A mahout’s son today would rather have the prestige and money earned driving a truck. When, instead, he’s stuck taking care of a cranky, old pachyderm, and is both uninterested and ill-prepared to do so, accidents happen. Although, as Richard says, the weekly deaths in Thailand nearly always are associated with illegal logging activity, and are not reported. Thus, in Thailand, the official body count is low.
Many of these deaths are the result of the adult male coming into musth, a periodic swelling of a gland between the eye and ear that causes aggression so fierce the beast may attack humans, other elephants, and inanimate objects; from the earliest stages, they must be retired from all work assignments and chained to very large trees. If they’re not, severe injury and death may come to those who aren’t paying attention. (Signs to look for: grumpiness, a refusal to take a mahout’s orders, a slight discharge from the eyes, and massive erections, although they aren’t always a clue as bull elephants tend to get them year round.)
Richard and I became friends and I visited him when I could at the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre in Lampang, where he helped found what probably is the world’s only mahout school and added elephant painting and the world’s first all-elephant orchestra to the tourist show that helps raise money for the center’s operations. Which also include a hospital famous for its treatment of animals who’ve stepped on land mines along the Thai-Burma border or have become addicted to amphetamines fed them by greedy, illegal loggers; also a refuge for nearly a hundred elephants, some of them orphaned by ivory poachers. Not long ago, I went to observe the elephant orchestra record a CD, another fundraising device.
I was standing in a grove of teak trees beside a two-ton animal that was banging on a big drum with a mallet held in his trunk. Nearby his fellow “big band” musicians were playing out-sized xylophone-like instruments crafted with steel bars and a gong fashioned from an old sawmill blade. One of the mahouts had given another a harmonica, which all but disappeared into the end of the trunk. Not only was it difficult to take any of this seriously, all thought of danger was drowned in a rather pleasant cacophony of bonks and clangs and juicy hoots.
Richard approached me and said, “Watch it, buddy. The elephant on the drums”—only a foot or so from where I stood— “tried to kill his new assistant mahout yesterday.”
I backed away hurriedly and asked why he was playing in the band, with so many people—including me!—in his immediate proximity.
“He’s perfectly safe with his head mahout on his neck,” Richard said, “and, besides, he’s our best percussionist.”
A Buffalo Named Toey
This is a story about a water buffalo named Toey, who was Nittaya Phanthachat’s best friend when she was growing up on a farm in Rayong, on Thailand’s eastern seaboard. Nit doesn’t like cats or dogs, thinks they make poor pets. When it comes to what she calls the “buppalo,” now there’s another tale.
Nit was the last born of seven children, arriving seventeen years after the next youngest, one of those biological surprises that happens in any culture. By now, many of her siblings were married and having children of their own, so her closest friends growing up were not brothers and sisters, but nieces and nephews. Together, they minded the family buffaloes.
Nit talked about how her brothers labored in the fields, walking behind a wooden plow that seemed as big as they were, in partnership with the slate-black beasts ahead of them, preparing the soil for the sugar cane crop. It was Nit’s job as a small child to take the animals to and from work, from the shed near the modest house where the Phanthachats lived to fields that sometimes were more than a mile away.
Nit’s favorite was Toey, who had been born the same year she was, in 1952. He wasn’t like the other buffalo, Nit said. His horns were curled like a mountain goat’s, rather than sweeping back in a proud and characteristic scimitar-like curve. In a male buffalo, she told me, this meant he had no interest in females, thus the name given to all such animals, an abbreviation for katoey, the Thai word for the transvestite, transsexual or overtly homosexual male. Toey’s eyes also watered all the time, she said, as if he were crying because his horns were not like all the others in the family stable.
Nit loved Toey and sang to him while riding on his broad back, patting him on the left flank when she wanted him to turn right, on the right when she wanted him to go left. Nit also liked to whistle. She said that was the way family members found her in the fields. They listened for her whistling.
As unusual as Toey’s horns were, the feeling Nit had for the animal was not. In Asia, when she was growing up, the water buffalo was not only the family tractor, but also the family friend. Because of its placid nature, it was matter-of-factly trusted as a child’s “baby-sitter”; the child, of course, believed the caretaking worked the other way round.
The bubalis bubalis, as academics rather comically call the beast, also was, and is, given recognition on a community level, where a farmer’s worth may be measured by how many buffaloes he owns. In some countries, a buffalo is still sacrificed when someone rich dies, another yardstick of wealth, and until fairly recently, before beef from cattle was imported from Australia and elsewhere, it was the region’s primary source of red meat. Not so well-known is that there are herds of water buffalo stretching all the way to Italy, where the milk is made into mozzarella cheese, while in India the milk is drunk because cattle are sacred and never used for nourishment.
Buffalo in Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries additionally play a minor role in sport. In the autumn in Chon Buri, where Nit now has a home, farmers bring their strongest animals to town for the annual buffalo races. There are no saddles or reins to help the “jockeys” stay on top, little for them to hold on to but a single rope and a sandpapery back. To be judged, the buffalo and rider must arrive at the finish line simultaneously.
In Indonesia and Vietnam, water buffaloes are pitted against each other in fights. These usually take the form of slow-motion butting contests, where no animal really gets hurt. It’s not at all like the National Geographic Channel series called Born to Kill. Maybe the buffaloes have a headache the next day, I don’t know.
The bad news is that the domesticated species is dying out, as for a variety of reasons the birth rate drops and tractors replace them in the fields, sending those no longer needed to the nearest slaughterhouse. Forty years ago, there were seven million in Thailand alone, a figure now reduced by half.
This doesn’t mean the species is endangered—as is the wild water buffalo, found in small numbers nowadays—but it does mean that many families no longer have them as pets or in great number. My wife Lamyai, now in her forties, remembers that when she was growing up in Isan, her father had fifty of the animals. Now the family has none.
Not long ago in Thailand, a movie maker named Aroon Pavilai used computer graphics, like those used in Jurassic Park, to bring a water buffalo called Mr. Buff to life, giving him the appearance of laughing, smiling, speaking, singing and crying.