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Phnom Penh's totem elephant – Sambo – survives

The speckle-eared pachyderm escaped machetes and famine, and  now rests as Phnom Penh's totem of good things.

By Suzy Khimm | Contributor to The Christian Science  Monitor
   
Phnom Penh, cambodia
  In the center of a traffic-mobbed roundabout, encircled by the crush of  cars and motorbikes, a small act of veneration regularly takes place. A  small gray-haired woman buys a bunch of bananas and toddles with her cane  up to Sambo, a 10-foot-tall, 4,000-pound elephant standing calmly in the  urban chaos.  Sambo grasps the offering with her trunk, gobbling the entire bunch in  one bite as the woman brings her palms together in a sign of respect for  the last remaining elephant in Phnom Penh.  Once plentiful in the Cambodian countryside, elephants like Sambo were  historically fixtures at the royal palace. While the animals still evoke  the nation's ancient legacy of kings and warriors, Sambo also represents a  more recent piece of Cambodian history. Having survived the machetes of  the Khmer Rouge she has become one of the capital city's most visible  cultural icons – a magnet for tourists, children, and those who venerate  her as a sacred beast.  

For Sin Son, a fourth-generation elephant handler, Sambo is a beloved  link to life before the Khmer Rouge regime: "For me, elephants represent  God – they represent people who have been saved, who have lived a long  time."  For more than a century, Sin Son's relatives kept elephants on the  family's five-acre plot to transport rice, clear forests, and haul logs.  Following tradition, at a time when wild elephants were abundant in the  wild, they captured and trained them.  In mid-1977 Khmer Rouge cadres descended upon Sin Son's farm near  Samrong Tong, a district west of Phnom Penh. They attacked the family's  five elephants with machetes. Sin Son, 24 at the time, watched in horror  as the Khmer Rouge seized the animals that his family had raised for  generations. When the cadres struck 17-year-old Sambo – the youngest  elephant – on a hind leg with a machete, Sin Son could no longer contain  his anguish.  At the risk of being killed, says Sin Son, he protested, "Friend,  friend! Please, do not kill her, she is so small – take pity on her!"  In his final glimpse of Sambo, Sin Son saw the wounded elephant running  from her captors, fleeing into the chaos of the evacuation. Sin Son was sent to a labor camp in the northwestern Battambang  Province. He says he wept openly after hearing reports that the four older  elephants had been killed.  "We took care of Sambo since she was 8," Sin Son says, describing how  the elephant learned to come when he called and bumped him playfully with  her trunk. "I thought of her as my blood relative, my sister."  Sin Son spent two years in the labor camp, where his parents, two  brothers, and two aunts would be among the 1.7 million Cambodians who  perished as a result of execution, starvation, disease, and overwork under  the regime.  After the Khmer Rouge was ousted in 1979, Sin Son returned to his  village to find that only one neighbor had survived. He was astonished to  hear that Sambo, too, was still alive. Sambo had been taken in by a chief  cadre and was living hundreds of miles away in the Cardamom Mountains, the  neighbor told Sin Son.  Sitting today with his elephant in front of Wat Phnom's ornate steps,  Sin Son breaks into a smile as he tells – for the umpteenth time – the  story of his remarkable reunion with Sambo.  Sin Son pedaled his bicycle for three days to get to the small farm  where Sambo was being kept. "At first they did not believe I was her owner," he says. "But when I  called her name, she came out from the jungle behind their house. I was so  happy, so excited – I never thought she'd be there, or that they'd give  her back to me."  He arranged Sambo's release in exchange for a buffalo he scrounged to  buy from a neighboring farm. "The Khmer Rouge destroyed pagodas, they killed monks and cut their  throats ... but maybe they took pity on [Sambo]," Sin Son says.  Sin Son moved to the capital in 1980 to rebuild – bringing his huge  "sister" with him.

Having served the powerful and elite for centuries, elephants are still  venerated in Cambodia, says Dougald O'Reilly, director of Heritage Watch,  an archeological preservation group.  At Angkor Wat, stone reliefs depict elephants carrying warriors into  battle and parading in royal processions. According to legend, elephants  hauled the stones for building the world-famous temple, though it's more  probable that they helped create the canal network around the complex,  says Mr. O'Reilly.  Though she's served neither gods nor kings, Sambo has served a newer  form of authority in Cambodia: democracy. Since the country's first  UN-organized elections in 1993, civil society groups and political parties  have made Sambo the outsized centerpiece of their public demonstrations.  She has marched to protest global child labor, to raise awareness about  UN's Millennium Development Goals, and to promote children's vaccinations.  During election season, she's routinely trotted out to support the ruling  party – and even its opponents.  "[Elephants] are a symbol of force that helped Cambodia when we didn't  have trucks and machines in the past," says Kek Galabru, founder of  Licadho, a rights group that has included the elephant in multiple  demonstrations. "It's the animal of Cambodia."

