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The animals suffered from the direct sun, the hot roads, the lack
of shelter, the hours of wandering around at night and the shortage
of food. In 2001 the provincial authorities took action.
Tough regulations
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| Sunart Wongchavalit
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“We are now very strict with elephant camps,” explains
Sunart Wongchavalit, chief of Phuket Provincial Livestock Office.
“Any that break the rules are barred from doing business and
are black-listed.” One rule limits the number of elephants
on the island. There is a total ban on elephants being brought into
the province, in an effort to ensure that the beasts are well looked
after and all have enough space and food. Of the 176 elephants now
on Phuket, all but two are female. This is because females are easier
to deal with. Unlike the males, they do not undergo periods of “musth”,
a condition of extreme sexual excitement that can make the males
unpredictably and dangerously violent.
The 176 elephants live in 14 trekking camps and three hotels on
the island. “A veterinarian from our office visits once a month
to make sure that the elephants are in good shape. We have been
happy with what we’ve seen so far,” Khun Sunart says.
The mahout’s tale
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| Sompong Eodinn and
a young elephant |
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Phuket.com dropped by the Siam Safari camp and chatted with Sompong
Eodinn, an elephant mahout and trainer. Khun Sompong, 36, is originally
from Surin Province in the northeast of Thailand, which is renowned
for its annual elephant festival. “In my village, people keep
elephants mainly to demonstrate their social status,” he says.
“If you are not well-to-do, there is no way you can keep an
elephant as a pet. A full-grown elephant eats a lot - about a quarter
of a ton of fodder a day.” Elephants in Surin are no longer
trained to work - there are no longer any forests in the region,
just endless rice fields. So elephants may be trained in tricks
to entertain guests at parties or at fairs, or they may be sent
to trekking camps in other parts of the country to work in the tourist
industry.
Khun Sompong says that, as a child, he was fascinated that people
could control these enormous animals. As he watched mahouts training
elephants, he knew that this was what he wanted to do. His first
job, however, was as a goldsmith, something he did for six years.
“I quit because the gold trade in Thailand at that time was
not so good. I was happy to pursue my original dream, to be a mahout.”
Big and powerful
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| Beware of the elephants!
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Khun Sompong has been injured many times while training to be a
mahout, and since, and has been hospitalised on a number of occasions.
“But it was never the elephant’s fault,” he stresses.
“For example, I remember once, while I was training, an excavator
suddenly appeared as if from nowhere. It frightened the elephant
I was working with. He ran away in a panic and knocked me over.
When I fell on the ground he ran over me. I got several broken ribs.”
What does it feel like to be stepped on by an elephant? “Well,”
says Khun Sompong with a grin, “you can’t really breathe.”
He was not deterred, however and now he can think of nothing he
would rather do. With his long experience, he says, being a mahout
is not at all dangerous. “A mahout is in charge of only one
elephant so you get to know the animal well and you can pretty much
tell just by looking at it what kind of mood it is in or what it
is thinking,” he explains. Elephants are by nature very placid
animals and not at all aggressive, especially the older ones. However,
they can be sensitive. For example, they don’t like sudden
noises or surprises, and they don’t like being mistreated.
They don’t have a big sense of humour, either. Some tourists
tease elephants by holding out a banana, say, and then snatching
it back. The elephant may retaliate by flicking them with its trunk.
In the north of Thailand not so long ago, a young tourist crept
up behind an elephant and yanked its tail. The outraged elephant
whirled and trampled him, severely spoiling his holiday.
Motherhood difficulties
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| Khun Sompong at
work |
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Thai elephants do not conceive easily and even when they do there
is a high likelihood of miscarriage. As a result, elephants are
expensive - between 400,000 and 600,000 baht apiece. “I have
been working in this camp for 14 years. So far, just three babies
have been born from 16 adult elephants,” says Khun Sompong.
A few years ago, they lost one female. “I could feel that she
was very depressed for her last two years.
Even the vet couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her.
“In the end we sent her to the elephant hospital up north.
They operated and found a dead foetus in her womb. For some reason
the baby had not rotted, but it had been dead inside her for who
knows how long,” says Khun Sompong.
Training the youngsters
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| An artist is born...
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These days, Khun Sompong’s main job is to train young elephants
to do tricks to entertain visitors. He is teaching three animals,
aged three, six and nine, to kick a ball about, to do paintings,
to pick up objects, to say hello and goodbye and - which is hardest
- to dance. “Young elephants are no different from children.
They tend not to be very interested in things like eating or training;
they prefer to play,” says Khun Sompong.
It takes about a year for a young elephant to memorise all the
orders, after which it is a case of practice, practice, practice
before it is handed over to its lifetime mahout. If a young elephant
is not familiar with the new mahout, it won’t listen to orders;
the two need to get used to each other. It’s all a mater of
time. Khun Sompong smiles. “One thing about being a mahout
is that we don’t take much holiday. We live and work with our
elephants. When we are away, we worry about our animals, even if
we have left them in the care of another mahout. We know that they
don’t like to be separated from their real boss.”
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