No More Elephants At Your Dinner Table?

[britmaveric]

No more elephants at your dinner table?

One of the more bemusing sights around Pattaya is the arrival of an elephant or two at perhaps your dinner table, or maybe the bar you drink at.

This practice, although entertaining to the tourists, does have to have a reality check, as a busy bustling city like Pattaya, is not a very good environment, for such a beautiful, but ponderous creature as an elephant. So, sadly for some, the elephant that strolls past your apartment could become a thing of the past soon.

On September 7th at 10.00 am, Deputy Mayor Ronnakit Aegesing held a meeting to discuss problems associated with elephants being used by their owners to generate income, by offering tourists the chance to feed them for a fee.

The elephants are beautiful and endearing animals, but they do cause problems as they are out of their natural environment. Some of the problems are traffic related, with accidents being blamed on elephants which are dark and hard to see at night.

The other problems involve street sanitation, as elephants are to big to get into a rest room, and often don't have the 3 Baht anyway.

But the core issue is that elephants seen around Pattaya usually come from the Thailand border and other provinces, and are sent here to simply make money for there owners.

Elephants are sensitive animals, and miss their own territory, much like humans do, and they also have a wide range of emotions, including anger, which does pose a public safety problem. Last summer, a number of elephants went on a rampage causing thousands of Baht in damages to property. They also have a hefty need for water consumption, a resource that Pattaya is rapidly running out of.

The solutions put forward involve: - rounding up and taking the animals to the Elephant Village near Pattaya for up to 5 months paid for by City Hall at 300 Baht per day per elephant. - if the owner wants to reclaim the animal in that time, he must pay back the boarding fees to Council, and take the creature to their home town, excluding Pattaya. If the animal returns to Pattaya the owner will be fined and the elephant will be sent to an appropriate accommodation area, - if the elephants are not claimed in 5 months they will be taken to the Khao Keaw Open Zoo.

-Pattaya People

8th september 2005

[poppa]

The elephant problem is not just in pattaya, its everywhere in thailand , from what i can make out the thais think its good luck to feed them , 10 years ago it wasent so bad as there was a lot less traffic , but now its a very dangerous situations , and when you think about it what can the police do , can you imagine walking up to a manhoot and arresting him and his 20 ton elephant , then taking them to a holding cell , the mind boggles

[Humphrey Bear]

This is all part of the price of 'progress' made by Thailand in the past 50 years.

Cut down the forests, use the land for rice growing - if it is flat enough. Very little nutrition in the soil, so pour in chemicals.

I'm turning into a bit of a tree-hugger, I think - but I recently returned to a part of Sumatera Barat that I worked in ten years ago. The landscape is now devastated, compared to what was there before. And for what? Hillsides denuded of trees - will collapse in the next heavy rainfall. Valleys were always farmed, now the good soil is covered by the run-off from the hillsides, as it can't be retained by non-existant trees.

No one benefits, future generations will curse us.

(Sorry - one or two Malaysian and Thai timber loggers have benefitted. No longer allowed to cut down timber at home, they roam the world looking for more places to destroy. Ask the Filipinos. And all for the japanese pulp mills.

Nowhere for the elephants to work - a thing they enjoy to an extent - so they roam the hard pavements, damaging their feet and, as the article says, getting very bad tempered.