August 10, 2023 • 29 mins
Laos used to be known as “the land of a million elephants.” Now, there are only about 800 elephants left in the country. Reporter Paul Kvinta went undercover to learn about the illegal elephant trade, and ended up putting in an offer on an elephant himself.
You can read read Paul Kvinta’s Outside Magazine story “I Bought an Elephant to Find Out How to Save Them,” here: https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/environment/asian-elephant-trafficking-captivity-laos/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I'm Paul Cavina, and I wrote I bought an elephant
to find out how to save them for Outside magazine,
and it's the story of the week.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Look, I don't really care about animals, but I do
love a prank, and there aren't a lot of organizations
professionally dedicated to pranking other than People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals. So back in the summer of two thousand,
I called PETA and asked if there were any cool
pranks coming up I could join them on. They invited
(00:49):
me to enactme supermarket in Wilmington, Delaware. Wilmington is in
the heart of chicken raising country. When I got there,
they gave me this giant chicken suit and told me
to go inside the supermarket and to fix these little
stickers to all the raw chicken products. And the sticker
said warning, this package contains the decomposing corpse of a
(01:14):
small tortured bird. I went in and tried to put
as many stickers on packages as I could, which was
not easy with the fake chicken hands and the lack
of visibility from the big chicken eyes that were way
too high for me. And I yelled at my lines
like give a clock as best as I could, but
(01:35):
someone started making threatening bocking noises at me, and that's
when the police came. They started escorting me towards the exit.
When I got outside, this officer made me stand against
the wall and started taking pictures of me, some of
them with my chicken head on. I was nervous that
(01:56):
these were mugshots, but they were just for the personal
use of the police officers. So I've done my part
for the animal movement, but not nearly as much as
today's guest Paul Kvinta. Writing is hard.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Who's got that kind of time when you're already busy
trying to be you all stand so it turns on
a mic. Maybe the twiddles nap because a journalist trand
has got in that juble job outories single story. Just listen,
smart people speak, conversation, film and information. It's a story.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
UK. I once ate a five hundred dollars dinner alone
at a restaurant called Elnea in Chicago and put it
down on my expense report for Time Magazine as dinner
(03:02):
with Bruce Willis. For his article for Outside Magazine, Paul
Covinta bought an elephant. I cannot imagine what he wrote
down on his expense report. Paul, thanks for coming on.
It's the second time we've had you on the show. Congratulations.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Well thanks, I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
This story is even crazier than the last one. When
I first read the title I bought an elephant, I
thought it was like an exaggeration just to get me
to read the piece, but it is not. In fact,
it's an understatement because you bought two elephants. Why didn't
you brag about buying two elephants in the headline?
Speaker 2 (03:39):
I should have.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
So the story starts in Laos and there's a seven
forty seven that's landed at the airport at midnight bound
for Dubai and it's picking up some very unusual cargo.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
There were sixteen elephants, and Dubai was putting together a
new Safari park and they needed elephants. And there are
a lot of wealthy countries now including the Ua China,
who are creating new zoos and they need animals for
those zoos.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
How do you even get elephants on an airplane like
they would just tear the place up.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
No, So they had some specially made crates and they
were going to put the elephants in the crates and
then put the crates on the plane. These elephants had
been staged outside of the capital of Laos Vntien, and
this was all going to take place under cover of darkness.
Those elephants were going to be moved by big trucks
(04:37):
to the airstrip and put on this plane. That was
the plan. But you know, as these things go, there
was there's a lot of you know, dark money floating around.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
This is all illegal, illegal under Laosian law or international law.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Under Laos law, that's correct. And apparently the Zoo and
Dubai had sent middlemen to negotiate with these mahoots in
these elephant owners in Laos and they had, you know,
reached all sorts of under the table deals. Well, somebody
didn't get their payments. Somewhere along the line, somebody complained
about us right, complained about this to officials. We don't
(05:12):
know exactly what happened, but literally, as this was about
to go down, suddenly all these officials appear. The elephants
get confiscated, they don't make it to the airport, and
everything falls apart, and then the president of Laos makes
the statement saying we will never part with our elephants,
and how could this have happened?
