Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation

...another date for your V.C.R's (you lucky, lucky things)

John Roberts — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:07:00 GMT

...but you are lucky, lucky things not only for being able to watch the incomparable Mr Varun Sharma ride the equally incomparable Yuki (and see me give an interview knee deep in mud - for you've seen that before and they'll probably cut it anyway) for having been spared the wrath of my spleen for so long.

    Life here in the Golden Triangle has been extremely hectic through the high season with all the eles seemingly spread over all four corners of our little piece of jungle but all happy, I have many, many things to share through these pages and as time goes by I hope to get around to commenting on a few news-of-the-day pieces too.

    You were spared for a few more days due to the drop in the inter net, some worms invaded places that worms shouldn't be and suddenly we were gloriously and frustratingly isolated up here - just me, some lovely guests and the eles.

    Oh, also, before I forget, a belated by no less sincere Happy New Year to one and all, I've a feeling it will be a big one for the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation and our partners (from the smallest elephant to the largest donors, you are all partners).

    For a first post of the New Year we'll start slowly with a recommendation to try and catch us on TV, but there is more to come (I promise!).

    It looks as though you'll be able to see shots of the time we spent with Varun in the UK on the 25th & 28th of February at 7pm with a repeat on with a repeat on 7th of March at 11pm and in Europe and the Middle East on the 23rd of Feb. at 2 in the morning and 9 in the evening, the 24th at 7pm, 27th at 7 in the morning and 5pm - all G.M.T.

    Full listings are available from here.

...on why it is important to keep mahouts smiling if you want to put a smile on an elephant's face.

John Roberts — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:58:00 GMT

    It seems odd but, in this cut and thrust world we live in, I am often asked whether we treat our mahouts too well? I'm not going to point fingers and name names but there is a great perception there in the outside world that perhaps we've gone a step or two too far in cosseting our elephant owning friends by not only catering to the every whim of their elephants but by covering enough of their living costs that they are seen to have the same level disposable income that, for instance, a normal hotel employee would have, several steps up from hand to mouth villager; all the mahouts, it seems, now have mobile phones and we must have the highest percentage of Toyota Hiluxes and shiny new motorbikes among the staff than any other ele camp in the world - that all the money we pay now goes to pay off bank loans is not necessarily my fault, I offer free ele care, not financial advice (though, being me, I have been prone to asking a few folks whose income I know intimately because I sign the cheques whether they are not just a little crazy).

    It is also true that villagers who started delivering elephant food to our four elephants six years ago used to borrow farmer's single cylinder diesel engine powered trucks (glorified rotivators, lot e-ten in local parlance) now deliver in shiny pick-ups.

    To be honest it makes me feel good to see, but we do set ourselves up as a scientific charity and there's always the question, where's the line? At what point do you cease to protect what you set out to save? At what point do you breed reliance on your project and therefore become unsustainable?

    I have to admit, if I were a mahout's son, I wouldn't choose to follow in my father's footsteps (though you could probably guess this of me as even though I wasn't a mahout's son I didn't follow in my father's footsteps), however I don't come from a strong tribal tradition where my father's trade is also my cultural identity - those farmers out there may understand the connection rather better than me, why would you choose a trade that you know will be tough and never make you any money?

    So let's admit it is in the blood, as part of their identity these guys have to own an elephant (and the validity and purpose of that cultural identity in the modern world is a debate I keep promising you I'll have), but elephants don't grow on trees and they can no longer be caught from the wild so somebody has to procure an elephant, the luckiest have one born to the family but even then there are stud fees and, of course, the cost of raising the elephant until it can earn a living. Those that don't have an elephant have to find one from somewhere and that, in the vast majority of cases, involves borrowing money - either from the banks or, as an elephant isn't really good collateral, from less formal places (who, of course, carry their own terms).

    Once you have the elephant, though, the job isn't over, the forest to let them go and forage between jobs no longer exists so you find yourself with a very large mouth to feed in addition to the more normal human task of looking after your family and in order to do that you must follow your chosen (or that which is thrust upon you) profession - you must go and be a mahout.

    For those of us in the business of trying to provide an alternative lifestyle for the elephant than living on the street or working hour after hour in trekking camps I believe it is essential that we start looking at mahout and elephant as small business units in their own right, that we don't look at the rent we pay as a handout or a wage, that we don't look at the fodder we give as a gift to help underprivileged people - it is not enough to provide just what is required and expect them to be grateful for the honour of survival, we wouldn't consider argument with normal employees (who among us would consider working just to make ends meet, who doesn't want a quality of life, a chance to save for the future?) why would we consider it with our mahouts.

    Now, I see the argument that we shouldn't over pamper, that if life gets too comfortable then it will be difficult to dissuade sons from following fathers and in the grand, scientific, sense sons following fathers in this particular tradition is something that we should ask ourselves whether we want to encourage but, at this stage in the proceedings the official policy is to maintain or even increase the domestic population - if this is your policy you will need the next generation of instinctive, born-on-the-elephant, mahouts.

    Quite apart from anything else, if the good mahouts default on their loans the elephants fall into the hands of those who don't know much about elephants at all but know all about making money and, whatever your vision for the future of domestic elephants, that can't be a good thing for the present herd.

    So, sound business reasons aside, I don't feel too guilty for the over pampering, whatever your reasons for wanting elephants off the streets it makes conservation sense to ensure the people who you are asking to change their way of life are comfortable in the place you want them to be and, as every politician and Public Relations Officer knows, if you are going to preach your crazy ideas, it always helps to make sure your audience has a full belly and a few fun toys to play with.

Wild elephants in San Francisco? (a date for your West Coast diary)

John Roberts — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 01:04:00 GMT

    For those of you with spare time on your hands in the Bay area tomorrow (12/12/09), I can highly recommend popping down to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival at 11.30 in the morning to catch "Chang: A drama of the wilderness".

    The movie is great not only for it's wild elephant scenes, at one point they destroy a village but as a historical document on two levels - firstly they filmed a wild elephant capture using the kraal method, something only catchable nowadays in darkest Myanmar (and happily so I might add) and secondly as a document of our attitudes towards nature, both in Thailand and in the West in 1927.

    The movie is without a doubt a miracle of film making given the technology available in those days shooting in what is an obviously wild jungle but I'm not sure a New York audience would stand in rapturous applause nowadays when a tiger is obviously shot live on the film or a wild baby elephant was dragged from a pit and tied to a house pillar.

    I reviewed the movie, and the mahouts' reactions, once before in these 'ere pages.
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Date

From December 12, 2009 11:30 AM
Until December 12, 2009 1:00 PM

Location

The Castro Theatre
429 Castro St
San Francisco, CA 94114

[map it!]

Info Line

1-800-838-3006

Website

http://www.silentfilm.org

Contact

Silent Film Festival
833 Market St
Suite #812
San Francisco, CA 94103
415.777.4908
boxoffice@silentfilm.org

Sales have ended for this event. Tickets may still be available at the door.

Description

11:30 AM
CHANG: A DRAMA OF THE WILDERNESS
Produced and Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (USA, 1927)
Cast: Kru, Chantui, Nah, Ladah, Bimbo

Shot entirely in Siam (present-day Thailand), Schoedsack and Cooper's thrilling adventure is clearly the prototype for their later masterpiece KING KONG - and a spellbinding success in its own right. The publicity of the time touted a cast of 500 native hunters, 400 elephants, tigers, leopards, pythons, and other denizens of the wild! Chang is a simple story of one family's survival on their small farm on the edge of the jungle - a way of life that often pits them against forces of nature. The film was nominated (along with Murnau's SUNRISE and Vidor's THE CROWD) for "Artistic Quality of Production" at the first ever Academy Awards.

35mm print from Milestone Film & Video. Approximately 68 minutes.

Donald Sosin will accompany Chang on the piano with an original score.

Introduced by Merian C. Cooper biographer Mark Vaz.

Notes

Free admission for children under 12. No ticket necessary!

Just when you thought it was safe to play favourites (it turns out they exhibit relative quantity judgement)

John Roberts — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 06:37:00 GMT

    If you come to my camp and ask me which is my favourite elephant I'll tell you that I don't have one, can't have one, and that they are all equal to me.  Apart from the fact that is an outright lie it seems to me to be a sensible policy, you don't get Bodo or Michel telling you which is their favourite department head, no-one ever asks Amp who is her favourite mahout - the difference between myself and the above mentioned professionals is, of course, that you only have to hang around in camp awhile and my obvious favouritism shines through.

    Favouritism to the point that I recently, pretending to be professional, challenged a journalist to an electronic guessing game and refused to divulge my favourite until he guessed it within about three e-mails (those flying Emirates Air this December can find this out for themselves as he went and printed - luckily though, I can rely safely assume none of the other potentially jealous girls and boys will get to read it as 1, we don't think they can read and 2, they are unlikely to find themselves in Emirates Business Class as I am too tight to pay for a ticket for their Christmas holidays, the ticket itself is OK, it is the excess baggage that gets me - packed trunk and all that).

    But we know from a thousand years of anecdotes that eles have a good memory and can hold a grudge as well as a candle. So at times like this when I've got a couple of bags of sunflower seeds in my office (I was in town yesterday buying stuff for an ele dung project when I saw them and couldn't resist) which I go out and feed to the eles a handful at a time, how careful do I need to be not to slip an extra handful to the eyelid flashing favourite of today?

    Well, according to a paper that has been sitting on my desktop for some time (Relative quantity judgment by Asian elephants by Naoko Irie-Sugimoto, Tessei Kobayashi, Takao Sato and Toshikazu Hasegawa) very.

    As you'd expect it, not wanting to give myself a headache, it was the relative quantity judgment bit of the title that had it gathering dust until I worked out what the phrase really meant and that, scientist being scientists, they couldn't really say 'counting'.

    Actually, and in fairness, not quite: R.Q.J. (as those of us in the know call it) doesn't necessarily mean counting, it just means the ability to look at too separate quantities and judge which is the greater - not quite the same thing. What our clever Japanese friends did was to fill two bowls with different amounts of bananas and allowed elephants to choose just one - the eles themselves unerringly (well statistically speaking) picked the fuller bowl, something that seems to make sense but apparently the behaviour was only previously seen in non-human apes and cotton top tamarins.

