BANGKOK — As an animal lover, I enjoy living in Thailand as the animal population here is bigger than that of humans, and it’s exotic. But, when flooding hit Bangkok last month, it was hard to see and hear of the struggles of Thailand’s animals, suddenly faced with surviving in several feet of water. Now floods are receding, it’s sadly obvious how devastating they were to many of the country’s animals — dogs, cats, snakes, even the Thai national animal, the elephant.
In my neighborhood, the stray dog that has lived on my small lane for several years has disappeared. I last saw him on the first day of the floods, a month ago, when he waded through two feet of water to the end of the lane with me. He seemed bewildered about all the wet stuff and didn’t know what to do with it. But he eventually loped off, somewhere, and I haven’t seen him since. Hopefully he found food but, when every street for five miles in every direction was under water, I don’t fancy his chances.
Stray cats had the same problem. The only difference was, being more agile and able to climb, they could at least get out of the water, even if it meant being stranded on an old tin house roof. Dogs, on the other hand, had it rougher as scaling a wall to get out of deep water isn’t something many dogs can do.
One of the saddest things I saw was a video on Thai TV of a dog stranded on a narrow patio. Out of the deep floods, but still under a foot of water, the dog couldn’t sit or lie down, as the water was too deep. All he could do was stand. Eventually, he began to fall asleep while still standing upright and, as his exhausted body finally succumbed, his head and nose lolled forward and he fell into the water. The shock of his nose submerging in water woke him bolt upright, but it wasn’t long before his eyes were closing and he fell forward again. Imagine the torture of that, and god knows how long he’d been stuck there.
Snakes have become a problem for many in Thailand as, because they couldn’t escape into their normal holes in the ground, they’ve been nesting in people’s flooded houses. Come flood clean-up time, and Thais in every formerly-flooded area of the country are reporting influxes of snakes and some are even bitten by them.
It’s even worse for the snakes though. Snakes in Thailand are often eaten, but they’re not usually this easy to find. Now, a whole generation of Thai snakes is being bashed over the head with a big stick, and sold for their meat. And all they were trying to do was stay out of the water.
On a visa run to Cambodia last month, I met a British man who was working at an elephant camp in Ayutthaya. Ayutthaya was under nine feet of water, the whole city, and the elephant camp he worked at had been completely lost.
When flood waters hit, they’d managed to get most of the elephants to higher, and safer, ground. But a group of 17 ended up trapped on a concrete coral and, two months later, they were still there.
Now, elephants can swim so being stuck on a corral wouldn’t usually be a problem. This group however included several babies and, because they were young, they couldn’t swim. The mothers couldn’t be forced to leave them as they’d die and if the mahouts (trainers) got them to swim out, they’d die.
So, for three months, they stood on a concrete corral under a beating down sun, while once a day military boats ferried what food they could in to feed them. An elephant eats around 300 lbs of food a day. Camp authorities couldn’t buy that much food, as farm land was flooded, and even if they could they couldn’t get it there. That they managed to survive at all, and they did, is some kind of miracle. Don’t you think?