Jim Algie

by Bizarre Thailand Tales of Crime, Sex,and Black Magic

  The latter programme, the first of its kind in the world, came about by accident. A local soldier who volunteered at the hospital noticed that when he put a rope around the waist of a three-year-old female macaque named Cindy, she liked to stand upright and lead him around. Manad Vimuktipune, the president of the local branch of the Wild Animal Rescue Foundation of Thailand (WAR), saw this and thought they might be able to use monkeys as a substitute for seeing-eye dogs.

  Cindy, the hospital’s mascot for the programme to help the blind, had been attacked by other members of her pack at the Phra Pang Samyod Temple. “She was almost completely immobilised by bites,” Manad said, shaking his head in dismay. “She didn’t have any energy left to fight them off. So the security guards there brought her to our hospital.”

  At first, Cindy was terrified by the walking sticks the blind use, so the trainers had to leave a bamboo stick in her cage. During the training, it was necessary to tap the stick on the ground constantly to reassure her. For test runs, they used the yard at a local school for the blind, so she would not be distracted by the city’s racket.

  Sitting behind the hospital’s front desk, in front of a black-and-gold painting showing one monkey pushing another in a wheelchair, Manad conceded that the programme was still in its infancy, but he was encouraged by an organisation in Boston called Helping Hands. Since 1979, the group had trained more than 100 capuchins (a tiny, agile monkey found in South America) and placed them in homes with quadriplegics. The monkeys, after two years of training, could fetch food from the refrigerator, change CDs, and even comb their owner’s hair. Helping Hands now has a waiting list of 500 quadriplegics who want their own capuchins.

  One of the main difficulties in training the Lopburi macaques is that “they have short-term memories, so the trainers have to use short verbal commands and repeat them constantly”. As the middle-aged Manad spoke, a young nurse scooped up a two-week-old monkey running around at his feet and fed it milk from a baby bottle. Meanwhile, an older macaque whose back legs were paralysed in a fall from a building propelled itself around on the tiled floor with its arms.

  After they trained her for several months at the school for the blind, Cindy passed her first big test by guiding a blind teenager through the city. Since then, she has appeared on national TV in Thailand and put on a command performance for Her Royal Highness Princess Chakri Sirindhorn.

  She also became the role model for a small group of orphaned macaques who live at the Lopburi Zoo, where Cindy performs tricks on a daily basis in order to draw visitors and raise desperately needed funds for the programme. The cost of training a monkey for the necessary two years is a minimum of several thousand dollars.

  “The monkeys have constant contact with people coming to the zoo, and that’s crucial for them being able to work with the handicapped,” said the beaming Manad, who has been at the helm of the US$45,000-dollar hospital since it opened in December 2003. “It’s also important that they’re orphans and don’t have other family members around to distract them.”

  The Monkey Hospital also functions as a kind of rehabilitation centre for wayward macaques. It receives numerous phone calls from irate citizens about monkeys breaking into their homes, stealing their food and even biting them, said the head veterinarian, Juthumas Supanam. When this happens, the hospital uses some of their volunteers—paratroopers from the nearby Royal Thai Airborne base, armed with tranquilliser darts—to track them down. “It’s an exasperating task,” Juthumas said. “They are so agile and clever that they often make monkeys out of their pursuers by pulling the darts out of their flesh and scampering away.” As pack animals with a ferocious loyalty to their kin, the other monkeys, seeing one of their own in trouble, will race in and try to bite the paratroopers with teeth as sharp as broken-glass shards. It often takes ten soldiers to round up just one of them.

  To retrain the rogues, Juthamas said, “We talk to them, use a lot of eye contact, and you have to be very patient. We can only keep them here for about a week—any longer and they wouldn’t be able to return to their pack.”

  Despite the monkeys’ hyperactivity and penchant for hi-jinks, what bodes wells for the future of the primates-leading-the-blind programme, the veterinarian continued, is that they “are far easier to train than other animals. They display so many human characteristics that they pick up on your emotions very quickly.”