    Where elephants split away from other tested animals, apart from ourselves, was the way they coped with disparity and magnitude effects (again a phrase that the scientists felt, quite rightly, that they had to explain to me) - while the cleverer primates could quite easily tell the difference between a bowl with one piece of bait and one with six pieces, routinely choosing the fuller, it seems they had troubles choosing the better between a bowl of three and a bowl of four; elephants, it seems had no such worries.

    So far, so clever, elephants pick the fuller bowl of food and can weigh up the better between two options while realising the zero sum nature of the game - the other bowl gets taken away - instead of instinctively reaching for something just because it is food, further still they're better at making finer judgments than anything so far tested (on a par with human children).

    But, being scientists, Naoko-san and friends decided to push it a step further, what if instead of letting the elephants see the bait in both bowls they could only watch both bowls being loaded and then choose before they got to see what was in a bowl? Well, blow me away if elephants (albeit a different set of elephants - making this even more convincing) couldn't do that as well, they watched the hand movements, heard the thump as the bait hit the bottom of the bowl, remembered which number of noises corresponded to which bowls and then chose the bowl with the greater number of previously loaded bait.

    Sorry Roy, but this isn't trigger on stage stamping his foot, this is a not-so-hungry (but famously food obsessed) beast counting and remembering actions that they know can be associated with amounts of sweet stuff.

    The researchers concluded that the reason for this reasoning may be an ancient necessity to work out the size of an approaching herd, or an ability to count mateable females before signing allegiances, but who knows?

    They were also confused that while all eles (though they were pre-screened for willingness to take part) performed well in the experiments, one (with the auspicious initials T.R.) couldn't grasp the disparity factors and fell apart when the amounts in each bowl were both large and close to each other - well, I can hazard a guess on that one, we know not all eles are uniquely gifted or fussy when it comes food, so perhaps once you get past a certain point the greedier eles just figure "who cares? enough is enough".

    The failure of one tested elephant to worry about the difference between a bowl of 5 oranges and a bowl of 6 oranges notwithstanding it seems worryingly sure that the things are watching and they are counting, maybe not how many sunflower seeds in a handful (though who knows) but certainly how many handfuls and they're remembering. No way I can play favourite if they know I gave someone three handfuls and someone else only two, with humans, of course, I can make excuses for my actions, but with elephants - even if they understand, no-one has yet proven that they'll listen - it will have to be straight down the line equal treatment.

    Sorry Lynch, no more favours!

Is webcam wilderness still wild? (or is freedom just another word for nothing left to lose?)

John Roberts — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:00:00 GMT

    Many years ago, in a land far, far away I was once, believe it or not, an English child and I still have vague memories of Sunday T.V. watching (in Black and White but more by license choice than necessity - I'm not that old), Rugby Special or Ski Sunday and then usually a programme with Dr David Attenborough somewhere exotic reporting on the natural order of things - the slow and the sleepy, eaten by the quick and the ferocious, the big and the close knit surviving through knowledge and memory - things lived and things died, it was (and is) tough out there: a dead young deer was the meal for the predator's cubs, a matriarch elephant, with a long life under her belt, died and made way for others, after a period where the herd hung around, the scavengers moved in and squabbled over the carcass.

    Red in tooth and claw as Lord Tennyson would have it, though, admittedly, in these Sunday night struggles, after the proscribed level of struggle the rains always came and life was once more renewed - but wasn't that the point of it all? (that this may no longer be happening is a tale for another time).

    This, and a trip to the zoo to see the slightly fatter, less naturally aware and intense versions of the animals was probably the closest average English folks got to wilderness and we lapped it up - when younger we wondered why the cameraman never stepped in to save the cute little deer, but we grew out of it when we learned that this is the way of things and to interfere on a gut reaction to solve the emotional problem in front of us, as history has told us time and time again, just pushes the negative consequence elsewhere - in the basest view, the predator's cubs die, the scavengers - part of the ecosystem - don't have enough to eat.

    Chaos theory will tell you every action has unseen consequences, I don't know why she swallowed the fly.

    Then slowly, the world got smaller, normal folks like you and I could find ways to go and see these things for real, Dr. Attenborough had to turn to expensive time lapse photography and widgetty cameras to stay ahead of the game and continue to amaze us while those that followed in his footsteps resorted to tabloid wildlife journalism with titles not out of place in a primary school yard argument, "WORLD'S DEADLIEST ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS", "Who Would Win in a Fight Between...." and, worse still in my book, if you weren't actually handling the creature you'd come to see or disturbing it in some way, then it just wasn't a bankable programme.

    The great wide open spaces, the endless jungles in which these dramas were once played out disappeared or, at best, shrank; human populations increased and cheap flights allowed normal folks like us to go and watch the drama for themselves - being humans we started to interfere, be it for our own progress (territories were split by roads, dams were built for power and irrigation) or for tourists (when droughts came naturally Park management pumped water to 'save the animals' largely at the request of their guests (but with half an eye on their budget); in a case recently a critically endangered Siamese crocodile was moved from a camp ground here in Thailand because it was scaring guests - not one word of dissent) somewhere along the way some folks changed the focus of the idea of National Parks - from preserved wilderness ecosystems in all their sweating, flying, biting, stinking, glorious ugliness flecked with seconds of beauty and views of the sublime to playgrounds to come and 'see what we saw on TV' (TV never expressly told you that their programmes were the result of years of mosquito bitten camouflaged camera work), naturally the focus falls on the charismatic megafauna and not on the mosquitoes, worms, ticks and leeches, in fact, say the visitors, if you can give us the charisma without the irritation we'd be a whole lot happier.

    So the temptation arrives to manage the wilderness, if people come to see elephants, we'll manage the area to show them elephants even if it is to the detriment - particularly with elephants - of pretty much all else in the eco-system, especially when you start to help them out, pumping in water in times of drought, growing fruit trees in the jungle - mostly done in Thailand in attempts to stop them coming crop raiding but also done in other countries in response to visitors' cries of 'how can you let them suffer' during the hard times.

    Is suffering to be regretted? I guess it must be, but it is also part of the natural order.

    Pumping water during a drought and negating the effects of other natural disasters that would regulate a population means they then fail to do so, in building a dam and knocking out the dry season delayed pregnancies are no longer delayed and the populations increase.

    Errrrm... hooray!?

    Well, yes, if you happen to be an elephant or a person who has come all this way to see elephants, and well, no if you happen to be a herbivore now in competition with the big guzzling things, or an ant that feeds on a particular sort of tree that is now driven to destruction by the increased ele population. An overpopulation of the charismatic mega fauna begins to develop inside the protected areas to match the overpopulation of humans outside....

    ...and then come the webcams, people love our animals and our park, let's pop a webcam so our fans can see what goes on in our wilderness environment - but the honest piece of naivety we show when we invite the globe into our homes via their desktop is that nowadays everyone is conservationally aware and educated and, well, it seems, everyone ain't.

    Apparently outrage was caused the other week when a park management somewhere in Africa failed to interfere with nature for the sake of just one beast, spotted in assumed pain on a webcam - though those that caused the outrage got their diagnosis wrong, the animal was not in pain through giving birth in her old age but through constipation bought about by not being able to properly chew food, eventually the animal died having successfully deposited her juvenile calf with the herd.

    Somewhere the line has been smudged between domestic animals, who we, having caused them to be born domesticated have duty to make as comfortable as possible (within the bounds of their species) and wild ecosystems which should be protected as a whole not just for the benefit of one species, let alone one beast.

    There are a great many advantages in being born free but the drawback is that you are part of an immense and complicated system that is not skewed in your favour - to me that the phrase "Elephant Dies of Old Age" makes a headline says it all.
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Elephant dies of old age (South Africa)

News 24

October 5, 2009

Cape Town - The elephant cow that provoked an outcry from an animal rights group when it was spotted, apparently distressed and in pain, on an Mpumalanga game reserve's live webcam a fortnight ago, has died.

"The elephant cow died yesterday [Sunday] afternoon of natural causes, i.e. old age," Djuma Private Game Reserve owner Jurie Moolman told Sapa in an e-mail on Monday.

The cow, which last week managed to rejoin its herd, had been at the end of its natural life, with her last set of teeth worn to the point of not being able to chew her food.

Looking out for her calf

"She kept up with the herd, and it is difficult not to think that she had one last thing to do before she died - ensuring that her calf was accepted into the herd. Her calf is with the herd and seems to be doing well.

"Hopefully this is a lesson to us all about interfering; we should not, unless humans caused the suffering," Moolman said.

Djuma is one of more than a dozen lodges and reserves that make up the 65 000 hectare Sabi Sand Reserve, which shares an unfenced 50km border with the Kruger National Park.

On Monday last week, the group Animal Rights Africa demanded that the reserve's owners help the elephant.

According to the group, the elephant was suffering with what appeared to be birth complications.

The Sabi Sand Reserve has a "policy of non-intervention when it comes to animals in distress not caused by humans", but its ecological committee decided to take action in this case.

Could not chew food

When the animal was found by rangers, it was seen to be suffering from old age and constipation.

"It was determined that she is very old - so old that her teeth are too worn for her to masticate her food properly, and thus a bolus of unchewed food is blocking her alimentary canal," Moolman said at the time.

At one point there were plans to euthanise the elephant, but it was granted a reprieve when it rejoined its herd. It was closely monitored over the past week.

The cow - which has a three-year-old calf - was estimated to be between 50 and 60 years of age, an advanced age for an elephant.

Moolman reported the calf was no longer suckling and should have no problems surviving without its mother.
African elephants, the world's largest land mammals, die more often of starvation than old age.

They go through five sets of teeth in their lives, but once these are gone - worn away by the up to 250kg of bark, leaves and twigs an adult elephant chews its way through in a day - they are no longer able to eat.

G'day Mate (an Aussie V.C.R. date)

John Roberts — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 08:39:00 GMT

...before she appealed to us to come and live here Pumpui's Mum, K. Varunee, was part of the one of the extended families whose elephants were chosen to go to Taronga Zoo in Sydney, being the most photogenic she was chosen to take part in a story culminating in the birth of Luk Chai - the first ele to be born in Sydney from Artificial Insemination.

We didn't know where she'd gone until one of the keepers called to say they'd seen her rock up in Sydney.

