Thailand Confidential

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.

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.

Nit doesn’t say Toey could do all those things, but right up to the end, he cried. Tears still ran down his cheeks, Nit told me the last time she went home to Rayong and visited him.

“Same age me,” Nit said. “Porty-three! Bery old. He cannot work. He bery sad. I whistle a song to him. Remember Nit! Looking to me when I whistle.”

I can see Nit and Toey in the field when they were young. Toey is chomping grass. Nit whistles a song. He slowly raises his bovine head with its curlicue horns and looks at her, crying.

Toey died a few months ago and was buried alongside one of the fields where he labored nearly all his life.

The World’s Fastest Elephant

“The question of the day is: how fast can an elephant run across a level, thirty-meter field when not scared for his (or her) life, but motivated and reasonably fit?”

The person asking this question, and who had ten elephants lined up waiting to provide a possible answer, was John Hutchinson, a recent graduate of the University of California at Berkeley whose post-graduate work brought him to Thailand to find the world’s fastest elephant, a query that not only was given credence, but paid for with an academic grant.

My question: is this a question a grown man should even ask? It’s widely conceded that the world’s fastest animal is the cheetah, a sleek sprinting machine native to Africa that has been clocked in pursuit of its prey over short distances at an astonishing 68 miles (110 kilometers) per hour.

The pronghorn antelope, another African resident, comes in second at 61 mph (98 kph), not quite fast enough to escape a cheetah’s pursuit, except that the antelope is more suited for longer runs.

Other maximum speeds, most of them measured over a quarter-mile (0.4 km) distance, include the lion and the ostrich at 61 mph (80 kph); quarter horse, 47 mph (76 kph); coyote, 43 mph (69 kph); greyhound, 39 mph (63 kph); domestic rabbit, 35 mph (56 kph); giraffe, 32 mph (51 kph); grizzly bear, 30 mph (48 kph); and man, 26 mph (42 kph). Followed, at some distance, by the squirrel at 12 (19 kph), the domestic pig at 11 (18 kph) and the barnyard chicken at 9 (14 kph).

Back to the elephants and John, who told me he was trying to link evolutionary biology and bio-mechanics, two fields, he assured me, that hadn’t been talking to each other lately. Which is what brought us to a field behind Rajamangala Institute of Technology in Surin, Thailand, during that town’s Annual Elephant Round-Up.

“What,” I asked, “do you do to ‘motivate’ the elephants?” John said that on the first day’s trials, they tried it both with and without the trainers called mahouts on top. They also tried shouting and banging empty plastic water bottles together as they ran behind the elephant. And they positioned other elephants—friends of the animal being tested—at the finish line to give him (or her) something to run toward.

The idea was to get the elephant up to a full gallop when the animal crossed an infra-red beam, starting the clock. Thirty meters and a few seconds later the elephant passed a second beam and the clock stopped. Identical tests with Asian elephants in California showed the fastest to move at four meters per second, or about ten miles per hour. John said he thought that was the limit, a “wall,” so to speak, comparable to the four-minute mile that humans once were thought unable to surpass.

Then John met, via the internet, Richard Lair, another Californian, but one who has lived in Thailand for about twenty years and is on the staff of the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang, a small town about an hour’s drive from Chiang Mai. He told John his elephants could, in a manner of speaking, run circles around the ones at the San Francisco Zoo, which is where John had tested his pachyderms while working on his doctorate. That prompted John to find some research money and come to Surin, where, indeed, on the first day’s run, he timed an elephant running just short of fifteen miles an hour. You have to understand that for John, this was more exciting than the consultancy he did on Jurassic Park.

“The general question is, how does body size affect the range of an animal’s movements,” John explained when I asked why even bother. “How do big things handle being big? Another question is how do the elephants do what they do, because at fifteen miles per hour, they should, like all other animals, including humans, when running at full speed, have all feet in the air at some point. But elephants always have one foot on the ground.”

He said humans were able to perform certain “tricks” to move faster and keep one foot on the ground at all times. Speed-walkers integrated a hip movement that enabled them to walk fast. And then, John added, there was something called “Groucho-running.” It was, he said, named for Groucho Marx, who stooped and sort of duck-walked in the movies, enabling him to accelerate his pace and maintain uninterrupted contact with the earth.

“Elephants are doing something we haven’t figured out yet,” John said. It was, he implied, the challenge of his young academic life.

As we talked, seven spots were painted on each elephant on the side facing the cameras that would record the run—on the top of the shoulder (or scapula), at the shoulder joint, on the elbow and wrists on the front leg, and on the hip, knee and ankle of the rear leg. In this fashion, the movement could later be tracked by drawing stick figures based on the film showing their movement as if in slow motion.

The first elephant was led into position. This was a three-year-old named Pop and he calmly walked the measured distance in a little over twenty seconds, a preliminary timing made with which to compare a gallop. He was then returned to the starting position.

Now, his mahout stood behind him with two empty plastic water bottles and started banging them together and screaming. Pop took off, the mahout in hot pursuit, still banging and yelling, and the relatively tiny beast was at full gallop when he passed the first light beam, tail curled upward as is always true when elephants run, his fat little legs pumping.

John stepped to the counter and read the finish time. “Four-point-nine-two seconds!” Not a record, but faster than a California elephant and I could tell that John’s heart was beating faster, too.

The second elephant was led to the start position. This was May and she was six and had no interest whatsoever in playing this silly game. She walked both laps.

“We’ll give her another chance later,” said Richard Lair, diplomatically.

I suggested to John that I thought maybe the reason Thai elephants ran faster than California elephants was the animals in San Francisco led a more sedentary lifestyle.

“That’s a good word,” said one of John’s associates, who stood near the clock with a clipboard. “Sedentary.”

“Yes,” said John, “but it still doesn’t explain how the elephants always keep one foot on the ground.”

I said I didn’t think it was because the elephants were “Groucho-running.”

In fact, the only thing I was sure of was that Groucho would’ve liked to have been there.