Portraits: Mahout and Elephant

Mahout Bang poses with his pet elephant Beepoe at a temporary camp in Bangkok. He is part of a group of several mahouts from a farming village in Surin province that have come to Bangkok to walk the streets offering tourists the opportunity to feed their pet elephants sugarcane or bamboo for a couple dollars. Although bringing elephants into Bangkok is illegal, with no income outside of the short farming season and a shortage of forests and grass the mahouts claim that traveling to urban centres with their elephants is a question of survival.