The T.V. show is airing in the city on Saturday, so, for fans of K. Varunee, K. Pom and Tony, Pumpui & Chok (all of whom stayed behind when she took to the big city) don't forget to grab a stubby, pop a shrimp on the barbie, slip off your thongs, slap a Pom and root for (erm... no, sorry, that's English, I mean support) K. Varunee...
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Getting ready for a special zoo TV event this Sunday, 6.30pm on Channel 7
Australia's biggest baby is growing up fast. This Sunday night at 6.30pm, a one-hour television special tracks the incredible full story of the journey that delivered Australia's first elephant calf, Luk Chai, at Taronga Zoo.

Sunday 6 December
Channel 7
6.30pm

See a preview (including Varunee) here

...because 40 years just fly by. (June and Garry's vow renewal in camp)

John Roberts — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:30:00 GMT

    It is well known that we need no real excuse for a party here in the Elephant Camp but occasionally some folks come along with the perfect excuse nonetheless.

    So it is with many times repeat guest June 'the rain Queen' Billings - so called because she has the uncanny knack of bringing rain from the bluest skies and the driest of dry seasons (we're thinking of sending her to Desert Islands or the new Anantara up there in the empty quarter just to give her a real challenge) - she is, of course, also part parent of Tawan, the little big fella that we bought out of hospital in Surin in the days before we learned that buying elephants only put other elephants in danger (in fact, it is his ex-owner that taught us this, converting the money we give him plus some insurance into two new baby elephants for the streets), elephant polo lines-lady and holder of other accolades too numerous to mention here.

    Having been married to Garry 'the sun king' Billings for forty years and accompanied by him on several of her elephant expeditions June contacted us some time ago to request a surprise party to celebrate this and we thought, where better than the elephant camp? We're not very good at keeping secrets but, well, we'll try.

    The morning started with a seven monk and food offering blessing with all the Anantara department heads...

...followed by a little rest to absorb the merit and put the eles to bed before things really got started in the evening, we invited a local village Brahman in to give a baisri (บายศรี) ceremony (which, unfortunately I failed to get photos of) and then let the mahouts, hotel staff and children enjoy a good, old fashioned, elephant camp party...

...food was moo katar buffet, a kind of Northern Thai Korean barbeque thing, cooked over hot coals...

...we pulled up the rugs (well the new 'hybrid' silks - traditional Surin design with more modern plain scarves - sorry, little advert for the ladies' business)...

...as ever in the ele camp the kids are invited too...

...OK, OK, not so old fashioned, the old songs now come through the computer, complete with word prompts karaoke style, 21st century mahouts...

...kom loys (โคมลอย) to bring 40 more years of good luck...

...then let the dancing begin...

...into the night...

...as it was such a special occasion and the Billings' had treated us to this party, we flew in a Swiss T.V. Superstar and anchor lady just for one song.

มงกุฎแสงจันทร์ (high drama on ele back - try typing that into TIVO)

John Roberts — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:47:00 GMT

    Residents of Thailand will know of the joys of Thai terrestrial TV, sitting P'Dai's noodle shop over a spicy ma-ma heang and a cold kwat of Leo of an evening you can watch the news followed by a programme that will update you on the deeds of the Royal Family during the day - there's often an elephant either in the news (something tragic that may have happened) or in the Royal news (if one of their Royal Highnesses visited one of their elephant Foundations).

    After that and a small, often humorous - though nowadays more about convincing Thai ladies that they are ugly with their olive skin and dark, smooth hair - advert break you settle in, a long (long - seriously long) theme tune (which usually gives the game away for the next fifteen weeks of story) and then two hours of high drama - clean cut heroes; bad guys with mustaches, long hair and comedically stupid henchmen; gentle elderly patriarchs; scheming matriarchs; a whiter than white, usually rich but pretending to be poor heroine (who always starts off hating the clean cut hero but ends up rather differently), who sometimes carries a very big gun and knows some form of karate, never sweats and wears full make-up even when sleeping rough in the jungle; a scheming older sister/evil friend; a comedy maid or gardener (always played by the same actor who must be legally obliged to be cast in all Thai made TV and movies) who speaks best fluent Lao in a Bangkok accent and to top it all there is quite often some time travel thrown in.

    Thai drama at its best, all acted as though for a stage audience and in crystal clear Bangkok Thai. It is not necessarily the best pointer for a young foreigner trying to find his way in the country (argue with the best looking girl until she falls in love with you, avoid men with moustaches, always listen to the old guy and don't follow the old lady - unless she's poor, or at least pretending to be) but it is a good way to practice the sort of Thai to use when you have to go for meetings in Bangkok.

    ...and what more reason do you need to sit down and watch? Either on television for those of you who live here or they even stream it through the internet nowadays for those of you not-so-lucky.

    Well, here's one more reason, last year, before the flood, we were approached by a production company needing elephants, long sticks and a bit expertise to film one such drama - set in a foreign land, sometime in the past, where elephant polo is played by princely folk.

...lights, camera...

...someone famous throughout Thailand and an actor...

...the elephants appear to be enjoying the action, the mahouts are wondering if this acting lark is all it is cracked up to be...

...and even more action.

    Oh, almost forgot, the point of the piece, the show in question มงกุฎแสงจันทร์ (Mongkut Saengjan) begins airing today on Thai TV Channel three at the drama time of 20:30 - the official page (including a trailer - with a trunk! - and some fan cards to send to friends) is available here.

You give what? to who? for why? (or why we support the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre).

John Roberts — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:57:00 GMT

    One of the questions that I am most frequently asked, a question that has me scratching my head, is "You do a great job here, does the Government give you any funding?". I cough a little and furrow my brow, say thanks for the compliment but never really understand why the Government would fund a private enterprise, or even a Thai registered foundation - yes, our goals may be broadly similar but I've never heard of Governments financially supporting N.G.O's.

    In fact, in our case, through the King's Cup Elephant Polo tournament held each year, it is often the other way around - but when I say as much it is the turn of my friendly guest or journalist to furrow their brow and ask why a struggling little enterprise which (by the dirt 'neath my nails and the holes in my jeans) is obviously working from month to month just to keep our eles and mahouts in the style to which they've become accustomed. Why would we be giving that hard earned cash (& don't believe anyone who tells you that just because most of the money is donated in a charity auction it is not hard earned, not only is a charitable auction incredibly hard to organise, it is not unfair to say that to get those donors into that position takes the entire management staff of the hotel plus a few die-hard outside supporters three to six month's dedicated work along with the investment of millions of baht - not to mention the organisation of twenty elephants off the streets and just a little sweat from my aging limbs) to a Government institution?

    Well, the initial answer to that is easy, it is our stated intention to help all the elephants in Thailand and we believe that, as well as looking after our few in such a way as to set up a blue-print that can be copied elsewhere, the Government, in particular the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre (in the North) are in an incredible position to do that.

    But then people go and visit, scratch the surface a little bit, slide between the gates and go to Lampang and what do they find? Well, on initial inspection, they see a largely commercial operation with an entrance fee, an elephant show, everything for sale all the time - it looks just like all the other elephant camps in Thailand, they're all businesses, why would this be any different?

    Well, two reasons...

    The first will be familiar, in a way far deeper than we have ever tried here, the T.E.C.C. have recognised that Thai elephants, if they are to survive in domesticity will have to make money in order to keep themselves fed and have dedicated themselves to finding safe, sustainable ways of doing this that will appeal to all markets; remember all the alternatives to 'elephant trekking' you've heard about from camps with different P.R. approaches or seen on the internet? You can probably bet they originated at the T.E.C.C. - our very own mahout training course started with them, the first folks to do it; elephant dung paper? yep, first in the world; elephant painting? years before that video went viral you could buy conceptual art from the budding pachyderm Piccassos of Lampang; elephant orchestra? well, not many people doing that yet but still they've featured on some high powered movie scores and have three CD's under their belt - just about any idea you can think of that is now seen with a 'wow' on the internet or a blog, if it safe for elephants and can earn a mahout (or a business) extra money giving the ele an extra hour off, it was probably pioneered and trialled at the T.E.C.C. It may have been tuned and tweaked elsewhere but the idea was probably from there.

    The second reason, the stuff you don't see - the hospital is pretty visible and gives free care to any Thai elephant but you don't see the research that goes on; the mobile veterinary clinic that will come to any elephant that is not in need of hospital treatment but still needs a vet; you don't see the musth control team that can come out at the drop of a hat, free of charge, highly trained, highly skilled crack mahouts who'll come and sedate your out of control musth bull (eh Phu Khi!) who would, in previous years, been in danger not only of hurting folks but of catching a bullet rather than a dart of sedative; it is possible to miss the Elephant and Mahout Training college which researches and offers new elephant training methods away from the brutal ones practiced in the old days, teaches new mahouts and old hands new ways of looking after the elephants; unless you sweep the internet you don't get to see the publications in Thai and in English that come out of the T.E.C.C's typewriters on elephant care, history and everything in between and finally (but not comprehensively, these are just the things I can think of from the top of my head and there's plenty that I don't know about), the thing that gave us the idea to come down here and write this blog, the Pang La Sanctuary for disabled, elderly and dangerous elephants - operating quietly for over 30 years now without an official opening or any way of turning a dime.

    All of this extra stuff costs money over and above keeping and feeding the eighty odd elephants under their care and this is why, when the management system have a project that needs supporting - we're currently working with their Thai Elephant Therapy Project to train already domesticated Thai elephants (preferably ex-street eles) to work with Autistic children they can come to us and to the King's Cup Elephant Polo with a proposal for equipment or for specific funding and, if we can see it will be good for all Thai eles in the long run, there's a good chance we'll put our noses to the grindstone and try to raise some cash, and over the years, with the help of our sponsors, we haven't done badly...

...over the last few weeks we've had reason to visit a few times and a few facilities, so I thought I'd take a few photos of the more visible things the King's Cup has given in order to help this work.

Mahout housing at the hospital, so not only can elephants come and get free care, the mahouts can now stay with their eles.

...a few years ago we scraped together enough shekels for three pick-ups, now seen moving staff and fodder between the Lampang sites...

...the dedicated elephant ambulance travels all over the country to help sick elephants come to the centre and can also double as purely a well designed elephant transport truck.

...and with the money from the 2009 tournament we've agreed to help the Thai Elephant Therapy Project, five elephants have been off the streets and under training at the T.E.C.C. for three months already, the research is due to begin in earnest next March.

