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Taste for elephant meat spreads among northern Thais |
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June 2, 2000 BANGKOK, Thailand, JUNE 1 (AP) - Eating elephant meat to boost sexual performance is spreading in northern Thailand, the latest threat to the proud pachyderms after land mines and motor vehicles.
Rumors spread partly by traders of elephant meat have convinced a growing number of people that eating it can improve their sex lives, animal-rights activists said Wednesday.
As a result, demand is increasing - especially in the north, where elephants are numerous - and traders approach down-and-out owners of domesticated tuskers to buy their beasts and turn them into food.
Chitsanu Tiyachareonsri, secretary general of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Thailand, said that several elephants have been butchered recently specifically for their meat.
In the past, Chitsanu said, the tiny market for elephant meat was served by about half of the 200 pachyderms dying a year of all causes. But buying young, fit animals to butcher was something new.
"For Thai people, an elephant is considered a source of strong power," Chitsanu said. "And this stimulates the market, to this point where a trader seeks an elephant to butcher for meat."
"The meat apparently isn't very delicious, because what I have heard is they have to put a large amount of spices in every kind of dish made from elephant meat," Chitsanu said. "But these people consider it a medicine."
The meat is typically sold by traders directly to customers after word-of-mouth spreads news that a pachyderm is about to be butchered, Chitsanu said.
Plai Om-Chakrawan, a 35-year-old bull, was destined for slaughter. He had been a show performer in Kanchanaburi, 110 kilometers (68 miles) east of Bangkok, Chitsanu said.
But he was withdrawn from the show ring after a bull elephant at a different resort killed a British tourist and injured two others a month ago.
The operators at Plai Om-Chakrawan's show didn't want to take a chance on a bull elephant - which can be short-tempered at different times of year - causing such a tragedy.
But after he was laid off, Plai Om-Chakrawan's owner could no longer afford the 20,000 baht (dlrs 520) a month to feed him, Chitsanu said.
Enter the meat trader, offering 280,000 baht (dlrs 7,370) to take the beast north and kill him. He could expect a 70,000 baht (dlrs 1,800) profit by selling meat, tusks and hide.
The SPCA heard of it and made a deal with the owner, buying the elephant for the same price. He's now being cared for at a club in Ayutthaya, 70 kilometers (40 miles) north of Bangkok.
The SPCA has been investigating the market in elephant meat for the past nine years, but has seen demand expand rapidly over the past year as sexual-enhancement beliefs have spread, Chitsanu said.
Thai wildlife laws do not protect domesticated elephants. Elephants have gone from being proud beasts of war and the mainstay of logging camps to becoming increasingly redundant in Thailand's modernizing economy.
Many of Thailand's domesticated elephants - estimated at about 2,500 - earn their living performing at tourist shows and begging in the streets of Bangkok.
Several are hit by cars and killed or crippled annually. In the past year, at least five working in logging areas along the strife-torn Myanmar border have stepped on land mines.
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