On Thailand & the Abuse of Elephants

I recently posted a (hopefully) delightful, if not inspirational, synopsis of my recent return to the Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai. I have some additional, more controversial thoughts that I thought I’d save for a separate post. So here goes.

I talked about how visiting the Elephant Nature Park is uplifting because of the contact and connection with beautiful, graceful, and gigantic creatures, yet sobering because of the stories of abuse those animals carry with them. When one has such an experience—both inspirational and heartbreaking—it’s tempting to become judgmental. During both my visits, I had heard other tourists ask, “What’s wrong with these people? How can the elephant be so sacred to Thai culture but so misused?”

I’ve contemplated this question quite a bit. And I think I have a possible explanation. It’s rather simple: poverty. It’s a matter of hierarchy of needs. It’s not as easy to take an idealistic perspective about the treatment of all living things when your own life hangs so dangerously in the balance. And desperation often leads to desperate action.

A good way to illustrate this is by examining the mahouts themselves. On the one hand, you have the logging mahouts, who resort to violence and abuse to punish the undesired behavior of elephants. On the other hand, you have the Elephant Nature Park mahouts, who reward desired behavior with food. When they want an elephant to go somewhere, they lead them with food. When they need to calm a distressed elephant, they placate them with food.

In my estimation, a stick or a hook is much cheaper than several tons a day of watermelon and bananas. There are two concepts in practice here: for-profit businesses will often seek the lowest bottom line even at the expense of living things, and people will almost always prioritize themselves over others. Moreover, it seems to me that the fight for the humane treatment of animals needs to happen alongside the fight to end human suffering.

It’s easy for Westerners to point the finger, while ignoring the fact that much of the prosperity that fosters their “enlightened” attitude towards animals stems from a history of exploitation of other people, particularly nonwhite people. This is not to excuse the actions of elephant abusers. Far from it. Many of them are probably cognizant of the degree of suffering they cause to these wonderful creatures. But perhaps they continue to do it because life must go on and quotas need to be filled. Who knows? Maybe they even regret it. Maybe it even keeps them up at night. All I’m arguing is that compassion should be universal to all species, including our own.

It’s important to fight for the lives and dignity of the innocent and defensive, no matter what species they are. So the efforts of the Elephant Nature Park are nothing but admirable and inspirational. But for me the inspiration doesn’t end with the story of the animals. I find it inspirational that a woman whose father was a healer in her humble village could have acquired the means to purchase over 60 acres of land, as well as the elephants themselves from their abusers.

Can you see the parallels here? In the same way fighting for the rights and dignity of animals involves a fight for the rights and dignity of people, the stories of rescuing those animals from abuse don’t start or end with the animals themselves. I reject the divide we place between nature and humanity. We’re linked. It’s a denial of that link that has led to such atrocities to begin with. Once we embrace that link, we can begin to solve the problems that face animals and humans alike.

Return of the Expat

Wow! How sneaky time is! You think you’ve got it locked up in the barn, but then it makes its slip in the middle of the night. If time weren’t so astucious I might have written this post much sooner, when its sentiments were in their infancy. Now, I’m afraid the sentiments are geriatric, and thus dulled by old age. Try not to yawn as they sit in their rocker begrudging their faded youth.

Inside Pudong International Airport, whose terminal looks like a permanent circus tent with high arching supports extending downward from a sloped metal canopy, I tried to soak in as much Chinese culture I could. Or at least I tried to soak up the overpriced gilded version of Chinese culture. I sat in a teashop, a small cubic structure that, like all of its neighbors, didn’t seem to fit the aesthetic of the vast cavern that houses it. I had ordered a pot of lemon tea, and was now sipping it as I sat hunched over my laptop beginning preliminary preparation for my new literature elective in the coming school year. It’s not a fun way to spend one’s holiday, but it beats losing hair while frantically scrambling in the days before the students return.

As I was slurping and clacking away, I detected a familiar sound—English. And not the broken English I’ve become so accustomed to in Thailand, nor even the Mandarin-induced broken English of Shanghai. It was native-speaking English. American English. Excited, I sat up and listened. For once I could eavesdrop. Lucky for me, it was coming from the table next to mine. But then I noticed it. Ugh, Californian English!

 As I listened to four UC Irvine students talk about professors and classes, I started to form an image in my mind of the speakers. They were all white girls, probably sorority chicks. “Like” and “you know” nestled themselves between every independent clause and prepositional phrase. Inflections rose at the end of statements like the voice of a karaoke singer who can’t find the final note. “S” sounds sharp enough to cut my tealeaves.