Electric Eleland (are you experienced?)

John Roberts — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:38:00 GMT

    It is a peculiarity of life, I've found, that no matter when you start a project - if it is a project worth starting - it will be finished at exactly the moment that you no longer need to use it: the baby elephant camp was finished at the beginning of last dry season, the office roof was finally fixed on the day the rains stopped, the solar showers for the mahouts were finally installed just as the idea of hot water made everyone sweatier and smellier, I have no doubts that my elephant dung solid fuel machines will finally see the light of day at about the same time this year - but that's the wonderful thing about being weather obsessed, seasons always, always, always come around again (well, they used to anyway).

    So it is with the much touted electric fence for our babies, the Mark III is ready to be launched on an unsuspecting ele public at just the time the fish are gasping for air and finding ready friends in the egrets' beaks down on the grassland.

    Luckily we always have half an eye on the bigger picture, the Mark III in this case, was never really designed just for our little valley - yes it will give a few eles a chance to run around, cause chaos and create unwanted wallows when our grassland floods again, as it surely will; but the plan has always been to finalise a design on this relatively small scale that could be extended around a larger plot of land, wherever, whenever, whoever this becomes possible.

    As with all these things, the electric fence idea is, of course, not ours but the designs we borrowed from downloaded internet photos, mobile phone sneaky spy shots and our visit to Her Majesty's Royal Re-introduction Project didn't seem to fit our rambunctious but obviously fairly tame young 'uns - so Mark's I & II fell by the wayside in a pile of not even barely worried buffalo (signal too weak - wire too thick) and St Vitus' dancing mahouts (hmmm.... bit too strong that one - you didn't think we'd actually test it on eles did you?).

    Once we had the jolt level to our satisfaction Lynchee and I went in, I with bated breath - how would she react? would the first jolt send her panicking through the fence the other side? would she hate me forever? - she with glorious ignorance - mmmm... green grass to eat; tyres, people to play with.

    Unfortunately I was actually so concerned (once more my scientific credentials go flying out the window) that I needed to be there to help her cope with the consequences of the first shock that I don't have a video or photo of the momentous occasion when she backed up a couple of inches, made no noise at all and came to the conclusion not to touch the blue rope again before going on with the grazing and the playing. In short the electric fence worked just as it should - other eles were not quite so quick to realise (but then I'm biased as to the brightness of our Lynch') but they got it in the end.

...after a quick (but largely unnecessary) verbal lesson in how to use it...

...it is down to some serious playing.

    The trick now will be persuading the mahouts to let their eles use it, unlike classic cattle and horse herding countries the electric fence is not a common method of stock control here in Thailand and we do make a point of listening to our mahouts' concerns - they started with 'the elephant will surely die it is lethal, you're completely crazy' which is an easy one to disprove having built and demonstrated the thing whilst maintaining a couple of very much alive eles - now we're on a slightly trickier belief that their babies will be sent sterile.

    Hey, ho, another day, another challenge in our mahout friendly, rescue rental world.

    But we have a long time to win them around because, as alluded to at the very beginning of the missive, the project is finished just at the time we don't really need it - the grassland's dry and the babies are daily out running around in the tall grass with perhaps, just perhaps, a little splashing thrown in.

Lazy review of Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers (using selected evidence from the book to back up my traditional rants)

John Roberts — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:13:00 GMT

    One of the problems of the blogosphere is that one can select and publish only the information that agrees with our world view, the medium removes the burden of proof, I could put up the most preposterous of opinions, presenting them as facts and, though they may be based on the scantest of evidence, you Dear Reader, would have no recourse save for an acerbic comment which I could then choose whether or not to send public.

    So, being prone to this sort of behaviour myself, it is a great relief when some clever and rigorous folks - otherwise known as scientists - go to the trouble of producing a work that appears to back up the more spurious of the rants I subject you to.

    The chapter on water usage had me almost punching the air with joy, apart from the fact it was lucid, well written and researched, it could have been lifted from one of my pieces (though as the book was finished in 2003 or so and I have only just read it now we must have just come to the same conclusion). That the yearly claims of drought have more to do with an increasing population and an increased expectation of year round cropping (using irrigation during the dry season) throughout the area (the book makes distinction between upland farmers who normally take the blame and lowland farmers who are the traditional blamers - not being tuned into the narratives I have never made that distinction) without a corresponding increase in water collection infrastructure.

    The rainfall graphs taken from the Royal Irrigation Department website manage to show that rainfall levels, though definitely fluctuating over the last 40 years, are (so far) fluctuating within natural, historical levels in much the same way as my favourite graph of flood and flow from the Mekong River Commission has (thus far) managed to show that even our great flood events and drought claims are well within the natural fluctuations of recent history and have more to do with an increased expectation to be able to farm/trade year round - something never dreamt of in the past.

    But enough of the agreements and the 'I told you so's' what did I learn? Well, in truth I learned a lot about the historical politics that have informed traditional Government intervention in this landscape - I had never assumed the monocrop large teak plantations were anything more than long term cash cropping though they were, apparently, an attempt to preserve rainfall levels under the belief that trees create rain; learned a great deal of the issues between lowland and upland farmers and became enlightened as to the land designations and, in particular, the intricacies of running elephants on certain types of land, if you like, the official definition of conservation.

    I was also quite disturbed to learn that perhaps the most accurate method of estimating historical erosion patterns is to calculate the relative levels of cesium-137 left over from the atomic bomb testing age (peaking in 1963) in the soil.  This is radioactive stuff dropped from the atmosphere uniformly across the world in those days.

    The only chapter on which I would take issue, and in relying on observational and anecdotal evidence to do so I become that which I seek to criticise, is the chapter on biodiversity. In doing so I make no distinction between upland and lowland farmers and between the methods traditionally used by different peoples, I buy into the arguments that certain sorts of swidden agriculture - both pioneer and otherwise (though, being a fan of big trees and of natural environments, I don't really like the idea of pioneer swidden - i.e. moving a village and cutting down virgin forest in order grow crops rather than having rotating areas of secondary forest left fallow for a certain number of years around a fixed village - though what is done is done and, what the book doesn't mention is that most of the big trees were presumably (up until Government intervention put a stop to it in 1989) taken by large logging companies and our favourite mammals which, I presume, would have produced a far greater effect on the virgin forest than any amount of either type of swidden).

    This chapter seeks, I feel, to suggest that large populations and commercial, year round, farming - be it of fruit, rubber or other trees, may not harm the biodiversity of the region - having walked in areas ranging from protected National Park (mainly areas of tertiary growth) where hunting and grazing are controlled, through secondary growth forest away from villages, swidden farming areas and into pesticide ridden fruit farms and 'intensive' agricultural areas I can vouch, observationally, that the diversity of mammal life (with wild mammals being virtually without trace outside specifically (and actually) protected areas) and of bird life (from calls and observation) decreases as you walk through - with the large, fruit and rubber forests, being void of any faunal life at all.

    For floral life you would have to ask a horticulturalist, but the (seemingly universal) habit of using pesticide to clear weeds around any plantation or area that needs cleaning cannot be good for plant diversity - in fairness the book only specifically challenges the oft made claim that pesticide use pollutes downstream waterways and, for this, I have to bow to higher knowledge - but it ain't that good for the plants it falls on, whether those plants be in the mountains or on the plains.

    In summation, this is not a book you would necessarily read unless you were specifically interested in the subject, either here or elsewhere in S.E. Asia - it may hold many lessons for those working in countries where the economic miracle of Thailand has not yet happened and, at times, it does read more of a direct questioning of Government policy and a defence of the upland 'hill tribe' farmers and farming techniques than a truly balanced scientific laying out of all research in the field.

    That said, the historical tendency to blame all of the agricultural and environmental ills on specific groups of upland farmers, whilst praising other groups and completely ignoring the effects of others still - when all are operating, increasingly, in the same area must be very frustrating for those who take all the blame and those who have researched to prove that this 100% share is unwarranted.

    As with so much else in life, for those of you who prefer your reading slightly less scientifically rigorous the situation can be summed up as "it's not as simple as it looks and don't believe everything you read in the papers (or the blogosphere)".

    Bit like elephants really.
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    Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers (the politics of environmental knowledge in Northern Thailand)
by Tim Forsyth and Andrew Walker is available from all good local bookstores as well as international websites.

What's big and grey and has a long nose?

John Roberts — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 01:02:00 GMT

    Any guesses? No, no, no, not that, would I insult your intelligence by not posing a trick question?

    Hint: It doesn't really have a long nose (apart from allegedly providing room for those that are inclined to develop one a la Pinocchio, but that is, quite literally, a stretch).

    No, it is the area in which the current wildlife laws and CITES regulations allow us to register our elephants in order to earn the moniker 'Captive Bred'. In fact, that's not quite true, the CITES regulation (10.16 rev.) is very clear, for an elephant to be defined as captive bred (C) both her parents must be classified at least F1 - i.e. have been bred in captivity in a controlled manner. What is unsaid is all four of the grandparent parents, presumably, could have been wild caught - something that makes sense as, given the life span and reproductive tendencies of an elephant we would have to be going back 24 years at the very minimum for those four grandparent elephants, to have been caught - yes, it would have been illegal to have caught them in 1985 but if we were to suggest that grandparents and then parents were 30 years old when they bred we are well back into the times when wild capture was not only legal but commonplace.

    Even in 1985, however, the world was a very different place, Thailand was a very, very different place, the laws for elephant registration are as old as the hills and, indeed, take into account that Thailand - particularly those bits in which elephants hang out - is a particularly hilly (or swampy if we talk of Surin) place.

    Once a baby is born you have eight years to register it, by which time it will have been separated from it's mother for five years and, as with wild elephants, the father has but one job, usually accomplished with relish and gusto, and he's out of the picture - one act of penetration performed nearly 10 years before the latest legal registration date of his calf, following which he may not have been seen again. So, on a village scale, we have the mahout's and perhaps the village elder's word that the elephant came from two specific parent elephants (who may no longer be in the area) - scientifically this isn't of much use as, outside the big logging companies, formal records were not taken and the registration system has no legal requirement to mention the parents of an elephant and place of breeding (i.e. to confirm it was a controlled environment).