  Repeat offenders—namely, the more temperamental and aggressive macaques—who do not respond to training, are castrated. About 50 per cent of the time, this calms them down. Together with the male orangutans at the nearby zoo, they are taught how to use pieces of watermelon, punctured with holes, as sex objects.

  Behind the hospital’s front desk are three rooms full of different primates in cages; out in the back are several bigger cages. For the full-time staff of three, much of their workday is spent caring for the maimed and the wounded. A three-year-old macaque had gone blind in one eye because of a rock from a child’s slingshot. “It hates children and women,” Manad said. Another monkey was electrocuted on a power-line and they had to amputate its right arm. As if still in shock, it sat there on a tree stump, looking forlorn and almost motionless. Yet another monkey, along with four of its friends, tried to hitch a ride on a train bound for Chiang Mai, some 500 kilometres north. The others returned home but this one got lost in a neighbouring province and was brought back to the hospital. Most of the other ‘patients’ had been involved in car accidents or taken tumbles off buildings.

  Sitting in the biggest cage was a baby orangutan named Joi. Like a child craving affection and attention, he kept reaching through the bars in the cage, trying to touch and shake hands with every visitor who entered the room. His palms were black, but they felt like leather and looked human. The staff was teaching him tricks for the special show at the zoo, such as riding a tricycle, throwing his arms into the air and how to balance a grape on his nose before letting it roll down into his mouth. Demeaning, yes, but certainly preferable to being hunted down in his native Sumatra, where orangutans (the only great apes indigenous to Asia) are a nearly extinct species.

  Before we left the room, Manad squatted down beside the cage. A big grin illuminated his face as Joi gave him a kiss on the cheek. Anchana laughed and knelt down beside the cage. Joi gave her a kiss, too.

  On Manad’s desk in his office were wallet-size calendars showing the Chinese ‘Buddha of Wealth’ with a monkey sitting on his shoulder. For Thais and Chinese, the monkey is an auspicious sign auguring a year of great, predominantly positive changes. That was certainly true at the Monkey Hospital, where they initiated a fund-raising drive aimed at people born in the Year of the Monkey. The donations went towards a facility to care for elderly and injured primates. The plan was a prelude, Manad said, to building a massive dome enclosing a jungle-like environment, where they can move all of the city’s macaques to in the future.

  Thumbing through a photo album, Manad explained how Cindy had now been trained to clean up garbage and fetch food for her blind master. One photo showed the macaque walking a blind teenager across a street in front of the Phra Prang Samyod temple.

  Buddhist compassion is the soul of the hospital’s philosophy and plans of action. Also depicted in the album and promotional pamphlets is one of the main benefactors for the self-funded hospital. Phra Khru Udom Prachthorn, the elderly abbot of the province’s famous Wat Phra Baht Num Phru, is well-known across Asia for his work with the temple’s hospice for AIDS patients. Back in the early 1990s, when other monks and even family members were ostracising those infected with HIV or full-blown AIDS, the abbot set up a special area in his temple and arranged for medical personnel and volunteers to care for the dying.

  The hospice is still running, but now the abbot also donates medical supplies to the Monkey Hospital every month. When one of the macaques at the hospital dies, or a local brings in one that has passed away, the abbot presides over a special cremation ceremony at the hospital. Like at a person’s funera
l, he chants Buddhist and Pali mantras to wish the creature a safe and speedy trip into its next life. After it has been cremated, the ashes are put in an urn and buried in the hospital’s special graveyard for simians.

  “Some Thais believe that monkeys will become humans in their next reincarnation,” Manad explained. “But the abbot also says that in Buddhism you must make merit and do good deeds for everyone—the rich, the poor and animals, too.”

  In the Glass Ring with Siamese Fighting Fish

  It was 10am on a Wednesday morning in the 21st century, but it may as well have been a thousand years ago. In the hinterland, under the shade cast by a jackfruit tree beside a grove of bamboo, a millenium-old contest and gambling game was about to begin. From their bags, men pulled out small whiskey bottles half-filled with water. Inside the bottles were male Siamese fighting fish, creatures so viciously territorial they will even attack their own reflections in a glass surface.

