Thai’s tourist elephants face starvation
BANGKOK: Underfed and chained up for endless hours, many elephants working in Thailand’s tourism sector may starve, be sold to zoos or be shifted into the illegal logging trade, campaigners warn, as the coronavirus decimates visitor numbers.
Before the virus, life for the kingdom’s estimated 2,000 elephants working in tourism was already stressful, with abusive methods often used to ‘break them’ into giving rides and performing tricks at money-spinning animal shows.
With global travel paralysed the animals are unable to pay their way, including the 300 kilogrammes of food a day a captive elephant needs to survive.
Elephant camps and conservationists warn hunger and the threat of renewed exploitation lie ahead, without an urgent bailout.
“My boss is doing what he can but we have no money,” Kosin, a mahout — or elephant handler — says of the Chiang Mai camp where his elephant Ekkasit is living on a restricted diet.
Chiang Mai is Thailand’s northern tourist hub, an area of rolling hills dotted by elephant camps and sanctuaries ranging from the exploitative to the humane.
Footage sent to AFP from another camp in the area shows lines of elephants tethered by a foot to wooden poles, some visibly distressed, rocking their heads back and forth.
By March, the travel restrictions into Thailand — which has 1,388 confirmed cases of the virus — had extended to Western countries.
With elephants increasingly malnourished due to the loss of income, the situation is “at a crisis point,” says Saengduean Chailert, owner of Elephant Nature Park.
Her sanctuary for around 80 rescued pachyderms only allows visitors to observe the creatures, a philosophy at odds with venues that have them performing tricks and offering rides.
Around 2,000 elephants are currently “unemployed” as the virus eviscerates Thailand’s tourist industry, says Theerapat Trungprakan, president
of the Thai Elephant Alliance Association.
The lack of cash is limiting the fibrous food available to the elephants “which will have a physical effect”, he added. Wages for the mahouts who look after them have dropped by 70 per cent.
Theerapat fears the creatures could soon be used in illegal logging activities along the ThaiMyanmar border -- in breach of a 30-year-old law banning the use of elephants to transport wood. Others “could be forced (to beg) on the streets,” he said.