    I think I have mentioned this before, when we began registering our elephants with an international database, the collator automatically recorded them as wild caught (turns out a lot of people outside Thailand seem to think that we just pop into the jungle and grab an ele every time we need one - partially, one suspects, because of this grey area in scientific designation and near impossibility of registering any of our elephants as Captive Bred under the CITES definition.) but what got me reading deeper was a recently published report by the international agency Traffic entitled The Elephant and Ivory Trade in Thailand which appears to be a well researched (except some data is out of date - number of domestic elephant camps stemming from 2002, price of baby elephants must be from about the same time) document focusing mainly on the ivory trade but obviously spending time at the border and making use of the research from an earlier study focusing on Myanmar that we have previously discussed.

    Interestingly the first study (and I consider both of them valid) resulted in vibrant headlines in the popular press identifying Myanmar as the centre of the illegal trade in wildlife in South East Asia, whereas this study, some of the same journals and journalists now identify Thailand as the centre of that trade with headlines such as Thai Corruption, Loopholes, & Adventure Travel Enable Illegal Ivory Trade - lucky Burma to be off the hook so quickly. The reality of the situation is, of course, that it is a cross border trade (at least for live eles) and that until both countries live up to their obligations under CITES (Thailand signed in 1983, Myanmar in 1997) then the trade will continue - though, as I have said before, the trade is older than the effective enforcement of the borders so the elephant keepers living on both sides of the border can be understood when they fail to see what the fuss is about.

    That Adventure Travel either deliberately (though I would be tempted to place that burden on the less adventurous tourism ventures) or unwittingly (through my old favourite soap box subject of the 'smuggle to Bangkok to sell to well meaning 'rescue' operations' trade) drives the trade in live elephants is something that it is not beyond imagination, I do find it slightly unfair to blame us for the trade in ivory though: I don't think any camp I've ever visited sells ivory (at least openly and to the public) - if anyone has seen it for sale in a camp I would like to know, Traffic's under cover folks may know more.

    In fairness to Thailand the report made several recommendations and those that can be practically and easily followed have been; leading to some high profile ivory seizures, increased training of border post officials and customs folks etc. I think it is also fair to say that the tourist industry is aware of the problems and, as ever, change can be market driven; as tourists I highly recommend that you ask the camp you choose to travel to (or ask your agent to ask) how they source their elephants and what they do to safeguard against using illegally smuggled, wild caught, elephants.

    Other recommendations such as the legal registration and microchipping of baby elephants at birth (or let's say within three months) and a national computer database have not yet been implemented but are worth campaigning for as it is very difficult to see any legal arguments for not doing this given Thailand's excellent infrastructure and communications system - let us hope for a change in the law in the near future.
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Thailand steps up efforts to tackle illegal ivory trade

TRAFFIC press release

September 24, 2009

Bangkok, Thailand, 24 September—A recent high-profile ivory seizure, a review of national legislation, and the initiation of training courses for both government staff and ivory traders are indications of the commitment being shown by the Thai Government to tackle the illegal ivory trade, according to TRAFFIC.

The seizure, by the Royal Thai Customs Department, took place during the third week of August at the Suvarnabhumi International Airport, when, according to the Thailand CITES Management Authority, 316 pieces of raw ivory weighing 812.5 kg illegally imported from Qatar were confiscated.

In order to help track the domestic ivory trade in Thailand, in August last year the Government introduced legislation requiring ivory traders to maintain and updated inventory their stock and to have this available for review by authorities as required.

The Government is also beginning a review of the Wildlife Animal Reservation and Protection Act (WARPA 1992). The Act contains a loophole that allows illegal trade to flourish in the country.

The flaw in the legislation was highlighted in TRAFFIC’s recent report, The elephant and ivory trade in Thailand (PDF, 800 K which also detailed the results of market surveys for ivory carried out in 2006 and 2007: http://www.traffic.org/species-reports/traffic_species_mammals50.pdf

“The government of Thailand is clearly demonstrating its commitment to addressing the illegal trade in ivory, although there is a long way to go before satisfactory measures are in place,” says Chris RShepherd, Acting Director of TRAFFIC Southeast Asia.

Recently the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (DNP) initiated a series of training courses to raise awareness among its staff about Thailand’s obligations under existing national legislation and under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) to control and manage ivory trade.

Thailand became a Party to CITES in 1983.

The first course was organized in Nakorn Sawan Province, and to help ensure buy-in from the private 
sector, ivory traders were invited to participate. TRAFFIC was invited to run a session on the identification of ivory for DNP staff.

“It was very encouraging to see the enthusiasm of the participants, and to see that more than 80% of the ivory and substitute ivory products used to test DNP staff were identified correctly,” says Shepherd.

The second course in Sara Buri Province was a three day event aimed at raising awareness among enforcement agencies about Thailand’s obligations under CITES and the importance of developing an effective coordination mechanism to report ivory seizures. A session was also included to help enforcement officers distinguish between real and fake ivory (usually bone and plastic resins) and between elephant (CITES listed) and mammoth ivory (non CITES listed).

TRAFFIC, in collaboration with the CITES Secretariat, has developed the Elephant Trade Information System (ETIS), a database that collates information on all ivory seizures reported worldwide.

Analysis of ETIS records helps in the assessment of how elephant range States are fulfilling theircommitment under the Convention, and has consistently identified Thailand as one of the top five countries implicated in the illegal trade of ivory.

Among countries in the region, Thailand plays the most significant role in the illegal trade in ivory and other elephant products, with trade in live elephants also a serious issue.

Although the trade in ivory and elephant products is not a new phenomenon—in Thailand, records go back as far the Sukhothai period (1238-1376 A.D.) — Asian Elephants are declining across their range, 
with the illegal trade in ivory a major contributing factor.

TRAFFIC has offered to provide technical support to help Thailand fulfill its obligations under CITES, ETIS and in the enforcement of strengthened national legislation.

Thailand is one of the 175 Parties expected to attend the next full meeting of CITES, which takes place next March in Qatar where concern about the trade in ivory and other elephant products will once again feature on the agenda.

“The seizure by Thai Customs of more than 800 kg of ivory illegally imported from Qatar last month could hardly be of greater significance for Thailand to signal its international commitment to implementing the treaty fully,” says Shepherd.

Elephant caravan - a mixed message or a dream journey?

John Roberts — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 01:24:07 GMT

    Recently, with a great deal of ceremony but with oddly low-key, given the organisations involved and the message, press coverage Greenpeace took five elephants back to the streets - they're calling it a Chang(e) Caravan, the Chang bit being elephant in Thai (ช่าง) and the e, apparently standing for 'empowerment' but I think probably poetic license to justify the pun (something I am prone to myself).

    Their plan is to march them through the lowlands of Thailand for a fortnight to bring attention to climate change and to the threats that rising temperatures and sea levels would have on Thailand's rice bowl - most of which sits a hair's breadth above sea level - and on biodiversity in general, the aim is to finish in Samut Prakarn in time for the United Nations Climate Change Negotiations - otherwise known as the Bangkok Climate Change Talks 2009 (which start tomorrow, 28th of September).

    I have to admit my first thought was not one of outrage, though there is definitely a mixed message in there, here we are working to get eles off the streets and here Greenpeace are takin' 'em back.

    I heard a young Dutch lady a few years ago attempted to do a similar thing, walk an ele she had bought from the streets back through Thailand, performing educational work along the way, to a Sanctuary in the North (I think Elephant Nature Park). Rumour has it that her donors and the overseas elephant loving folks were so appalled at this idea that she had to call it off - we're saving an ele from the streets, how can you suggest that it walk some more?

    My first thought, though, centred around a green-eyed monster - if I could find someone else to take over the reins of keeping my 34 elephantine and 64 human souls happy, busy and healthy for awhile (and persuade my bosses to keep on paying me) I have long dreamed of an elephant pace journey through the back roads of Thailand, from Surin to here over the course of about three or four months, I think the kindnesses and insights into Thai life that you get at that pace (I always love riding the elephants back from Chiang Saen after Songkran) would be selfishly worth it as a lifetime experience, if you also performed educational work in local schools as well as told the international press that you were doing it to 'draw attention to something' (more for form's sake than to draw attention to it one feels), who knows, given a further six months of hair pulling and wrist ache there may be a best seller in it too.

    So, mixed messages aside, I feel it would be churlish to complain about our climate change activist friends taking eles back to the streets, they are also quick to point out that the eles will only walk 10km a day and will be transported by truck through the busy areas, something that I guess is necessary if you need to cover that distance in that time. I guess some folks might point out that popping elephants on and off trucks and sending them out on the road is a little unnecessary, there are other ways to make a point and the eles may be happier in the forest but, done well as I'm sure Dr Alongkot will, and using Surin elephants that are used to trucks, it is still better than scraping a living on the streets from whence they came and if attention really is drawn (I think the benefit to the schools and towns they visit will be greater than to the folks in the U.N. conference centre who are presumably well versed in the issues) then the greater good is satisfied (and it all sounds like jolly good fun).

    The caravan is obviously having some effect as climate change stories are popping up in the press - and I'm not going to argue that this is not a pre-eminent issue facing our planet - as I will not argue that (should we fail to prevent it) it will directly harm the bio-diversity of the entire planet (as well as the Greater Mekong Sub-region) but being an old and unreformable pedant I do have to make the small point that, in my opinion, the greater immediate threat to the bio-diversity of the areas mentioned is continued habitat loss through human intervention and encroachment, unsustainable water usage as well as, in some cases poaching for the pet and bushmeat markets.

    Climate change will obviously increase these problems over the next ten to twenty to fifty to one hundred years, but, by then, many of the 133 - 2,835 species (now there's a fair old data range) may be extirpated or extinct already thanks to current destructive trends unconnected to the major global issue. I haven't seen the educational material that accompanies the caravan but I do hope they stress the importance of saving Asia's wild places now as well as the household level changes that can be made to help change the larger picture.

    On a smaller point, while I find the assertion that there is no viable population of Asian elephant remaining in the range states a little alarmist - the scientific agreement on what constitutes a viable gene pool is a long way off (under the most rigorous scientific definition we'd all be doomed) - I agree that concentration on wildlife corridors and linking the remaining populations in Thailand and throughout the range is necessary - these were listed as recommendations in the 1996 Asian Elephant Conservation Action Plan - perhaps a caravan to highlight the need for this work is in order?