Though city life was a huge adjustment for the farm-dwelling elephant –  "[Sambo] was terrified of cars," says Sin Son, and train whistles caused  her to cry deafeningly – she became accustomed to it. Eventually, the pair  set up shop at Wat Phnom, a 14th-century pagoda surrounded by a park of  shady trees. In 1982, Sin Son built a staircase and began selling elephant  rides for 25 cents.  Sambo now ambles daily to Wat Phnom at 7 a.m. Surrounded by monkeys,  incense-sellers, beggars, and snack vendors, Sambo flaps her speckled ears  and waits under a tree for her visitors. On a recent day a family of  Korean tourists finished a photo session as a young woman carrying her son  walked under Sambo's trunk three times for luck. Pregnant women will also  come to pass underneath her belly.  Though Sin Son has hired a cousin to guide Sambo to work, he still sits  next to his lifelong partner each day, to monitor Sambo's condition in the  heat, hose her off, and make sure she gets her 150 pounds of sugar cane  and bananas.  "I feed her, she feeds me. We go back and forth, like siblings," says  Sin Son, whose rate for the popular ride has risen to $15.  Such prosperity has enabled Sin Son to send four children to college;  his oldest son even went to Utah to study information technology.  But while his family's partnership with its elephants survived the  horrors of war, Sin Son doesn't expect his children to carry on the  tradition.  "They like school, they like to study," he says. "Maybe it's finished  with me."

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Good day. We would just like to share with you a series of fascinating
articles that have recently been published on elephants and their behavior.
The first article is a study that proves that elephants are self-aware. A
trait thought only to be held by humans, chimpanzees, and dolphins. To find
out more, go to:

http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/061030_elephant_mirror.html

Another article, one that the AEACP participated in, is a scientific study
that asks “Do Animals have an Aesthetic Sense?” The article talks quite a
bit about painting elephants and reveals some interesting facts about
whether or not our elephant friends can actually see color. To find out
more, go to:

http://www.dana.org/books/press/cerebrum/

The third article we would like to share is a bit more sobering. It is a New
York Times article that discusses growing violence among elephants in Africa
due to Human-Elephant Conflict, the elephants’ loss of role models, and how
we, as humans must change our way of thinking for elephants to survive.
This article is posted here.

Thank you again for your support. We would also like to thank the authors
of each article and the foundations behind them.

Agence France-Presse

Taiwan: World's Oldest Elephant, 86, is Dead

The oldest elephant ever known died in a zoo in Taiwan at the age of 86, officials said.  The elephant, Lin Wang, originally from Myanmar, was found collapsed at Taipei's Mucha Zoo.  Vets had recently expressed concern about his fading health.  Workers at the zoo held a minute of silence in memory of the elephant, who was captured in 1943 by the Nationalist army from the Japanese troops in Myanmar, which was called Burma at the time.  He was transported to Taiwan in 1947.

Critter Creations; The Virginian Pilot; 8-11-07

Elephant Art; The Virginia Gazette; 8-4-07

Elephant Art; Williamsburg Magazine; September 2007

Review of ‘Pachyderm Painters’ in Williamsburg; The Virginia Pilot; 8-30-07

Arty Animals; The Washington Post; 5-8-07

Artwork By Elephants - Community News (St. Louis County); Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Elephants Can Paint Too! - New York Times Book Review - Children's Books; Sunday, December 18, 2005

Komar and Melamid Multitasking with talented Pachyderm painters -The Japan Times - Weekend Scene
October 31 - November 6, 2003

Read about Anchalee Kalmapijit of the Maesa Elephant Camp, Thailand

Komar & Melamid: Desperately Seeking a Masterpiece - Exhibit Oct. 24 to Dec. 14, 2003, Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art in Japan

When Elephants Paint April 8, 2002. Contra Costa Times

Trunkful of Art at Cal exhibition. March 29, 2002.

Elephant Art at Berkeley March 25, 2002. Elephant art project artists spend semester at Berkeley.

Elephant Art on 60 Minutes February 14, 2002. Bob Simon's report on the painting pachyderms of Thailand broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, Feb. 17, 2002.

World Wide Fund: When Elephants Paint June 2001. World Wide Fund For Nature was main beneficiary from an online auction of artworks painted by elephants on display at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art.

Why Do Elephants Paint? March 23, 2000. Salon.com

Elephants' artwork: Raising Cash and Eyebrows March 22, 2000, CNN.com.

Press release November 16, 2000. The AEACP celebrates the publication of When Elephants Paint.

Press release July 27, 1999. The AEACP visits Bali, Indonesia.

Press release June 9, 1999. Elephant paintings featured in Venice Biennale.

Press release September 28, 1998. The opening of the first elephant art academy

A Report on Painting Elephants
Art historian Mia Fineman shares her first hand experiences of watching elephants paint.