains ready, and secure her head and legs to the thick steel poles of the scaffolding. Doctor Grishda , the twenty-three year old assistant, is still hiding in the laboratory. Every day he has to cut her absces open, clean the puss out and inject antibiotics into the wound. If the cow elephant were to see or smell him before she's bound, she'd flee in panic. She knows perfectly well that Doctor Grishda is the one with the needles and knives. "When we drive through the villages in order to check up on the elephants there, sometimes the elephants hide behind trees and hope that I won't see them," he explains, laughing. He points to the bound elephant. "This one here is an especially difficult case. Very nervous and disturbed. We found her in the forest. A work-cow that was abandoned by her trainers." Over the past few years they've been finding homeless animals like this one more and more often. "Most of them in a miserable condition. First of all, elephants are very attached to their trainers. It can take years before they will get used to a new person. Second, many abandoned elephant's have been gravely mistreated and made addicted to drugs." Illegal work colonies are responsible. Ever since the deforestation of jungles in Thailand has been forbidden by law, tree poachers have been up to their dirty tricks. Ten to fifteen-man teams made up of lumberjacks and mahouts load up their felled trees onto elephants that carry them out of the forest. The poachers have to work fast: penetrate into the forest, fell the trees, haul the trunks immediately to the nearest highway where the trucks are waiting. "To keep the elephants working through the night, they mix amphetamines into their feed," reports Doctor Grishda. "They get addicted to the stuff, just like people do." Some get so depressed that they commit suicide. "They just stand on their trunks. That way they suffocate." Doctor Grishda sneaks up to a portable cart behind the cow-elephant, which stands ready with the necessary medication. Immediately, the cow picks up his scent, tears at her chains, and snorts. "O.K.!," shouts the doctor. "Pull!" The mahouts wind the chains tighter using wooden rods. Doctor Grishda wipes the sweat from his brow. With elephants, every procedure becomes a battle. After all, they're three and a half meters tall and weigh as much as four tons. And so damned sensitive. He wields a mighty syringe in his fist like a dagger. With momentum, he jabs the needle into the cow's side. More and more violently the elephant tears at her chains, kicks with her free hind legs, and lets out piercing shrieks. She sucks up water from the ground and shoots it underneath her stomach in hopes of driving the doctor away. He jumps back until a mahout takes hold of her trunk. No easy task, since work-elephants heave whole trees with their trunks. Now -- just position the canula and shoot the milky anti-biotics through. With a swift motion he takes a huge scalpell, cuts the abscess open, a mahout sticks a water hose into the open wound and flushes the puss out. The cow twitches, tries to break lose once more. Then the daily drama is over. A success. Doctor Grishda is not sure whether the cow is in withdrawal, or if she's suffering from a broken heart, since her mahout deserted her; elephants are so attached to their trainers because, like the proverb says, they really never forget. There's no drug test for elephants. So Doctor Pricha, Doctor Grishda and Doctor Sittidet, the third doctor, have developed a drug-withdrawal program for thick-skinned addicts. "Lots of vitamins, a balanced diet, and a sort of pastoral care for elephants." Each new patient is assigned its own mahout, who regularly takes the animal into the forest. Sometimes they spend weeks alone together in the jungle. "Only there, are they able to calm back down," says Doctor Grishda. "Once they have gotten used to a new caretaker, we can begin to re-socialize them. Either they find a job for the animals, like performing in the show we have for tourists, or they try to lead them into membership in a herd on the wildlife preserve. Dr. Grishda takes care of three more animals. One suffers from exhaustion, the two others also have abscesses on their legs. Then the mahouts call him to breakfast. In front of their huts they have set up a table. There's raw beef filled peppers, sticky rice, vegetable puree, and rice whisky. The elephant trainers dip the sticky rice with their hands into bowls, pass around the bottle, laughing and chatting. "Everything we know about elephants we learned from the mahouts," says Doctor Grishda. "With traditional veterinary medicine we wouldn't have a chance here." An elephant doctor has to be a psychotherapist, a social-worker, and a surgeon all at once. "I don't believe there's any animal more sensitive than an elephant. And only an experienced mahout knows how to handle one." Uncle Joy who, at sixty-seven, is the oldest of the mahouts here, started working with elephants when he was just a kid. His father was a mahout. "It was years before people really had elephants under control," says the dainty man with the wrinkled, weathered face. An elephant has eighty-five pressure points with which it can be steered. The mahout works these with his feet and with his iron hook. So, what's the art of steering an elephant? How does it work? Uncle Joy searches for words, but then just shakes his head and says: "You've got to see a mahout at work with his elephant in order to grasp what kind of art it is." At the border with Burma, there's a lumber camp run by the Department of Forestry, in which two work-elephants help the forest marshals catch up with illegal tree-cutting. Mistrustfully, the officials eye our letter of recommendation. But when they see Doctor Pricha's signature, there seems to be no problem. The next morning, they're on the run. Down by the river they've tracked down a poacher camp. Shortly after sunrise, the two mahouts drive their animals onto the courtyard of the sawmill. They mount the work-harnesses onto the elephants. Wide straps made out of knotted sisal rope are bound around throat and chest, onto which the chains will be fastened. A truck already stands ready, the forest marshals drink coffee in front of their huts, a few lumberjacks await departure. Slowly, the animals climb up onto the loading area. The mahouts chain them to the wood crane. Then the trip takes an hour along a dusty