AR-News: Bangkok's elephants beg for survival

[Animalara2003 at aol.com]

Sunday, June 20, 2004


It's not an uncommon sight in this city of 7.2 million to see an elephant and 
its mahout, or trainer, come lumbering along, sometimes causing a traffic 
jam. Elephants visit almost every major urban center in Thailand, including the 
edges of sprawling Bangkok, begging for food. 
The Asian elephant may still be a revered cultural icon in this country, 
gracing bas-reliefs of temples and serving as the royal emblem of the monarchy, 
but these days, it is woefully unemployed. 
Worse, in a country whose civilization was more or less built on its back, 
the elephant is fast disappearing. More than 100,000 existed at the beginning of 
last century. At the beginning of the 21st, there were fewer than 5,000 -- 
2,000 of them still in the wild. 
Now classified as an endangered species, the Asian elephant is expected to 
disappear from the country altogether -- except perhaps in zoos and a few nature 
reserves -- around 2050. 
There are many reasons why Asian elephants are disappearing, but the main 
culprit -- the scourge of all wildlife -- is deforestation. For domesticated 
elephants, deforestation means that they no longer have jobs. Logging in 
Thailand's forests have always relied on the power of powerful pachyderms. 



full story:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/20/I
NG2976LBP1.DTL 


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