When Thailand's indiscriminate commercial logging of teak forests was halted in 1989, thousands were left without work, including teams of elephants trained to haul the heavy timber. Many of these animals were massacred for their ivory tusks or simply abandoned (another tragedy, since a trained elephant is much like a pet lacking skills to survive in the wild). So Thailand's elephant population, which has numbered 100,000 in the last century, is now closer to 4,000, of which about 2,400 are domesticated.
展开▼