  One of the ‘referees’ held up two bottles to properly match the opponents by size. When the owners agreed it was a fair fight and made a wager, the fish were put into a square glass tank that stood a half-metre high.

  Immediately, the gill covers on each fish shot out like protective armour and they charged at each other. Their iridescent scales shimmered as the blue-and-green fish nipped at the fins of its red-and-purple rival. Like boxers, they circled each other, making quick strikes and then retreating. But unlike human combatants, these fish can fight like this for three hours or more.

  They can fight like this to the death.

  This morning’s session out in Nakhon Pathom province, an hour northwest of Bangkok, had pulled in a crowd of about 30 men, watching a like number of matches going on at once. Some of the men bred fighting fish (better known as betta splendens or bettas). Some were wholesalers. And a few were professional gamblers. One of them said that the matches also attract gangsters, drug dealers and other criminal elements who gamble on fighting cocks during the dry season and pla gat (‘biting fish’) during the months of the monsoon. Sensing our nervousness, he reassured us that these rough-and-tumble characters holster their firepower and rein in their homicidal tendencies when gambling. “Well, most of the time anyway,” he said, laughing in that gleeful Thai way that strikes a discordant note with the seriousness of what they’ve just said.

  In the middle and upper echelons of Thai society, the ‘sport’ is looked down upon as a no-class pastime for ‘pricks from the sticks’. Most of the spectators and fish owners, even in Bangkok, which has around 20 fighting rings, are migrants from rural areas, and have never attended high school. At Bangkok’s weekend Chatuchak market, where they sell Siamese fighting fish, visitors can sometimes also see gambling matches.

  But one man in attendance shattered all these stereotypes: Precha Jintasaerwong holds master’s degrees in both philosophy and computer science. Through his website (www.plakatthai.com), he exports the fish around the world. Precha said that gambling on fighting fish is also popular in Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia, with smaller followings in Singapore and Hong Kong.

  Like many Thai boys, Precha remembers playing with the creatures when he was a kid. In those days, the freshwater fish could still be found in the canals of Bangkok. Nowadays, they thrive in ponds, rice paddies and irrigation ditches in the pastoral parts of the country. Because the fish has both gills and a ‘labyrinth organ’ in its head, it comes to the surface now and again to breathe oxygen, and can live in small jars with no filtration system or even mud puddles. (One of my bettas jumped out of his tabletop jar while I was away for the weekend and I found his withered corpse lying on the floor about five metres away from the table—an astounding feat of strength and endurance.)

  The short-finned species has been bred to fight for centuries now, said Precha, who served as the scientific advisor for a Discovery Channel programme on them in 2002. However, the fancier kind, such as pla kat jeen (‘Chinese fighting fish’, because their long fins resemble the ancient robes of China’s nobility), while still aggressive, are strictly bred for aquariums. And they’re a large part of the reason why Thailand has become the world’s second largest exporter of tropical fish.

  What attracts fish fanatics to the betta, however, is the incredible variety of hues, patterns and at least 12 different kinds of tail. The International Betta Congress estimates that there are more than 26,000 different varieties of the fish. Breeders are coming up with new hybrids all the time and new colour combinations like gold and copper. Some species sell for up to US$150 each.

  At today’s matches in Nakhon Pathom, many breeders came to show off their fighters and trawl for new customers. Also in attendance was the province’s biggest breeder. Sandit Tanyaporn has 230 big clay tanks at his nearby farm. Each tank can hold around 200 fish; and each month he sells around 500 of them for 50 baht each. When he’s breeding the fish, Sandit leaves the male and female in opposing tanks. The female can begin producing eggs just from looking at the male, and her ease of fertility has given rise to a slang term that rural Thai women use: Mai chai pla gat (“I’m not a biting fish”)—meaning they are not easily seduced. On the eve of spawning, the males are particularly territorial, so the breeders get them to relieve their sexual tension by taking some nips out of an opponent in the glass ring.