Speaker 1 (05:32):
And Laos is like a global hub for wildlife tracking
like ivory and rhino horn. It is what is going
on with that country.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
The institutions of Laos aren't particularly strong. There's a lot
of corruption in the government. And if you have money,
you can do do a lot of things in Laos.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
It's nearby countries that now have a lot of money.
And you said that when these countries get money, they
tend to like build these lavish zoos. Is that something
you do when you get rich as a society, like
build the world's tallest building and build zoos?
Speaker 2 (06:05):
I guess so, I don't know, or send people to
outer space, right right? China is building a lot of zoos,
a lot of aquariums. People have disposable income, they want
to you know, different kinds of entertainment and zoos and
aquariums would fall into that category.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Okay. And the reason there are all these elephants in
Laos that are kind of available is this unintended consequence
of a law to protect the environment there, right.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Laos traces its history to the fourteenth century kingdom of
lang Zeng, which means land of a million elephants. So
there's always been a ton of elephants in Laos. They
are just a celebrated species there historically, but now the
country has only eight hundred elephants. Half of those are wild,
half are domesticated. In twenty sixteen, Lao ban the export
(07:02):
of unprocessed timber and elephants and their mohots had really
been the backbone of that industry. So when that was
banned and suddenly you had all of these unemployed elephants
and unemployed mohots, So that's.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Been one of the hoots. Are the people that have
for I guess centuries trained elephants to do things including
logging which is now correct, which is now illegal, to
protect the forests or.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
To protect the forest And yes, as you say, the
irony is that those owners are much more you know,
there's an incentive for them to now sell their elephants,
and so they're doing it to these people in China
who are trying to create these zoos.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
And I imagine the mohots, the people that train these
elephants are not happy about having their way of life
destroyed and having to sell these elephants because they're like
spiritual creatures in Laos.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
As part of this Buddhist belief, people have thirty two souls,
and the only other creatures that also have thirty two
souls or elephants.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
I don't even think I have one soul thirty two.
That's exhausting just to think about how many souls do
you think you have? I have?
Speaker 2 (08:10):
You know, I've got a lot, Joel, five hundred souls.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
You've got a hundred lives to live through all these things.
I have not done reporting like this. Okay, So they
have these sixteen elephants that are not going to Dubai.
They have a lot of free time in their hands
now as elephants. What are they going to do with them?
Speaker 2 (08:31):
These elephants end up at this wonderful place in Laos
called the Elephant Conservation Center, and.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
This is like a forest somewhere. Can you pay to
go there? You can?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
You can, Tourists can go, and in fact, they were
there when I spent time there.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Well, it's starting to sound a lot like a zoo.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
That's funny. It's not caged in at all like a zoo.
They basically live in the forest, but they always keep
tabs on them. And if you're a paying tourist, you
can go and you stay in this sort of not
fancy lodge and and you can you know, get guided
out into the forest and where you can see these elephants,
(09:10):
you know, drinking at the riverside or the mood is
bathing them in the river. So it's not a zoo,
it's not completely wild either, it's somewhere in between.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
So it's run by this young kind of American woman
who's twenty five, and she has this sort of crazy
idea right.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Right, So her name is Chrissantha Pinto. She is a
scientist from the United States. And so what she wants
to do, or wanted to do, is, can we take
these elephants we have here at the Elephant Conservation Center.
These are all, you know, formerly these are all domestic elephants.
(09:48):
They don't know each other for the most part. Can
we put five of them together and create a herd?
