Those of you that attended our wedding last year, keep those memories safe because Thailand has done what they’ve promised to do for years and are now actively enforcing the “no pachyderms on the street” law.
Well, this is what many people think of the new law:
I just saw the Thai equivalent of COPS where the bad guy – I shit you not – was trying to get away on an elephant. The ele wasn’t so big and I’m sure if this had happened in any other country it would have ended in a barrage of 12 gauge slugs… but there were tons of cameras following the “getaway,” and Thais love elephants so much that they basically let it run wild down the wrong side of a busy Bangkok street at night. It made for good television. In the end, they kind of directed it to a narrower street and into an empty lot, where they presumably gave the handler (AKA the bad guy) a ticket for riding an elephant on the street.
Hey, I’m all for letting the animals live in their natural environment and not exploiting them and all, but you actually have to think about this a little harder than, “Let’s return these 3,000 pound critters to their natural environment so they can be happy and natural!” – THERE AIN”T NO FUCKIN’ FOREST LEFT FOR ALL THE ELEPHANTS, PEOPLE! Besides, being hand fed sugar cane on the dirty city streets of SE Asia beats the hell out of being hunted with AKs and RPGs in an African nature preserve, yo…
…I’m just saying.
Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
I can’t believe that this post has gone comment-less all this time.
Perhaps your readers are simply in awe of that elephant’s output, but I must say I’ve seen bigger, thanks to my little brother David, a skinny boy who is, apparently, harboring a giant colon.
Kevin