    ...and while I wouldn't argue that Khao Yai at 300 has possibly Thailand's highest density of elephants it also wouldn't hurt to make the point that Thailand has some other populations with greater viability (at present) due to access to greater areas of contiguous forest and of being on the border with countries with a lower human population density and potentially very large areas of forest remaining (albeit with very little current protection).
_____________________________________

The Future Depends on What We Do at the Present (Greenpeace South-east Asia blog)

Om Jai Shri Ganesha! As is the practice amongst millions of believers, especially the Hindus, the blessings of the elephant-headed god, aka Ganapati, the remover of obstacles and god of all beginnings, were sought today to launch the Chang(e) Caravan near the famed UNESCO world heritage site, the magnificent rainforests of Khao Yai National Park.

Later, sitting amongst hundreds of school children, watching the ancient ceremony of Wai Pakam, being performed by mahout elders of the Kui tribe, calling upon the spirits for protection of all life in the forests, I was amazed by the simple animist beliefs that have persisted despite the disappearance of the forests , thousands of species and the traditional way of life.

Before the arrival of man, Southeast Asia, a region that today comprises of 11 nations and is about half the size of USA, was completely covered by forests with the exception of its beaches, tidal flats and top of some high mountains.

More than 100 plant families with several thousand tree species thrived in these forests that one time, according to naturalists, was home to over 50 percent of all species on earth.

Only a few patches have survived the onslaught of man and his greed, but I was reassured by my friend, Dr. Alongkot, a leading elephant conservationist in Thailand and Caravan Manager of the audacious Chang(e) caravan, that these remaining rain forests of Southeast Asia are still a refuge to almost 20 percent of surviving bio-diversity on the planet

Chang, Thai for Elephant, the most charismatic mega-fauna, its largest member. All of which is under unprecedented threat with the dual and inter-related cause of deforestation and climate change.

The Asian Elephant, is divided in 3 sub-species, the elephants of Sri Lanka (Elephas maximus maximus), the Sumatran elephant (Elephas maximus Sumatranus) and all the elephants of the continental mainland (Elephas maximus Indicus).

According to Dr. Alongkot , nowhere in India or Southeast Asia there exists, what biologists call a ‘minimal viable population’ that can breed in perpetuity without harmful genetics efforts caused by ‘pocketed herd phenomenon’ due to forest degradation and loss of forest corridors.

Thailand has about 1500 wild elephants with the biggest concentration (200-300) in Khao Yai National Park and along the border with Myanmar. Thailand presently has about 2500 elephants in captivity. With the closure of logging industry , many of these elephants and their mahout families have been rendered jobless, reduced to begging on the streets of Bangkok.

Five such elephants, rescued and rehabilitated by Thai Elephant Research and Conservation Fund, will lead the people’s caravan for change, raising awareness on climate change, collecting and broadcasting the voices of thousands of impacted people in the region to call upon world leaders especially President Obama to take decisive action to combat climate change and stop deforestation.

Von Hernandez, Greenpeace Southeast Asia’s Executive Director, in his opening remarks said that the letter ‘e’ in chang(e), stands for ‘empowerment’. Given the elephantine task ahead for the Chang(e) caravan crew and also the world leaders who will meet in New York for a special session of UN general assembly on climate change, we hope that the wisdom of the elephants will prevail.

After all, to quote Mahatma Gandhi, “The future depends on what we do in the present.”
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Mekong countries told they must work out plan to adapt

: Writer: Apinya WMekong nations have been urged to work out a regional plan for adapting to climate change to safeguard the region's ecological system from rising temperatures.ipatayotin; Position: Reporter; Published: 26/09/2009 at 12:00 AM; Newspaper section: News

This photo taken on Jan 1, 2008, and released by The World Wide Fund for Nature shows a Khorat big-mouthed frog,known by its scientificname Limnonectes megastomias, at an unknown location in Thailand.Thefanged frog wasamong163new species discovered last year in the biologicallyrich GreaterMekong region, anenvironmental group said yesterday. AP

A lack of concrete measures to combat climate change has put many species of rare fauna and flora in the Mekong region at risk of extinction, Stuart Chapman, director of the WWF Greater Mekong Programme, said yesterday.

He proposed the Mekong Regional Climate Change Adaptation Agreement be drafted and signed by Mekong region nations to ensure cooperation in combating climate change and protecting the region from its devastating impacts.

The recommendation came after the WWF's survey of animals and plant species along the Mekong river last year found 163 new species in the region _ 100 plants, 28 fish, 18 reptiles, 14 amphibians, two mammals and a bird.

But all of them are at risk of extinction due to the impacts of climate change.

The new species were found in the Greater Mekong region, covering Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam and the southern part of China.

Mr Chapman said closer cooperation among Mekong countries in fighting and adapting to climate change should be discussed at the Bangkok Climate Change Talks 2009, which start on Monday.

Geoff Blate, the WWF's climate change coordinator for the Greater Mekong programme, said that recent studies show the climate of the Greater Mekong region is already changing.

Moreover, rising seas and salt water intrusion will cause major coastal effects on the Mekong River delta, which is one of the three most vulnerable deltas in the world. An average rise in temperature in the region of two to four degrees Celsius would lead to the extinction of 133 to 2,835 species, he said.

"We have many cooperation agreements on the economy and energy, but none for the crucial issue of climate change," said Mr Blate.

Kathrin Gutmann, of the WWF Global Climate Initiative, expressed her hope that climate change talks in Bangkok would be able to bring about progress for the main meeting to be held in Copenhagen at the end of this year.

"Protecting endangered species and vulnerable communities in the Greater Mekong and elsewhere depends on fast progress at the UN talks in Bangkok."

Caring is Sharing (yes, Am, we're talking to you)

John Roberts — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:49:00 GMT

    Being genetically hungry beasts it is not always apparent that elephant vocabulary contains a rumble or a squeak for the word share when it comes to food - yes, we've seen elephants steal food from another's mouth with apparent acceptance from their friend, it is not uncommon for the babies to lob a bit of dry sugar cane or a particularly thorny piece of pineapple tree at us - but more in expectation of a return with interest (we never see them flinging at other eles), I feel, than borne of a feeling that we might like a quick chew.

    Sometimes, however, we two legged beasts see the bigger picture, or at least flatter ourselves that we do, and feel the need to intervene which is why when Dr Cherry bounced into the office one day to introduce two friends Miss Sirinart Chaichanathong and Miss Warangkhana Langkaphin who wanted to deprive Nong Am (Raimon) of some of Bua Tong's milk we didn't immediately throw them from the top of the office steps (something that happens to unwanted interlopers on a regular basis - whereupon they are generally tickled to delirium by Pumpui).

    Nong Bonus and Nong Fai (as they are otherwise known), it was explained, are sixth year veterinary students at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Chiang Mai University and they, along with their co-advisor, our very own Dr. Cherry, were proposing to collect milk from different sets of elephants to analyse the calcium and other contents at different times during the lactation and, as an aside, at different locations with different diets.

    One other reason they weren't thrown to Pumpui's tickling trunk was that, had the research been done earlier, Pumpui (or given that we use human milk replacement to bottle feed her, more likely our coffers) may well have benefited from this research officially entitled Determination of Calcium Concentration in Captive Asian Elephant Milk During Lactation.

    We jumped at the opportunity to take part, one of the hotel's suppliers of fine meats, funny seafoods and odd sausages, Horeca, volunteered use of their refrigerated truck and off we went to the easy bit, milking an elephant...

    ...he, he, he - good luck ladies!

P.S. & just F.Y.I. according to the girls, a previous study performed by Mainka et. al. found that an Asian Elephant's milk composition at 280 days postpartum composed of total solids 19.7%, protein 3.4%, ash (if I remember my rubber burning degree the ash would be the result of burning the solids before the flame atomic absorption spectrophotometry and just the unidentified stuff) 0.45% and fat 7.6%. The calcium to phosphorus ratio was reported at 1.5:2.1. If the ladies ever get their milk, we'll let you know about Bua Tong!

No longer a voice in the wilderness (do we hear faint echoes?)

John Roberts — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:02:00 GMT

    It has taken me awhile to type this blog, not only because we actually seem to have more guests than this time last year, not just because September has been the month we have finally got the ele-dung briquettes off the ground, not merely because this was set aside as our vacation month (mahouts gone to Surin for elections, me, I'm supposed to be resting and spending time with my wife) but because, well, it is a difficult one to write - to be honest I was going to put it as a comment on the C.N.N. missive - mostly because I don't want to be seen to be blowing my own trumpet but I happen to agree with several 'new' ideas rising in the popular press and I believe they could use some more air, it is just that, well, some folks may have heard the new ideas before.

    Those of you who have been around the block with us will know that, sometime in 2004 we came to the conclusion that buying street elephants to rescue them was counterproductive and dangerous to other elephants, a mahout with money in his pocket buys another elephant, often possibly wild caught and smuggled in from our neighbours, often split too early from its mother. Even a market for retirement age elephants will tend to stop (has stopped?) the practice of donating them to Government retirement centres - if I have an elephant who can no longer work, no-one offers life insurance or retirement plans for elephants (though we're working on a few of the insurance companies) does it not make sense to bring it into the path of a well meaning sanctuary agent, bring it into the city, and have someone pay over the odds for it.

    With this money I put a downpayment on a new, younger, ele and continue my mahouting life.

    To get around this we put together a Rescue Rental method which brings the mahout and his family off the streets as well - cannot give them the money they made down there, but can give them, their family and their elephants a decent quality of life.

    After five years of doing this it is still a work-in-progress but it seems to be showing positive results, from the Foundation baby camp we've had no elephants return to the streets, from the Anantara mahout training camp we have had three leave, one to ceremonial duties back in their home village, one to be a film star and one back to the streets.

    That's three in thirty seven - a 90% + success rate, of course it is harder work, we not only need to routinely provide a decent quality of life we need to ensure that we (too) are not taken advantage of and, of course, in the long term, it will prove far more expensive to continue renting the elephants so I'll have to continue to find donors and go to the bosses cap-in-hand.

