After much to-ing and fro-ing, with liberals and academics demanding the truth about what happened and those responsible still trying to cover their asses and save their collective face, Education Minister Panja Kesornthong held a press conference. After a long and sincere contemplation, he announced that the ministry had decided not to include anything about the incidents in the new textbooks then being prepared because, he said, with a straight face, it “wasn’t history.”
And why wasn’t it history?
Because, the minister explained, all the people involved in the tragic events weren’t dead yet.
WILD THAILAND
The Ugly Truth About Elephants
You can forget all that Babar/Dumbo nonsense.
Yes, elephants are adorable and entertaining and smart and endangered and worthy of our lasting respect, but a lot of that respect should be given because many of them are among the most dangerous animals on earth, killing more people than any other mammal, save man himself. Worldwide figures are unavailable—I’ll explain why soon—but it is known that in India, over two hundred are killed every year and in Thailand the toll is at least fifty. Compared to elephants, such maligned animals as snakes, crocodiles and sharks are downright friendly.
The odd thing is that the image of a man atop the largest of land mammals is a romantic one. Classic twentieth century literary and film characters, including Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book series and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes are remembered riding through the forests of Asia and Africa in loincloths, astride their pachyderm pals, forming a manly bond, forever partners and friends, nature at its most harmonious.
From childhood, we are further lulled by Disney’s Dumbo and the Babar books and the circuses that add to the illusion of glamor and the non-threatening sense of adventure we feel when we see men with the wise and kindly modern day mammoths, teaching them to perform facile tricks.
This attitude persists in Thailand, where the annual elephant round-up in Surin, a variety of religious and royal ceremonies throughout the country, and commercial shows in Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket and in the north from Lampang to Chiang Mai, along with the popular jungle treks, have exposed growing numbers of visitors and residents to Babar up close and personal.
In Thailand today, there are approximately twenty-three hundred elephants engaged in a variety of domestic services, mostly tourism and entertaining, and although the government legally classifies the animals as “livestock,” regulating them under legislation for draught animals, according to Richard Lair, one of the world’s foremost pachyderm experts, they are “wild” even if born in captivity and trained from childhood. Unlike most dogs, who evolved from wolves, the wildness hasn’t been purged from elephants by selective breeding.
“Some elephants form such warm and affectionate bonds with man as to deceive the observer into thinking that this animal must have been made truly domestic,” Richard wrote in a book commissioned by the United Nations and considered definitive in the field, Gone Astray: The Care and Management of the Asian Elephant in Domesticity (1997). “Many other elephants in domesticity, however, remain unremittingly wild, hostile to man and ready to kill him at every chance. Clearly, a domesticated elephant is simply a wild animal in chains—but a wild animal frequently gentle and intelligent enough to serve as a totally trustworthy baby-sitter to watch over human infants.
“Far quicker than its bulk would seem to allow, the elephant can kill with its tusks, its forehead, its trunk (either by striking or lifting and throwing), its mouth (by biting, a favorite of cows), its legs (by stomping or kicking), or any combination thereof. Kicks come in astonishing variety with both the front and back legs able to kick away from or into the body, the latter a perfect prelude for yet more kicking underneath the elephant’s belly. A killing attack often comes as a combination of charging, kicking and head-butting so fast and so coordinated that the three components are inseparable to the eye. The domesticated elephant, thoroughly accustomed to man’s presence, is particularly adept.
“In everyday management,” Richard concluded, “elephants fall into three classes: some are never dangerous, some are dangerous only under very specific circumstances (in the mahout’s absence, around trains, in water, etc.) and some are dangerous all of the time. The proportions of the classes within a group will vary somewhat according to sex-and-age structure and the quality of training, but considering every third elephant to be dangerous is a very healthy way of thinking.”
The question of the day, of course, is: how do you tell the three classes of elephant apart? They don’t come in different colors. This is where you have to put your faith in the people who run the zoos, circuses and Thailand’s many elephant shows. Keeping in mind that everyone makes mistakes.
Richard saw his first elephants at the San Francisco Zoo as a three-year-old and claims he knew from that moment that this was, somehow, his life’s work. I saw my first elephants in the Frank Buck Circus when I was in grade school, also in the United States. But where Richard’s interest continued virtually uninterrupted, my first real contact with one of the brutes came when I emerged from the audience at an elephant show in Pattaya a few years ago. I’d watched other tourists lie in rows on the field in front of the bleachers, with the mahouts, or trainers, leading the animals over them, one careful step at a time. So I figured I was in no danger when I volunteered to have one of them wrap its trunk around my waist and lift me into the air. Once elevated and in the elephant’s control, everything changed, and it was something less, or more, than a lark. A photograph taken by a friend shows an expression on my face of delight mixed with terror.
I met Richard some years later, when I was writing a story about filmmaking in Thailand. He’d worked as a consultant in the production of a movie called Operation Dumbo Drop, which called for an adult elephant to run down a crowded village street. Many said safety couldn’t be guaranteed. After fifteen years in Thailand, Richard felt he knew the elephant he chose for the job, and under his tutelage, the elephant did the scene in one take, without causing injury to anyone or upturning a single produce cart.
Which takes us back to the third of all domesticated elephants that he feels are safest. As a tourist climbing nervously onto the back of one to go for a weaving, lumbering walk through the jungle or volunteering, as I did, to take part in an elephant show, you can only hope that the animal you meet—reaching a height of more than three meters and weighing as much as four tons— is one of them. Usually they are. Squashed and impaled tourists are bad for tourism and it happens rarely.
More often it’s the keeper and the mahout, those who have regular contact with the beasts, who are trampled and kicked and picked up and tossed—and mostly, nowadays, it’s the young mahout, who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Not so long ago, a mahout was respected and the craft was passed with honor from father to son. No more. In the modern world, the elephant is not needed for transportation of people and goods or for logging and mahouts must teach their charges tricks or, when the habitat is depleted and there is no forage, as happens every year during the dry season, take their animals to the city to beg, selling bananas and sugar cane at inflated prices to tourists or charging a small fee to Thais who believe walking under an elephant will bring good luck; not so long ago, a pregnant woman was trampled while praying her child would be male.