Elephants hunted for aphrodisiacs

Press, 16 November 1987, Page 41

Elephants hunted for aphrodisiacs

By.

JOSEPH DE RIENZO

NAPE-Reuter Bangkok

Thailand’s dwindling number of elephants are finding there is no place to hide as poachers hunt them in the jungles and city authorities try to keep them out of Bangkok, where many now work.

Poachers kill elephants for their valuable ivory tusks and wardens in the jungles west of Bangkok near Burma recently found the carcases of about a dozen beasts whose penises had been cut off. The organs are dried, ground and mixed in aphrodisiac potions or cut into pieces for amulets, according to Richard Lair, an American wildlife expert. The deputy head of the Forestry Department, Pairoj Suwannakorn, said, "Chinese believe remedies or amulets made from sex organs of tigers, bears and gaurs (a wild ox) enhance male virility, but these beasts have almost been hunted to extinction.”

blamed the elephant killings an no-

madic tribesmen who he said sell the . organs through middlemen to makers of traditional potions in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. Several hundred beasts may have been killed for their organs as well as their tusks and hides in forest reserves in the past decade, Pairoj said. Elephant penises, weighing about 20kg, fetch about $34 a kg on the black market, he said.

Poaching has reduced the number of Thailand’s once numerous elephants to between 2000 and 3000, according to wildlife officials. Their natural jungle habitat is disappearing as trees are cut down for firewood or to be sold as timber, or just to make room for the growing human population.

Increasing numbers of elephants are being brought to Bangkok by their mahouts, who charge superstitious Thais about 50 cents to walk under the animals’ bellies. The act is a traditional portent of good in particular is supposed

to guarantee pregnant women easy deliveries. The elephants are also popular with foreign tourists and earn money for their owners by performing tricks. But city authorities want to keep the slow, lumbering animals out of the capital because they aggravate already appalling traffic jams and foul the streets.

A Bangkok administration official, Sunthon Na Songkhla, said many mahouts do not register their elephants as the law requires and do not clean up after the beasts.

He said he sometimes had nightmares about the havoc that could be wreaked in a crowded street by a male elephant in the throes of must — a state of dangerous sexual excitement.

“An elephant in frenzy would be very dangerous. The police would have to take quick and drastic action to stop it,” he said. The police had to use machineguns to subdue an enormous bull in a sexrampage which killed two people in a Thai village in August.