Going begging

'Is that a man raising an elephant (คนเลี้ยงช้าง) ....or an elephant rearing a man?' a Thai man sniffed.

An elephant was approaching us on the road. His mahout was riding on top.

The elephant was just a baby, possibly no more than a few months old. The mahout had scrawled something on his side in chalk, urging people to be generous.

Same mahouts scrawl the name of the elephant on his side, and his age. Occasionally they put flashing lights on his tail, to alert motorists that an elephant's large bulk is shambling on the road ahead.

After all but vanishing from Bangkok for months, elephants are now back. Their mahouts have taken advantage of this lull between the end of the coup-appointed regime, and the newly-formed government coming to office, to bring the beasts back into town, defying a ban which forbids mahouts from bringing elephants from the provinces into Bangkok.

When he sees a group of diners eating at a table on the sidewalk, the elephant, or his mahout, will approach them. The mahout offers them bags of bananas or other elephant food. Diners buy it from the mahout, take the bag from him, and feed the elephant.

The mahout could feed the beast himself, of course, but would rather have other people pay.

He buys the food himself first, then adds a mark-up. He tries to persuade diners to buy it from him. The ever-hungry elephant's job is to keep walking, make trumpeting sounds, and look cute.

Diners don't even have to feed it themselves. The mahout can take the food from out of the bag and feed the animal himself.

The Thai man who made the comment was sitting at Mum's shop in Thon Buri, watching the football. I happened to be seated next to him, as all the other seats were full.

Thais being the friendly people that they are, he just started talking.

'I will not buy food from the mahouts. They should not bring the elephants into town. They get hot, tramping up and down the streets, and when they sleep at night they are put in heavy chains. If you buy food from them, you are just encouraging them,' he said.

In the last week, half a dozen drinkers at Mum's shop have told me the same thing, as we watch elephants trundle up the street almost on a nightly basis.

No one buys from the mahout, so the elephant has to keep walking.

Gap, a law student friend, says that if an elephant dies in a mahout's care, there can be legal repercussions for the mahout. Moving a dead elephant is no easy task, and he may not have the money to get it carted off the road and buried.

He reckons the only way an elephant could make the long trek to Bangkok from the provinces is in a 10-wheel truck.

If so, who pays the fee to hire the truck?

Mahouts are generally dressed in rough clothes, and look poor. They are like beggars, only they use the elephant as their beggar's hat.

I won't support them, either, no matter how poor their owners look. The mahouts might argue that the economy has suffered so much under the coup-installed government that they have no choice but to bring the beasts into town to beg, as there is little work for them to do in the provinces.

But I suspect they are just seizing this opportunity to make money before the new government organises itself enough to crack down on the practice, as the last Thaksin government did before it.

It's just shabby exploitation, no matter how you look at it.

Postscript: Buddhists believe that feeding elephants brings good luck, says fellow blogger Rainbow Man, in a response to this post. Thais told me that a few times this week, too. 

However, judging by the lack of interest when elephants walked past, few Thais felt in need of a visit by Lady Luck. Hardly anyone put his hand in his pocket to buy food to feed the beasts.