  Once the male and female fish are finally put together, the male builds a bubble nest to store the eggs. The mating dance of the two fish can last for three hours, as they swim slowly to and fro with their fins wrapped around each other, which allows the male to fertilise the eggs. Then the two fish take turns pulling out her eggs. Occasionally, the female tries to eat her own offspring, so she is usually taken out of the jar while the male guards the bubble nest until the fry are born. Even afterwards, the male plays a matronly role (rare in the realm of the wild), helping the sliver-sized newborns stick to the bubble nest as he protects them against predators.

  At the age of six months, the short-finned breed is trained to fight. The owners use ancient techniques such as putting them in a big tub and splashing the water around to increase its strength and stamina. Another technique is putting a male with a female to let him ‘exercise’ by chasing her around. Different herbs, such as Indian almond leaves, are added to the water to toughen the betta’s scales. Some owners also have their own trade secrets for breeding winners. Sandit, for instance, feeds his fighters shellfish—as supplements to their staple diet of mosquito larvae and live bloodworms—in order to make their tiny teeth stronger.

  Although it’s a ‘sport’ for men, Thai women don’t mind it, Precha claims. “The women aren’t interested in playing, but they think it’s okay because they know that when a breeder is training his fish, he’s not fooling around with a second wife.” The businessman laughed. “He must stay home and train them—every day for two or three hours, same time morning and night.”

  This is not entirely true; some Thai women hate it. At one point during the fights, Anchana, who was the only woman present besides an older lady selling food and drinks, picked up my dictaphone and pressed the record button, saying, “This is Thai men... sitting around, gambling, drinking, smoking, talking shit. They don’t do too much. Now you know why I have a farang boyfriend.” We shared a smile. She looked around at the 30 glass rings under the jackfruit tree beside the stand of bamboo, wrinkled her nose and swore in Thai. She went back to reading her celebrity gossip magazine, stopping occasionally to read me headlines she liked, “‘Robbie Williams Romp’… what does romp mean?”

  Training only accounts for about 20 per cent of any fight, Precha estimated. The most important thing is the bloodline. Even that does not guarantee any blood money, though.

  For professional gambler Gai, the X factor is the most exciting thing about the fish fights. “One day, a fish from a particular family wins a match,” he said, “but the next day he’ll lose.”

  Gai (or ‘Chicken’), who preferred to go by his nickname, estimated that he is one of around 1,000 full-time gamblers on fi
ghting fish, laying down bets six days a week in and around Bangkok. The 40-year-old explained that he makes a living off his obsession, but he won’t be buying a BMW any time soon.

  Before the match begins, said Gai, the gamblers put down a stake of around 300–500 baht—though he’s heard of tycoons placing as much as 500,000 baht on a single match. After 30 minutes, once they’ve had a chance to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the two aquatic adversaries and look over their wounds and mobility, they might choose to raise the stakes, or other gamblers can get in on the action.

  Gai reckoned the floating number of gamblers and fighting dens is actually increasing, even though the pastime is technically illegal and the police sporadically bust them. For gamblers like him, the attraction lies in the fact that it is “not like playing cards, because it’s very difficult to cheat when you gamble on the fish. And you actually have a chance to win sometimes, not like when you’re in a casino, where the odds are stacked against you.”

  According to the rules, if a fish swims away and refuses to fight, then the match is over. This is what usually happens in the wild, but rarely in captivity. Also rare is a quick kill. They only occur when one of the contestants tears the gills of his rival so the fish can no longer breathe and slowly sinks to the bottom—dead in the water. More likely is that one of the gamblers will concede a match, because if he refuses to give up and his betta dies, then he’ll be fined 100 to 200 baht. Losing fish—if they survive (and most do)—are released into local rice fields, where they disseminate their combative genes.

  Some of the matches we saw went on for three hours until the fighters’ fins and tails were in tatters. Even so, the two combatants could still lock jaws for minutes at a time, barely moving, while trying to tear the lips off the other fish. Transfixed by this ‘death kiss’, the gamblers stared at the glass jars. Minutes passed. Lit cigarettes smoldered. Energy drinks went untouched. And still we stared.