    However, since there seems to be a greater supply of elephants than there is of mahouts and the real mahouts would not consider making a living (to the point, it seems, of starving - dyin' ain't much of a living, boy) any other way it strikes me that a solution that doesn't involve keeping the mahouts as mahouts and concentrates on emotionally helping a particular elephant just can't be sustainable in a world where traditional mahouts and the Thai population in general need domestic elephants (again, an open debate on whether domestic elephants are truly a necessity would be an interesting one). Particularly a world in which businessmen (including mahout businessmen - we've never argued that all mahouts are saints, in fact falling foul of the mahout businessmen in the early days helped formulate the current Modus Operandi) are willing to drive a smuggling-for-the-street trade.

    Now, to me this is common sense and I've been rattling on forever on the same subject (to the extent that regular readers - flattering myself that such creatures exist - will have switched off by now) and it is so close to just normal conservation thinking that I wondered why it hadn't cropped up elsewhere.

    Well, I can't believe the Bangkok Post reads these 'ere pages, I don't believe we've espoused these thoughts (well, for a year or two) to the elephant buying-to-rescue programmes - preaching to folks that have been doing things their way for years is not a good way to make friends.

    However, over the past few months quite a few people seem to have begun quoting this piece of common sense conservation theory out into the ether and general paparazzi consciousness, a C.N.N. researcher even quoted an old blog to me, almost verbatim, as having come from elsewhere in the Thai ele-rescuosphere - which may be kind of flattering.

    The idea makes so much sense I'm sure it was arrived at independently wherever it cropped up but it is good to hear our own thoughts quoted back at us and I really do believe that the more organisations that begin to practice along these lines the quicker we can move onto larger problems.

____________________________

EDITORIAL Plight of the jumbos

Published: 17/08/2009 at 12:00 AM

Newspaper section: News

The various projects to help the elephants of Bangkok have finally begun to take shape. Thanks to public donations, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration has been able to purchase a 30-year-old, partially blind animal. Instead of begging for food in the dangerous capital city, Pang Bua Kham will get a home at the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre in Lampang. The rescue of this elephant is a heart-warming story, and a project that deserved the support it got.

It is not so clear, however, that general plans to continue to raise money to send elephants to the countryside is sustainable or worthwhile. The well-meaning programme could just wind up encouraging owners to bring their animals to Bangkok in a never-ending elephant march seen more as a profitable business than a rescue project.

The idea of involving the public in a programme to adopt elephants began to take shape about two months ago. BMA Governor MR Sukhumbhand Paribatra announced the formal start to the project on July 3, and predicted the capital city would be elephant-free by next July 2. City inspectors were dispatched once again to do a census of elephants inside metropolitan Bangkok, and to insert microchips under the skin of each animal, to allow formal cataloguing of the pachyderms. According to the governor, they found "about 100" elephants begging in Bangkok.

The lack of a precise number could illustrate the enormous problems involved in trying to keep track of these massive beasts. Elephant owners have traditionally brought their animals to Bangkok to raise money through begging when they could not find regular work, such as logging in the provinces. But in recent years, more and more mahout and owners have been bringing the elephants into Bangkok as an alternative to the harder work up-country. Bangkok residents, like all Thais, love elephants. Many are superstitious, and owners are able to exploit this into cash from people who pay to walk under the elephant's stomach.

In short, many elephants already are treated by their owners as begging machines rather than workers. This demeans both the owner and elephant. The Thai national symbol is not an elephant performing tricks in order to sell overpriced bananas to the public. Elephants are revered for their historical, cultural contribution to the nation as a worker and a faithful animal.

The programme to purchase all elephants in Bangkok in order to get them off the streets confuses two competing ideas. The first is that elephants should not be roaming the streets of the capital where they often are struck by vehicles, suffering injuries or worse. They should not be reduced to tricks or to begging on behalf of their owners. But the second aim must be to give the animals dignity. It is unclear that the plan to buy up elephants willy-nilly can do this.

The great danger is that domestic elephants will become part of an organised sales effort. Mahouts will bring a steady procession of elephants to Bangkok to demand a profitable price from the city and its charitable citizens - and then go back to the countryside to get another one. Such a programme inevitably will mean that unscrupulous businessmen will encourage capturing wild elephants and putting them into the same programme.

The problem of elephants in Bangkok is complex and cannot be solved only by applying baht. The heart of the city is in the right place. But purchasing elephant after elephant merely to get them off the streets is unlikely to solve the plight of these great animals.

Plus Ca Reste La Même Chose (The Elephant and the Crisis ten years on)

John Roberts — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:57:00 GMT

    This is probably my laziest blog ever, the verbosity with which I have bored you (and in certain cases forced you to scan and miss the final point) down the centuries will be missing, in fact, I intend to hand you over to a more competent (not difficult) and more intelligent (almost a given in this 'ere blogosphere) writer.

    See, when the outside world is closed (the eerie dusk and the early morn) I sit in my eyrie office and read the internet, watching the steady flow of words, thoughts, facts and opinions drop out of the ether over the past few months under the heading "Thailand Elephant" I began to get the strangest feeling of having read it all before.

    In the opening piece of their (apparently more than one person) brilliant "Jungle Book: Thailand's Politics, Moral Panic, and Plunder, 1996-2008" Thai political pundit Chang Noi (and no, we don't just like them for their nom de plume which means baby elephant) links, trunk in cheek as they put it, elephants as they make the Thai news to the local political and economic crisis.

    The only thing is, it was written in 1999, now we're in 2009.

    Being lazy I'll cut and paste the whole of Chang Noi's 1999 text below, any insertions, links and parentheisised words are from 2009 (or at least the last 12 months).
_________________________________

CHANG NOI

The elephant and the crisis

22 June 1999

In Thailand, the elephant is a sacred beast in a very special way. It figures in the religious culture – in the Buddha’s birth story, in the Hindu god Ganesh, and in many Jataka tales. It is central to royal history as military equipment, parade transport, and as the magical protector of the realm, the white elephant. But the elephant is much more than a religious and royal icon. It is sacred in a very popular way. Elephants are loved for their unique combination of power and vulnerability. In a curious way, the nation’s experience of the crisis has been transferred onto the popular national symbol of the elephant.

To begin with, this has simply been a matter of prominence. Since the crisis hit, elephants have been in the news a lot. There has been a glossy coffee-table book about elephants, at least three art exhibitions on elephant themes, another exhibition of art by elephants (the inspiration of a Russian pop-artist) and a documentary film. The prime minister’s wife in late 1997 went everywhere clutching a pink elephant doll rigged out in a wedding dress and diamond necklace. Mahidol University announced plans to clone elephants. And of course the mascot for the Bangkok Asian Games was inevitably an elephant.

But the elephant has also conveyed important messages. While nobody had much success in predicting the crisis, close observers of elephants in mid-1997 should have twigged that something was amiss. In the month before the baht floated and sank, an elephant ran amok and hurt a young boy in Samut Prakan; another killed his own mahout in Phayao;

(Elephant Goes on Rampage in Thailand, Stomps 3 Workers to Death)

two were possibly poisoned by pineapple-growers in Prachuab;

(Jumbo Fatality)

and another was rammed by a car in Rangsit.

(Why we do what we do)

(Pang Kamlai Dies)

Things were going wrong.

We know now that the worst impact of the crisis came in early 1998. The economy shrank 12 percent with amazing speed. Over two million lost their jobs. The numbers in severe poverty shot up by a fifth. The public reaction to all of this was deceptively quiet. No major riots. No mass demonstrations. No noisy public diatribes. No disastrous violence. Of course, in the background there was a gradual and terrible disintegration. More drugs. More gunmen. More violence inside families. More petty crime. More summary killings. But this huge social hurt was somehow disguised. The nation transferred its sense of injury onto elephants. There were lots of news stories about elephants in trouble.

In February 1998, mahouts seized fourteen which were being maltreated by tour operators in Mae Rim. In March, two elephants were killed and burned by pineapple-planters in Kanchanaburi. Another fell off a cliff in the forest divided by the Yadana pipeline. In May, a baby elephant in Surin died from eating pesticide-laced grass. Another adult died from possible starvation. Another was shot in the leg by a poacher.

And yet another was badly injured falling down a hill. In October, at least six died in Chiang Mai in disputes between rival tour operators. Another was rammed by a car in Chonburi. In early 1999, one elephant was wounded by a poacher in Chachoengsao, and a pregnant one was killed by a train in Kanchanaburi.

The epicentre of the crisis was Bangkok, and through mid-year, the press focused on the plight of elephants in the city. Like everyone else, the elephants suffered from unemployment. Like everyone else, they were forced to make a living in desperate and risky ways – tramping the city streets. They were hit by cars and trucks. They were harassed by officials. They stumbled fatally into canals, potholes and sewers.

They fell sick from Bangkok’s pollution. The prominent cases were followed night-by-night on the TV news.

Towards year-end, this theme was used as the plot for a whisky ad. A young Adonis drinking in a bar for the rich and beautiful is suddenly drawn to the plight of an elephant mother and child in the crush of night-time traffic. He rushes out and hands over not just all his money, but also his Rolex watch, one of the iconic symbols of affluence in the boom years. Perhaps it was significant that two of the elephants killed in falls into Bangkok’s subterranean infrastructure were called Pang Thong Kham (gold) and Phlai Setthi (millionaire). The elephant had come to represent not just the shock of unemployment, but the collapse of dreams of wealth, the fall of the god of money.

The elephant also became the clearest focus of national feeling. In early 1998, reports trickled in about six Thai elephants which had gone to work in Indonesia. One had already died. The others were being mistreated. They were increasingly at risk as Indonesia’s crisis worsened. As months passed, the story became darker. The Thai mahouts had been tricked, short-changed, and packed off home. The deal had been set up by shady middlemen and "politicians". The story took on the shape of tales from the world of human trafficking – initial promises of wealth giving way to trickery, exploitation and slavery. A campaign was launched to bring these "Thai" elephants home. Groups got up petitions. The prime minister’s office, commerce ministry, forestry department and foreign ministry were dragged in. International law was invoked. The Indonesians refused to negotiate. Emotions rose. Street demonstrations demanded that the Thai government do something. Activists threatened to bring 80 tuskers into the city to storm government house to enforce their demand.

This was almost certainly the major threat of public disorder throughout the entire period of the crisis. The call to "bring the Thai elephants home" evoked more nationalist sentiment than all of the protests against the IMF, "selling the country", and the bankruptcy bills. When the five elephants were finally shipped to Phuket, they were welcomed by the governor, the local MP and a flag-waving crowd who garlanded them as returning heroes. In this crisis, nationalism has been rather half-hearted. But elephantism has been strong.

