Bangkok, Sukhumvit Rd. soi 7

These are photos of before the "enforcement" and new ideas to get rid of this abuse, but I have been informed that the "show" is going on in certain places of Bangkok, so please don't moan about "old captures". You can be assured that whenever I'm able to shoot them in the parts of Bangkok I didn't visit up-to now you ...will be the first. mistifarang.smugmug.com/Thailand/begging-elephants/Bangko...

“Thailand offers Bangkok elephants for adoption

BANGKOK, Thailand — Elephants idling outside discos or lumbering through traffic have been part of Bangkok’s colorful nightlife for nearly two decades. Now authorities want to send them back to the jungle.

Thai officials say they have come up with an innovative solution: offering the pachyderms for adoption.”……………

It seemed to me that there were already rules and laws to outlaw these suffering animals: www.flickr.com/photos/toni_uni/3815168192/in/set-72157610...

but a la, who cares: let’s try to invent another solution when law-enforcements don’t work out! I only hope that this solution doesn’t activate certain groups to start an import-business into Bangkok to touch afterwards the adaption-funds again and so on.

“Elephants first arrived in Bangkok in the late 1980s after a logging ban made them redundant in forestry work. Since then, they have been trafficked into the city from rural Thailand and even neighboring Myanmar by politically connected gangs who count on corrupt government officials to look the other way.”……………………..

“This time, the campaign includes putting microchips in the elephants so officials can track their whereabouts, and trying to convince foundations to buy and relocate them.”………………..

All nice invents but how long does it take until the chips has been “sold out”???

I wasn’t too suspicious, one must give the counterpart once the benefice of the doubt isn’t it?

Unfortunately, childish as I was I went out of work for several weeks now in the surroundings of Sukhumvit?Asoke, Silom etc.

In spite of an eye-witness story about an elephant runned down at the corner of Sukhumvit soi 5 by a certainly drunk driver who reversed and rushed away direction Asoke leaving the elephant screaming on its knees, well, who cares, let’s say it was one of the last convulsions of two decades of abuse (nothing in the printed English press by the way) and in spite of a (sucessful) denouncement of a local Thai at the other side of Bangkok, which reached indeed the (Thai) television the misery-show seems to go on, only better hided for the tourist-eyes. It remembers me all of a sudden of a very short bit of film of Charlie Chaplin: video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7599076870975062985&...

One can “earn” 2.000 Baht by denouncing a brake of the “beast of burden-law” by phoning 1555 as the police seems not to be present or are (still) turning blind eyes, about what I’m informed already.

Now they seem to be noticed near Chokchai 4, Ladprao, Minburi and other places.