Thais are showing their love for His Majesty the King this year by wearing yellow and sending congratulatory postcards, but one group of businessmen has come up with a novel - and mammoth - alternative.

Woothiwong Toatong and his friends have invented special equipment that can help save the lives of elephants and other jumbo animals and plans to offer it to His Majesty during this anniversary year.

Woothiwong heads the Thai Industrialist Development Forum, which counts among its members the owners of various kinds of heavy-machinery factories.

The forum has devised a huge bed on which animals can be harnessed for medical procedures, and another involving inflatable cushions that can be used to move a beached whale back into the sea.

"This is a genuine, practical way to show our love for the King," Woothiwong says.

Forum members served as unofficial consultants to the Royal Household Bureau in 1995 and '96, and afterward wanted to serve the public as well.

They began the following year by making 7,000 slate and stylus sets for the blind. Then for the King's sixth-cycle anniversary in 1998, they made artificial legs from polyurethane.

Some 10,000 stainless-steel walking sticks were distributed to the elderly in '99, and they've also provided a garbage truck and clean drinking water for schools.

Then, a few years ago, Woothiwong was asked to find a way of putting an injured elephant's leg in a cast for an operation.

The animal didn't survive, and he and his colleagues subsequently witnessed several more large animals dying for lack of proper equipment.

"Why should a big animal have to die just because it has an injured leg? It's unfair!" laments Woothiwong, who graduated from Mahidol University 36 years ago with a degree in public health.

So the forum members concocted a bed - 3.5 by four metres and weighing eight tonnes.

Its top tilts a full 90 degrees on cogwheels so that the animal can be stood against it, harnessed in place and then pivoted into a prone position ready for surgery.

That was the problem taken care of for elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes and any other hefty land creature in need.

Next the forum turned to marine mammoths.

"If we could help the huge land animals, why not the big marine life too?" Woothiwong says.

The 12 cushions used are actually aluminium wheel covers with the tubes inside, each ready to insert along the length of a beached whale, then inflated. The whale is thus raised enough so that slats can be placed under it to facilitate movement.

Assoc Prof Sumolya Kanchanapangka of Chulalongkorn University's faculty of veterinary medicine was struck by the unusual concept, and praises the forum for its innovation.

"They're certainly trying to do a good deed here," she says, while cautioning that the six-tonne invention has yet to be tested on a living animal.

It can clearly take the weight, she says, but animals will resist binding, especially if they're injured, and if the harness is too tight it could break bones.

"But the bed is likely to work, and it will be a big help for veterinarians," says Sumolya, even though a few adjustments might have to be made to ensure practicality.

Woothiwong is ready to make any alterations necessary. Once the devices are deemed ready to use, he says, the forum will present them to the King so they can be put to proper use.

While the bed will certainly be useful in Thailand, the cushion apparatus might not, but Woothiwong is hopeful that other countries will be able to utilise it, earning even more praise for His Majesty.

Sirinya Wattanasukchai

The Nation