3 minutes ago, kickstart said:

Why do Thai's keep buffaloes ,they  do it as a bank ,they do  not cost a lot to keep ,and any problems they will sell a few ,same with Thai beef cattle .

Wife's son-in law ,sold a few ,he wanted the money to buy a Kwie Lec,a walk behind tractor ,60k,same as my neighbour ,he sold two beef bulls and bought a  small tractor ,cost him almost noting ,just a bit of labour to look after them .

Yes, I get that they are bought/sold/traded, but they are not (as far as I know) butchered for meat/hides, milked, or used as labour - so what is their actual value?

I think some posters have it right - status, tradition, etc.

I once asked Mrs C "What do you do with the buffalo when they die?" She told me that they are buried. I found this hard to believe, but I just found this Coconuts article about "Thailand's most handsome buffalo"

https://coconuts.co/bangkok/news/thailands-most-handsome-buffalo-dies/

Prior to 2003 (when tesco opened locally on Samui) it was commonplace to purchase meat that was carved from a Buffalo leg hanging up in front of you complete with hoof & fur in Lam Din market.

Tongues were quite popular too.

On 3/20/2020 at 1:59 PM, chickenslegs said:

Yes, in times gone by. But people are paying thousands of baht for them now. That is what I can't understand.

 

The other thing is buffalo are terrible for the environment. I am not just talking cow farts. I lived on an island on the Mekong and every single last piece of greenery is eaten by buffaloes. Plant any flowers or shrubs the buffalo eat them leaving only this sort of dried out stubbled waste land for a good portion of the year. During the rice season they are kept tied but otherwise at that island roam free.

 

Where they go to the river the bank is always extremely eroded and blooms of algae and buffalo sh!t. 

 

It seems to me the only point of buffalo is to ensure the area and your land remains a brown eaten to the stubble wasteland that yields nothing, There was literally only a 10 meter wide ring of greenery where I lived on steep banks. 

 

They should kill the entire herd. Maybe leave on or two as tourist like them but strictly kept. A large amount of land would return to being green and lush without them. Although they do leave behind anything thorny or poisonous so that's nice. If a buffalo won't eat it you know it isn't desirable in anyway.

There the animal version of a tractor.....gees....lot of city dwellers living in Isaan....

A few years ago it was the tractor in Isaan;
and then, with the help of progress, they were replaced by real diesel engines;
it is not impossible that with the current crisis many farmers will begin to imagine that one or more buffalos would be more profitable than a tiller or a Kubota tractor.
They are peaceful and very fearful animals;
I have always dreamed of having a BB buffalo but we do not have enough land near the house.

In Brittany, my home province, the farmers next to us had two agricultural tractors but they also had two Breton horses which could go where the tractors could not.
It was a pleasure to  lead them into the fields of potatoes, wheat, artichokes;

Same reason people in the west devote hours of their lives to renovating steam trains and vintage aircraft - nostalgia.

On 3/21/2020 at 5:28 AM, chickenslegs said:

What is the value of raising buffalo?

Look on it as preserving a remnant of a past life, just like some in the west raise Clydesdale horses. Tractors have rendered them irrelevant, but it's good to see a few survive.

 

Besides, once the world economy collapses and society is really in the poo, it'll be good to have a breeding stock to repopulate farms with working animals, as machinery will be too expensive.

 

When I was in Saudi, they had a saying- my grandfather rode a camel, I drive a car, but my grandson will ride a camel. Bit hard to ride a camel if they are all dead.

On 3/22/2020 at 10:35 AM, Cryingdick said:

The other thing is buffalo are terrible for the environment.

Humans are more terrible for the environment. They destroy everything, not just some island. If your solution does not also apply to humans, than let the buffalo be. Without buffaloes ( and horses ) humans would never have developed civilization. Show some gratitude to them.

On 3/21/2020 at 12:52 AM, sirineou said:

The were beasts of burden, and were used in rice farms . Don't think they have any real use anymore. 

They are very useful in the Philippines and are still the primary way to plow rice fields prior to planting. If they disappeared overnight, many people would starve. This actually happened during the WW11. The Japanese slaughtered about 70% (est 3 million) of the Philippines Water Buffalo (Carabao) population and caused a major food shortage that took many years to recover from. They stole the rice and slaughtered the Carabao for meat. Of course it wasn't the Japanese that went without food.

On 3/20/2020 at 1:37 PM, ChouDoufu said:

makes excellent mozzarella. 

Mozzarella was originally made fro water buffalo milk in Italy and that is how it still is in many places.  By using cow milk the result is a very different texture and flavour.  Not the same at all but that is what people use on their pizzas nowadays unless you are fortunate to find a place that uses the original.

'nuf sed.  plamuk aka travellingchef.