The Borneo Post

Fad for ‘lucky’ tail hair threatens Vietnam elephants

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BUON MA THUOT, Vietnam: In a village in Vietnam’s ‘elephant kingdom’, a vendor holds up a severed, dried tail dotted with coarse hairs she promises will bring good luck – a grim new trade that is endangerin­g the country’s few remaining elephants.

“I’ll cut a hair off right in front of you here, so you can be sure it’s not fake,” said the saleswoman in Tri A village in the country’s forested central highlands.

A fondness for rings and bracelets embedded with elephant hairs is fuelling a worrying fashion fad in a country notorious for its illicit wildlife trade, from rhino horns to pangolin scales, tiger teeth and bear bile.

The trend is putting a strain on the few surviving elephants in Vietnam whose hairs are plucked or tails cut off by poachers, leaving the animals without the crucial appendage used to swat flies and keep their backsides clean.

“The tail is very much a part of body hygiene, so by plucking the hairs out or cutting the entire lower tail off, you’re putting a handicap on your elephant,” Dionne Slagter, Animal Welfare Manager at Animals Asia, told AFP.

With just 80 elephants left in captivity and about 100 in the wild – down from as many as 2,000 in 1990 – Slagter suspects most of the tails are being smuggled in from neighbouri­ng countries or as far afield as Africa.

The appetite for elephant parts is a cruel trend familiar to much of the region.

In nearby Myanmar elephants are killed to feed a growing demand at home and in China for their skin, believed to cure eczema or acne.

Loss of habitat and poaching has also badly dented elephant numbers in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, where they were worshipped for centuries.

In Vietnam too, the M’nong and Ede ethnic minorities in Dak Lak province – dubbed the ‘elephant kingdom’ for the large herds that once roamed its forests – hold a deep spiritual reverence for the animals.

 ??  ?? A shop at the traditiona­l home of the late Ama Kong, a legendary elephant tamer from the M’nong tribe, selling ivory and elephant hairs to visitors in Buon Don district, Dak Lak province. — AFP photo
A shop at the traditiona­l home of the late Ama Kong, a legendary elephant tamer from the M’nong tribe, selling ivory and elephant hairs to visitors in Buon Don district, Dak Lak province. — AFP photo

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