Now in the wild jowl an elephant herd is made
up of adult females and they're young, so no one's
ever really tried to just sort of slap together a
herd of elephants that don't otherwise know each other. People
(10:10):
have attempted in other Asian countries to introduce domestic elephants
into the wild, and none of those efforts have really succeeded.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
The Queen of Thailand did it, right, That's.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Right, she did. They put together, you know, a handful
of elephants, put them out in the wild, and these
elephants suddenly just you know, roamed everywhere and did not
stay together as or herd, and you're just.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Like attacked people's houses and stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Right exactly. Yeah, So that's one of the concerns is
that there'll be this human elephant conflict. They'll trample crops,
they'll run over houses, they'll stomp on people. Chrysantha Pento
at the Elephant Conservation Center in Lause. When she decided
how am I going to put together an elephant heard
she started with three of the elephants that had been
bound for Dubai. One was an older female and one
(10:55):
was a young a young elephant, a young male elephant,
a five year old and another adult who sort of
served as the doting aunt. So Chrissantha started with those
and then she added another female, and then she also
added a fifth adult female elephant and these were the
This was the herd that she watched for months there
(11:16):
at the Elephant Conservation Center. And you know, Joel, all
this drama unfolds inside this elephant herd. You know, the
three elephants don't like one of the other females. They
you know, they they kick at her and whatnot. And
then when the little guy, when the little elephant, the
little male elephant, gets upset, what all the females do
(11:37):
their mothering instinct is to reach their trunks in uh
to his growing area, because then they can somehow by
doing that, discern what his stress level is. So Chris,
every time, every time the little guy got upset and
started crying, you know, these four mother figures would come
in and you know, touches growing with their trunks.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Wait, they like wrap their trunks around the young elephant's
penis to see if he is upset.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
That's right, that's right.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
And when they did this, Chrisophatch, that was awesome. You know,
this this meant that they cared, you know, and they
you know that this was another one more clue that
they were going to stick together in the wild hopefully.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
So this is not awesome. This is going to send
these elephants into elephant therapy for the rest of their life.
But does this work with humans?
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Like?
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Do we not shy that?
Speaker 2 (12:28):
I have no idea. My mother certainly didn't do this
with me, Joel. If that's what you're.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Asking, your trip to this elephant conservation center sounds kind
of amazing. First of all, you're meeting all these mahoots
and what are they like?
Speaker 2 (12:44):
So uh, these five elephants that we set free into
non Fui National Park, each of them came with a
mahout that had known these elephants pretty much all their lives.
Almost These men were amazed, and they were all guys.
They were amazing. I'll give you an idea.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
There was another a British guy, a guy named Mike Foulshaw,
who also worked at the Elephant Conservation Center. There were
times when I was with this group of people, me, Mike, Chysantha,
the Mohoots, the elephants, when Mike would say, well, the
GPS says we should go this way, and the mohots.
One of the moots said I've got a GPS. I've
(13:21):
got two and he pointed to his head and he
pointed to his heart, and he would say, yeah, we're not,
we're not. We're not listening to your GPS, Mike Felshot,
We're going that way, you know. And these guys just knew.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
And they'd be right, like he'd say it. We took
an hour, and they'd get there in like ten minutes, right,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
I remember the first day we spent all day out
in the wilderness. We'd come back to camp. These guys,
you know, with their pocket knives, had created a table, chairs,
a whole lean to to cover up all of our tents.
They had gone into the river and caught all these
frogs for us to eat for dinner.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Dinner that night.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
I mean, these guys are just incredible.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
So they walked in with no food and they made
you a whole like dinner. Yeah yeah, yeah, okay. And
the mohots are like flying through this place, and you're
struggling to keep up with them, I assume.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Yeah, me and Chrysantha actually are having a hard time
keeping up with these guys. They're they're you know, climbing
up you know, these really steep hills. Were halfway up
this cliff, and Chrissantha realizes she has a leech in
her groin and she's she screams out, Ah, it looks
like I'm on my period. So she was upset, and
(14:28):
you know, I had leeches all over me, and it
was it was tough going, that's for sure, all right.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
So it goes pretty well. It seems like with the
elephants in the conservation center.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yeah, Chrissantha saw things that she thought was was quite hopeful.
The elephants were mostly staying together after I left. I
later learned during that three month span when I spoke
with Chrysantha, that male elephant started developing a relationship with
some of these female elephants, which again she considered a
(14:58):
very good thing. So it went pretty well.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
It's like love Islands for elephants.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
That's exactly what it is. I should have titled my
story love Island for Elephants.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Oh no, no, you I should have told your story. I
bought two elephants. When we come back, Paul's going to
a zoo in China to try to buy his elephants.