Why must I be so judgmental? My irritation—especially with a dialect of English that I was all too happy to indefinitely leave behind—led me to measure myself some self-loathing. I turned to force myself into the conversation, hoping that making a human connection would alleviate my cynicism. I was shocked to see not a single white girl in their company.

I took my self-loathing onto my connecting flight to San Francisco. Carry-on item number three—a burden none of the airline staff made any fuss about. As I sat waiting for takeoff, reading over materials for my literature class, I heard it again, this time from across the aisle and slightly behind.

But it wasn’t the UC Irvine students. It was a girl from Kansas and a guy from Vancouver Island. Two non-Californians. The Kardashian effect in demonstration. I eavesdropped again.

During my visit back to the homeland, what annoyed me most about my fellow countrymen (and women) was not simply a problem of inflection or dialectic infusions. It’s not that I’ve suddenly become British and loath anything that isn’t “proper” English. It’s the content. Americans—especially young Americans—have very short-lived experiences, and gain residual amounts of information about something, and suddenly they’re experts.

Miss Kansas and Mr. Vancouver are classic examples. They talked about healthcare in Thailand. Mr. Vancouver had been in a motorbike accident and became acquainted with Thailand’s healthcare system—or at least the upscale, private end of it. Miss Kansas and Mr. Vancouver talked about how wonderful Thailand’s healthcare system is, how unbelievably cheap it is, and how good the doctors are. Now, there’s nothing wrong with Thailand’s healthcare system, per se. And Miss Kansas was right to point out that if you’re seriously ill or injured in Cambodia, Laos, or Myanmar, you’re better off paying to get flown to Bangkok. But where her lack of knowledge betrayed her was in the claim that Thailand “has the best healthcare system in Southeast Asia.” She meant other than Singapore, right?

And for Mr. Vancouver to claim that Thailand’s healthcare is “so quality yet so cheap” is to ignore the fact that the average monthly income in Thailand is less than 14,000 baht. Thailand’s high-end healthcare is wonderful—I’ve experienced it firsthand. But it’s only wonderful if you make more than 30,000 baht a month, and have group health insurance and emergency savings. Otherwise is simply unaffordable, and you go to the overcrowded, under-qualified government hospitals.

Don’t get me wrong—I ended up having a pleasant conversation with Miss Kansas and Mr. Vancouver. These are two people who are well travelled, and more knowledgeable of the goings-on of our globe than most Americans. But I talk about them to give an example of why my return to the homeland proved to offer me more culture shock than I anticipated after only 6 months’ absence.

I walked down University Avenue in Palo Alto, California feeling more accosted by pretension and privilege than I ever had before (and when I lived there I was already well aware of the ills of affluence). And yet, I entered bars where I didn’t feel sick to my stomach. I watched men and women chatting and sipping craft brew and felt a level of innocence—maybe even naiveté—to it all that Pattaya’s bars greatly lack. I wondered if affluence is good for something when it’s not tiptoeing off the backs of the planet’s poor. Then I wondered how many of the silver-haired executives patronized the seedy go-go bars when they visit Pattaya.

And in San Francisco there exists a sort of dumb camaraderie, as if we’re all going to hold hands and peace will just descend upon us as we sing “Kumbaya” from our frothed, hopped up lips. And in Concord, New Hampshire, there’s this shrunken sense of existence. The world ends at the Massachusetts border. One’s domain is everything up until the dirty ice drifts demarking the edge of the road.

As I walked America’s cities, I was reminded that, unlike Thailand, here was a place where an entire race of people was enslaved for centuries, only to be “freed” into a system of inequality. It’s a history that confounds my Thai friends. As I watched America’s news, I was reminded of the shallow politics and the egocentrism of the American perspective. When I was in the Castro, I thought of how open-minded Thailand is to LGBTQ people.

When I think of my country of birth and country of residence in comparison, I see many differences, but I also see some similarities. Both countries exhibit hyperbolic sensationalism. Both countries fear outsiders and blame their problems on them. Both countries have a self-inflated sense of cultural worthiness, and cite their national ideals as self-evident premises on which to base political and social discussion. Both countries see the world through their own eyes, shake their heads at the atrocities of other nations, and ignore their own sins.

America sits in its own vibrating easy chair spilling crumbs between the cushions while binge-streaming high-budget TV shows on Netflix. Images of my new home rarely enter the living rooms of the bearded metrosexual, the fully vested executive, or the cackling valley girl. And so during my visit I endlessly told stories of a place completely foreign—so foreign and unknown it may as well be another planet. I told my stories until my voice went hoarse. I described my experiences best I could without making anyone feel more privileged or less grateful than they should. And then I sipped my craft brew and scratched my beard.