road in the forest. Patiently, the elephants balance themselves on the loading area and blink in the driving wind. A quick stop at the outpost of the border guards. A few kilometers down the road, a village. Wooden houses on stilts, wide-eyed kids along the side of the road. They rarely see trucks around here. Almost never elephants. Then we've reached our target. On a slope, the tree poachers have hacked out a clearing in the forest. With soft steps and short commands, the mahouts drive the elephants through the thicket. No machine could operate here on this steep slope. "An elephant can carry a hundred kilos with his trunk alone," says the mahout. "He can pull half a ton, you'll see." The elephants climb slowly up the incline. Carefully they test the ground with their front legs, to make sure it's sturdy. Only then do they put their full weight on the foot rests, that give way like a wet paper bag. The older of the two mahouts steers his elephant between three wedged together tree trunks. He pokes him with his toes behind the ears. The elephant goes on its knees, slips its tusk between the tree trunks, heaves one out of the way and throws it to the side with his trunk, and then stands back up. One of the lumberjacks hurries over and lays the chain around the tree trunk. Slowly, the elephant drags his load down the slope to the truck. For over a thousand years, farmer's and lumberjacks in Thailand have used elephants to transport enormous loads. Out of the nearly four thousand work-elephants that live in Thailand, barely a dozen are employed. Machines, bans on lumber, and above all the introduction of the tractor are responsible for the army of unemployed elephants. A few hundred have ended up in shows put on for tourists. Even the elephant hospital has a troupe of elephants heave around tree trunks in an arena each day for the tourists. Nonetheless, many end up on the same path as the unemployed farmhands, the one that leads to the cities. On the New Highway, an eight-lane expressway near Patpong Road, Bangkok's redlight pleasure district, lives Am, an eight year old cow elephant from Surin. Restless, she trots around the demolition area, searching with her trunk for grass among the rubble and ruin. In a corner stands a tent of plastic tarpaulin and boards. This is where her mahout Peng, an eighteen year old lad wearing a fake leather jacket, lives with his mother Tin, an old farmer who chews beetle nuts all day long and spits the red juice on the ground. Next to their sleeping bags lie two mountains of bananas and cucumbers. The daily quarter-ton of feed for the elephant. It has already been two months since they started "passing through" Bangkok. They want to stay until the rainy season, four months from now, before returning to Surin. That is, if the police don't run them out of town first. But what can they really do? "They can't exactly lock up an elephant," says Peng. "So they just cut the ties on our tent and we have to find another campsite." That's how it has been going for the past four years. Peng knows that his Am is suffering from this beggar lifestyle. "Above all, its the solitude that troubles her," he says. "Some evenings we cannot work, because she is so unhappy. Then she stands in a corner, wags her head and cries." Elephants can shed actual tears. But it doesn't do any good. "Back home there's no money," says Peng, casting his eyes shyly to the ground. His father and three brothers can hardly sustain themselves with their rice farm, much less support an elephant. In Bangkok, Peng and Am can make up to fifteen-hundred Bhat a day, nearly sixty Dollars. Eight to nine hundred Bhat goes for feed each day, Peng and his mother content themselves with two hundred. Once a month they send one or two thousand home. It doesn't bring in a lot, but Peng's mother says: " We'll never give up our elephant, even though they've offered us a lot of money for Am. We love Am too much." Evenings at seven o' clock, Peng goes with Am into the pleasure district. Off to beg. Ideally, he stations himself in front of McDonald's. A lot of traffic passes by this spot. Then Am has to stand up on her hind legs, trumpet loudly, and Peng sticks a harmonica in her trunk, through which she blasts a few off chords. Immediately a crowd forms around the two of them. The passersby are delighted. Elephants bring good luck. For a Mark, they can buy a bag of bananas or cucumbers from Peng. Then they can feed them to Am. She carries out the business with hungry eyes. A man in a suit fails to pull the cucumber out fast enough. Instantly, he finds the damp trunk in his face. Startled, he jumps back. The spectators laugh. Am knows what to do, rears back on her hind legs and trumpets. Soreida Salwala doesn't find the street show in the least bit cute. She is an elegant young lady of Thai and Saudi descent, founder and chairman of the Friends of the Asian Elephant Foundation and co-founder of the Elephant Hospital in Lampang. She fell in love with the elephants, when she was a little girl and witnessed a work elephant being killed by his load of lumber in a ditch, while she was on a road trip with her father. Ever since she has followed the plight of the animals in her home country. "The Elephant is the heraldic beast of Thailand," she says. "Don't you think that it's a bad sign when the heraldic beast has to go begging?" For the past eight years she has struggled in Thailand for the rights of elephants. She raised the funds for the construction of the elephant hospital, initiated research projects, alarmed legislators. Thus, was she able, for example, to push through the ordinance forbidding elephants within the city limits of Bangkok. To no avail. Just recently, there were more victims, because an elephant caught in the middle of rush hour traffic panicked and trampled two passersby to death. Now she's calling for a comprehensive package of legislation for the protection of elephants throughout the country. With state support. At every opportunity Soraida Salwala gives interviews on television. "I am permanently getting on the nerves of those in power here, so that they finally do something for the elephants." She shakes her head. "Do you know what the toughest thing about my job is? It won't help anything. In fifty years the elephants in Thailand will be extinct." 
Story from "Dispatch from the Combat Zone", |
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