Tourists paid to have their pictures taken with the elephants, watch them beg, or do tricks they were taught by training methods that might have been painful, even brutal. There's no way of knowing.
Street life was not good for Bangkok, mahouts, or elephants. Jobless elephants showed up in smaller Thai cities, too.
The nonprofit Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation was launched in 2003 "to help resolve the problem of elephants begging on the streets," says John Roberts, 38, the director of elephants at the five-star Anantara Golden Triangle Resort and Spa, which hosts an elephant camp and 30 resident pachyderms - 25 females and five males (four juveniles and one adult).
At the start, Roberts admits, mistakes were made. To get elephants off the streets, the foundation bought them from mahouts who took the cash, bought more elephants, and returned to the streets.
"We realized that while we were feeling good about ourselves, it wasn't helping the long-term problem," Roberts says.
After the purchase scheme flopped, a more creative strategy was developed - the foundation decided to "rent." Each mahout is paid 15,000 baht (about $500) a month - very good money for a poor Thai - to take his elephant into a camp in the clean forest. The elephant and the mahout live free at the camp, along with the mahout's family, on the grounds of the resort in the rugged area known as the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Myanmar (formerly Burma), and Laos touch.
