As part of The Unreliable Bestiary, my next performance is ELEPHANT. We’ll put it up for 5 days – September 22-26, 2010. Save this date. You should come and you should bring all your friends – drop everything, drive/fly/hitchhike/sled to come see this show.

One of the first things I read about elephants was a book called War Elephants. The author wrote about going on a “mahout training course.” And I thought, “Huh.” You can find a few mahout courses in Thailand.

Asian Elephants are endangered as a species. There are about 2000 elephants left in Thailand. This includes domestic and wild elephants. We were told that there aren’t really any elephants left in Laos, Cambodia or Vietnam because of us bombing them (Americans in Southeast Asia … ugh… is this what children and grandchildren of Nazis feel like? We talked to a young Cambodian monk at a “Monk Chat” in Chiang Mai: “Mor-all-it-ee. Lov-ing kind-ness.”). African Elephants are not currently endangered, but with recent ivory poaching, maybe we can erase these pesky creatures from the face of the Earth once and for all. Oh man, I love extinction humor! A domestic African Elephant is rare (Hannibal’s elephants were African). Asian Elephants run from 3 to 5.5 tons and 6 to 11 feet high. African Elephants can get up to 7 tons and stand 13 feet high. They are aggressive, so Africa did not develop a culture around domesticating elephants.

Traditionally, a “mahout” is the trainer/keeper/life-long-human-companion of a domesticated Asian Elephant (using the word “domestication” is dicey when you’re talking about elephants – “captive” might work better). Thailand has a long history of logging – most of it involving elephants. In 1989 Thailand banned logging. The last straw: an illegal logging operation’s cache of logs thundered down a mud-slid-hill and wiped out a village. In the 80’s and 90’s harvesting timber in Southeast Asia was often connected with Myanamar and Cambodia arms purchases – the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the domestic war to eradicate the Karen people in Myanamar (More on this here). In Northern Thailand you’ve got a third of the Golden Triangle: opium. The Royal Project was/is an attempt by Thailand’s king to get the people of the hill tribes to grow other things besides opium. Like, um, guava. We bought some dried guava at a Royal Project store in the airport. It’s very tasty, but I imagine two ounces of dried guava is going to be a little cheaper than two ounces of heroin. Sort of like asking the kid in one of our cities to take the 7.75-an-hour job at McDonalds vs. the 700-an-hour job dealing.

O.k., so the hill-tribes turned their backs on the evil (but lucrative) opium poppy and embraced the virtuous (but a lot LESS lucrative) fruit tree. What about the mahouts and their 100’s of years of culture? Well, suddenly stripped of their livelihoods, they took their elephants to work the streets of Bangkok. Lonely Planet writes that a common Bangkok sight would be an elephant with a flashlight tied to it’s tail, the elephant’s mahout selling bananas to tourists to feed the elephant. The government tried something like the Royal Project for the mahouts and their elephants. The Thai Elephant Conservation Center’s objectives are mostly about sustaining careers in tourism “rather than begging or illegal logging.” So, the TECC isn’t really about the elephants. It’s about the people.

Of course it’s more complicated. First world conservation folk wagging fingers at third world folk just trying to scratch out a life is pretty common. Tourism – turning entire ways of life into an “experience” or a “destination” seems to be a global answer – Tinker Bell sprinkling Disney-dust over the mining industry in Wales (a “museum” where out-of-work miners take tourists down to the kaput coal pits), ranching the Wild West (dude ranches throughout, uh, the Wild West), and the logging industry in Thailand. Dignity, education, life’s purpose, respect, population densities, open wild space, agriculture are all connected. Tourism puts a bandaid on a compound fracture, but I’m not sure if we have any doctors trained for setting bones of this magnitude.

Here’s me and Jen making elephant sounds.  Oh.  I should say that this recording was made after I had botched a recording.  I thought I’d been recording us making elephant sounds for quite a while.  And the sounds were great.  We were really tearing it up.  Then I realized that I didn’t push the record button twice.  So I wasn’t recording anything.  I finally pressed it twice.  And I said, “Make some elephant sounds,” and Jen says, “NO.  I’m eating,’ because she had already poured her heart into a bunch of elephant sounds that were NOT recorded.  She is not belligerent.  She is exasperated.