After one and a half years of controversy, eight Thai elephants are finally on their way to new homes in Australia. Local and regional conservation groups, however, are still up in arms about the "secret" journey made by the last four elephants on Monday night.

Rather than bring an end to the controversy and protests, Monday's shipment of elephants appears to have raised opponents' ire even further, with conservationists vowing to take the case to the Administrative Court.

They say the government has failed to protect the animals despite their status as a revered national symbol.

Demands are also continuing for DNA tests to identify whether the elephants were taken from the wild or were domesticated, as Environment Minister Yongyuth Tiyapairat and the Zoological Park Organisation of Thailand (ZPO) had promised.

After talking to people involved in this issue, The Nation found there was enough evidence to show that the conservationists' doubts about the origin of the eight elephants were reasonable.

At the same time, it is widely accepted that the country is not ready to use DNA testing as the way to prove elephants' origins.

With advances in biotechnology, DNA testing is not a difficult process.

However, this means of tracing the origin of the elephants seems "useless" to Thanong Nateepitak, the deputy director-general of the ZPO.

He said he would have no problems actually carrying out the DNA tests as demanded by conservationists. But his question was: With which other elephants would they compare the eight jumbos' DNA "fingerprint".

"The best thing we can do - and have already done to a certain extent - is to collect DNA samples of all elephants in the country. We don't know where their parents are. Their fathers might have died, and their mothers might be roaming who-knows-where?"

Soraida Salwala, the secretary-general of the Friends of the Asian Elephant Foundation, however, said DNA tests were the only hope of proving the elephants' origins since all current government measures to protect wild elephants from being traded were inadequate.

State officials directly involved in the issue believe this as well. However, they did not want to reveal their identities, because of fears about losing their jobs.

A senior officer at the ZPO said conservationists' lack of trust in the government system aimed at stopping wild elephants from being poached and exported was no surprise.

"There are a lot of loopholes in the government system," he said.

The official's comments are supported by information from the DLD's Elephant Institute, which is responsible for implanting microchips in elephants.

Statistics from the institute show that between 2004 and 2005 100 baby elephants, aged less than two years, were sent to the institute to have microchips implanted.

However, the data shows that only 64 could be traced to their parents while it was unclear whether the remaining 36 were captive-bred or wild.

Transported from Burma

A veterinarian from the institute, who asked not to be named, said the duty of the institute was to provide medical healthcare and implant microchips, not to check the ownership certificates or ID tickets of the elephants.

However, he said he noticed that every year many baby elephants are reported as being born in Mae Sot, then moved to Surin province in the Northeast.

Mae Sot is a district in Tak province, which borders Burma. Hunting wild elephants was legal in Surin in the past. Many villagers poached the elephants to use in the logging industry.

Now, however, wild elephants are protected by law. And poaching is banned. But Surin is still home to hundreds of elephants which - local villagers claim - are the offspring of wild elephants caught generations ago.

The DLD's information agrees with that of conservation groups such as Friends of The Asian Elephant Foundation and Wildlife Fund Thailand, who say that wild elephant calves have been poached from Burma and transported to Thailand via Mae Sot.

The calves then become domesticated using loopholes in the registration system, Soraida said.

Domestic elephants are controlled by two laws - the Interior Ministry's 1939 Draught Animal Act and the DLD's 1956 Animal Epidemic Control Act.

The Draught Animal Act requires all domestic elephants less than eight years old to be registered and issued with an ID ticket. The ticket is only issued to elephants that are born in captivity.

The Animal Epidemic Control Act authorises the DLD to implant microchips into domestic elephants to record their health and medical service history.

Thanakhom Thananant, head of the Draught Animal Registration Division at the Interior Ministry, admitted there was no exact method of checking the origin of elephants registered with the division.

The division relied on information from the owners of the elephants, he said.

As of June, some 2,054 elephant ID tickets had been issued, he said.

However, Thanakhom declined to provide information such as the last time a ticket was issued, the number of domestic elephants registered as having died each year, or the average number of elephants registered each year.

"For [those] details, you would be better off asking each district office that has a mandate to issue the documents," he said.

System not computerised

Thanakhom said the elephant registration system was all done through paperwork and that none of the information was put into a computer system.

The information on the ID ticket of each elephant shows only the name of the elephant and its owner, address and unique physical features of each elephant, if any.

Soraida said this made a mockery of the system as all elephants shared the same physical characteristics such as the same number of toenails on their front and hind legs - 10 and eight, respectively - and a kong kan kuay, or a beautiful curve of the back bone.

The age of the elephant is not shown. While it is required by law that the death of an elephant be reported in order to cancel the ticket, there is no punishment for any owner who fails to report a death.

"It is possible that someone might put a wild elephant onto an existing ID ticket after the real owner of the ticket died. No one would notice since most features [of elephants] are the same," said Soraida.

The ID tickets of all eight elephants exported to Australia and obtained by The Nation also show that all have the same "unique" physical features.

A ticket for one beast was re-issued with a remark that the old ticket had been lost but there was no reference to the former ID of that elephant.

The tickets of two other elephants also showed doubtful information.

Dok Koon and Phak Boong were registered at Ayutthaya's Wang Noi district office on the same day. Dok Koon was registered first with the serial number 11/2000, while Phak Boong's serial number is 12/2000.

However, the number on Dok Koon's ID ticket runs after Phak Boong's; Dok Koon's being Ko Kai (GG) 059119 while Phak Boong's is Ko Kai (GG) 059112.

Where the microchip system is concerned, The Nation found that the microchip number of an elephant reported as having died in China in 2004 is now being used by another elephant with a different name.

The data available at the Elephant Institute shows that as of June, there were 3,062 microchips implanted in elephants.

And while the institute is responsible for the elephants' health, it did not have information such as the number of pregnant females.

Such loopholes have convinced Soraida and other elephant-lovers not to trust the government system. They believe that many elephants roaming in big cities and staying in elephant camps were taken from the wild.

Mattanaa Srikrachang, a biologist with the National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Variety Conservation Department who specialises in elephants, said she found it hard to believe that elephant poaching was increasing because the number of wild elephants was also increasing.

However, she said it may have been true 10 years ago, as in 1995 some 15 big holes to trap elephants were found near the Thai-Burma border in Thong Pha Phum district in Kanchanaburi.

Wattana Vetchayasathit, the director of Cites (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna) Thailand, said he had no doubts about the government system, but his office and the National Parks Department had recently agreed that some additional processes should be added to tighten it up. One new process includes DNA testing to identify the origin of animals before they are exported to a foreign country.

"We trust the government system. The DNA testing is just to make the NGOs happy," Wattana explained.

Thanong of the ZPO suggested that if the country wants to establish a DNA testing system for elephants, the first step should be the collection of DNA from all domestic elephants.

The collection, he said, would form an elephant DNA database that could be used to identify the origin of any elephants to be exported in the future.

Pennapa Hongthong

The Nation