Elephants also predicted the timing of recovery from crisis. The Thai government and IMF had been forecasting recovery "within 6 months" since the crisis began, and had long since lost any credibility. But elephants were another matter. Towards year-end, the stories of elephant sorrow dwindled away. In retrospect, we can see this was the time the stockmarket perked up, exports bottomed, and production indices turned north. Again the clearest message came in an ad, this time for a beer. An elephant is coming through the gate of the ancient city of Ayutthaya, whose destruction in 1767 was evoked many times in comparison to the current crisis. Unlike in the earlier whisky ad, the elephant is not oppressed and threatened. Rather, he is upbeat and resurgent. He is clad in finery, bathed in sunlight, surrounded by traditional dancers, trunk aloft, and preceded by Ad Carabao singing a jubilant anthem and prancing in obvious triumph. Witnessing this display of national resurgence are groups of Japanese and farang, who smile and raise their glasses in gestures of restored international confidence from east and west. If you had read this message of imminent recovery correctly on the first day it appeared, and put your entire fortune on the Thai stockmarket, you would be over fifty percent richer by today.

[This is Chang Noi’s 100^th piece, and maybe slightly trunk-in-cheek. But only slightly.]

________________________

History does seem to be repeating itself, though perhaps not as badly, the final paragraphs, though, point to a way out - over the coming months we, amongst others, will be publicising projects that will hopefully turn elephants in the public imagination from animals of pity and shock to potent symbols, partners and teachers once again.

Time to put your money in the stock market again?

Of Semantics and Mathmatics (...extinction? extirpation? and some verbal constipation?)

John Roberts — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:58:00 GMT

    A while ago, in some old magazine, there was a picture of me, of the type beloved by public relations folks and mothers (and bandied unashamedly around by myself if the truth be known), the caption read 'John Roberts, Director of Elephants, is concerned by the declining number of Thai elephants', on seeing it I wrote to complain and had it blamed on a sub-editor but with a question mark - who wouldn't be concerned about the declining number of domestic Thai elephants?

    Well, me, for starters. When there are baby elephants on the streets, when there is not enough work or money in the system to keep the elephants we have in the style to which they should be accustomed, when there is not enough forest to let them all go, why worry about the decline? Better, surely, to manage the population scientifically, ensuring (as far as possible) a varied gene pool and hope we can come up with an answer to the question that torments us all - whither the domestic elephant?

    It is a phrase so often repeated that it has become received wisdom and doesn't appear to be questioned anywhere that the 'Asian elephant is destined for extinction' unless we (the Thai elephant community) do something urgently.

    While this may be true (what with global warming and the shrinking universe, aren't we all?) I'm afraid it makes my blood boil - as it does so often in my old age.

    Firstly, just to make sure, I looked up 'extinct' in the dictionary and the definition came up as "no longer in existence; that has ended or died out", so, for the sub-species we are dealing with, elephas maximus indicus, to be extinct there would have to be no more elephants in Thailand, India, China, Burma, Cambodia and the Malaysian peninsular (and perhaps Vietnam and Laos but they are going for a separate sub-species all to themselves, though, as they are not a discrete population cut off for a thousand years by a body of water, a Himalayan sized mountain range or human settlement it is difficult to see that they'll achieve this - though I can see why they'd try). That is a total of around 50,000 wild animals (i.e. excluding domestics) of which Thailand is responsible for between 2,500 and 3,200.

    Alright, the IUCN red list has elephas maximus listed as endangered in the wild due to their declining numbers and habitat threats, so yes, in looking after a small but significant subset of a species (about 7% - without factoring in domestic elephants in any other country) and maintaining their genetic diversity we are doing our little bit to stave off potential extinction it is true - but the graph often quoted that Thailand had 100,000 domestic elephants in 1900, 50,000 in 1950, 2,000 in 2,000 followed by a big red word EXTINCTION (crossing this line sometime in the next ten years and ignoring the fact that the graph seems to have been rising since 2003) does not apply.

    So the word we're looking for is "extirpated" which means, in conservation terms, no longer present in an area they once were.

    Semantics, Roberts, semantics, don't you come here with your dictionary and your internet links and your scientists - what we mean is that elephants will no longer exist in Thailand and that would be a huge shame, we must do something immediately to prevent this.

    Well, I agree, but is the situation that bad? Are we going to run out of Thai domestic elephants? Well, I look around at our little camp and take off my socks so I can count to higher than ten.

    For argument's sake, we'll ignore our adult elephants though they are, of course, more likely to produce young - we don't have a dedicated breeding programme with them but accidents happen.

    We have fifteen elephants under the age of ten, two males (if and when we start a breeding programme we'll bring Phu Khi in to mix up the gene pool but I'll leave him out of the maths) so, even if no breeding takes place the chances of the elephants being extirpated from the Golden Triangle - if I get to keep my job after all this polemic - in the next fifty years is very low - Nong Am, with love, luck and care, we hope, would live until at least 2058.

    Now, being a proud and protective father, let's wait until the babies are twenty before we think about breeding with them and stop breeding them at forty, with a possible baby every five years (2 years gestation, 3 nursing) that is a maximum of 13 x 20/5 = 52. OK, OK, let's give them a rest, never did get on with this barefoot and pregnant thing anyway, one baby every seven years ought to be enough = 37 elephants.

    OK, OK, breeding isn't that easy, only a few parks in Thailand have had real success with their breeding programmes but with their brains (also the brains of our Surin based mahouts who seem to be able to pluck pregnant eles out of the air) and some friends we have at other successful (though controversial) international, artificial, breeding programmes - given that we're talking about instigating this in the face of a global population crash we'd like to think all scientific knowledge would be made available to those trying to avert this.

    So let's say only 50% of our females turn out to both like boys and be fertile = 19 elephants.

    With these, to me very conservative, figures by the time our self imposed breeding cycle would be over for the elephants we currently have in camp and under the Foundation, we would have increased our breeding numbers for the next cycle by 30% by the time Nong Am turns 40 in 2048.

    This seems achievable as an average for Thailand, some camps would have less luck breeding than others but some are very good at it and, with the help of some scientific input, basic farming techniques may become viable scientific breeding programmes.

    The questions arise what all these elephants will be doing in 2048? How they will be fed? How their owners will make enough money to feed/keep them? If there will be enough regenerated forest to have let them all go?  How much freedom will they have? Will they still have to come into Bangkok to make a living? Whither the domestic elephant?

    But these are questions for another day, today's question is, will the elephas maximus indicus become extinct in the near future if we don't do something urgently, if 'we' is the global population of conservationists then the answer is 'possibly' but I feel the guys that are saving the species from extinction are those working to protect the much larger wild populations throughout the range, building wildlife corridors to keep the gene pool wide, slowing down trains, preventing illegal development.

    With the Thai elephant community's managed 7% we may be maintaining a life raft should all else fail - this is good work and we should certainly see this as our duty whilst ensuring our work does nothing to threaten existing viable wild populations, questions of management of wild and domestic populations where they are contiguous - i.e. almost everywhere throughout the Asian range - are interlinked and indistinguishable.

    Let's move the goal posts a little, let's ask "is the domestic elephas maximus indicus endangered in Thailand?"

    Taking the IUCN's apparent definition of endangered (if I read correctly) a greater than 50% reduction in numbers over the previous three generations I would say yes, however, I would argue that the drop in domestic elephant numbers was due to their lack of economic viability - and given the rapid decline must have contributed to a rise of some sort in the wild population as non-viable elephants were let go - just as the population rise over the last few years has been due to a rise in this economic viability (and drop in neighbouring wild populations?) - whether it be from tourism camps, taking babies begging on the streets or pandering to well meaning rescue groups who buy elephants.

    Despite the expense involved in keeping elephants properly and the apparent lack of work an elephant of any sex and age is worth more on the market than a similar elephant three years ago and I maintain that the majority of breeding in Thailand is economically driven. In short, domestic elephants are an already managed population.

    If it is decided that we must maintain domestic population (and a public debate about the reasons for maintaining a domestic population would be an interesting one - another question for another day) it is surely our job to prove that it is economically viable to maintain that population in a way that is comfortable and ethically sound for the elephants and (if it is decided that the traditions of those that have looked after elephants since time immemorial are worth saving - yet another question for yet another day) their mahouts in such a way that the market is controlled to eliminate the temptation to smuggle in wild-caught elephants and thereby threaten any viable wild population.

    This will be a balancing act requiring input from the mahouts themselves, a diverse range of local and international bodies as well as a fair amount of good old organic luck - if it can be pulled off it will be something to write home about, take a bow before the world's media and perhaps get together, pat each other on the back and clink glasses, everyone involved will have saved the way of life of a (much maligned) group of people - the mahouts - and helped to continue the Thai tradition of elephant domestication...

    ...but we should not kid ourselves (or our donors) that, should we fail, the disappearance of Thailand's domestic elephants equals the extinction of a species.

Products of the Mega-beast (if you're Going to San Francisco, be sure to go along and listen)

John Roberts — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 03:15:00 GMT

    Not often I get to write things like "cross the Golden Gate bridge and turn right" in these here pages, but right now, this is part of what I must urge you to do.

    Recently, renowned (as opposed recently renowned) photographers Carol Stevenson and Avinash Pandey spent about ten days with the eles, the mahouts and a thing unofficially termed a Nikon Megabeast capable of turning out photos the size of football pitches and making all but the most modern supercomputer look like something Sir Clive Sinclair used to turn out.

    These photos are destined for a number of projects, books, exhibitions and websites - the proceeds of all of this will be generously donated to help us look after our elephants.

    The first part of the project, a talk by Carol, is about to take place at the Belvedere-Tiburon Library (I am reliably informed that you need to turn right just over the famous bridge) in California.

    The text reads "Elephant Stories - Carol Stevenson highlights the conservation work and the challenges facing the Asian elephant following her recent visit to Thailand. The presentation includes images from a planned international exhibition series entitled Elephants and Mahouts that will benefit the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation - Thursday August 27th - 7:30pm - Founders Room, Belvedere-Tiburon Library".

    The sharp eyed amongst you will recognise Pumpui and Deang Moo.