But first today's sponsor has an incredible offer on some
ivory tusks. Okay, So then you go to China to
(15:38):
this city kun Ming, and you've gone there to go
look at a zoo, right.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
That's right. So after I spent time with on this
experiment of reintroducing these domestic elephants into the wild, I
connected up with an investigative filmmaker named Karl Aman. He's
a Swiss guy and he has documented different sorts of
animal trafficking all over the world. What's he like that
has these sort of sleepy eyelids? And he the person
(16:04):
who comes to mind to me when I think of
Carl as Peter Falk playing Colombo, got it, this kind
of frumpy guy who maybe you don't expect a lot
out of, you don't realize he's a really good investigator.
And Carl had identified two different business groups. One was Chinese,
another one was Laotian, and these two groups had been
(16:26):
steadily trafficking elephants out of Laos into China. And so
at one point Carl contacted the Laotian company pretending to
be a Western man who was going to start a
new zoo in Guangzhou, China. And so he asked these
this Laotian business, you know, how much can you get
(16:47):
me elephants? And how much would I be paying for them,
and so he started this relationship with this Laotian company
and what he learned from them was that very recently
they had just sent elephants, you know, illegally out of
Laos into China, and Carl learned which zoo they had
gone to, and if we could confirm that those elephants
were at that zoo, we would have documented this illegal
(17:10):
trade from Laos to China of these elephants.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
So I know that Carl is pretending that he's starting
a zoo in China. Are you there as do you
tell them you're a journalist, Do you tell them that
you're working with Carl or what do you tell them
you're there for?
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Carl and I are basically working under cover. We are
pretending to be a pair of Western businessmen who are
starting a zoo in Guangzhou, China, And so we are
out looking to purchase elephants, and you know, we've been
told that this particular zoo has some elephants, and we
want to see if we can buy some of those
(17:45):
elephants and how much they'll they'll they're going to charge us.
And so I went with Carl to this zoo and
that was a really trippy thing. Do you know much
about Chinese zoo's Joel?
Speaker 1 (17:56):
If I had a dollar for every time someone asked
me that question, you know, no, what's a Chinese zoo?
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Like a Chinese zoo, the relationship between the paying customers
and the animals is quite different from what we have
here in the United States. So, for example, there would
be these enclosures of predators, big big enclosures of tigers
and lions and bears and oh my, and you could
buy a ticket, and Carl and I did this. We
(18:24):
bought a ticket and a little mini bus can drive
you through these enclosures and you can buy food skewers
of raw chicken or just a live chicken, and you
can hold it out.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Stick it through.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
By the way, these little buses they're covered in wire mesh.
Why because you're going to drive into where the lions
and the tigers live. And then you can stick your
little skewer through a hole and it's got raw chicken
on it. And you could buy a whole cow where
this hydraulic lift would would then send the cow down
a ramp and the tiger cow a live cow, and
(18:59):
forty tigers would just like descend on this cow. And
rip it to shreds. So that's just that that's a
Chinese zoo.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Yeah wait, so it's like a zoo, but it's also
like an amusement park. What is this?
Speaker 2 (19:14):
I would call it an interactive zoo. So with the elephants,
and this is a very popular part of any Chinese zoo.
You go see the elephant show, and so these five
elephants come trotting out and they're wearing these really fancy outfits.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
What's a fancy elephant outfit?
Speaker 2 (19:30):
You know, it's got decked out and robes and spangles
and mangles and all sorts of glittery whatnots, and these
mohoots or these elephant trainers come out there with them,
and then they roll out the soccer ball and the
elephants play soccer, you know. And then they bring out
the paints and the easels and the elephant's paint pictures.
They've been taught how to paint a picture. And or
then someone will volunteer from the crowd to come out.
(19:52):
Someone will go out and the elephant will give it
a quote unquote massage where the person lays down the
elephant and take its big giant foot and kind of
tap along the back of the person, and the elephants
will dance and they'll spin around and they'll just do
all sorts of stuff. And then after the show's over,
we just kind of wander backstage go to the elephant
enclosure area. When someone says, well, what are you doing?
(20:14):
We explained, and we have a woman there working with us,
traveling with us, who's serving as our interpreter. Her name
is b. B explains that these are these two Western
businessmen starting a zoo in Guangzhou. They want to see
the elephants, and people say, oh, yeah, have a look.
So we go back and we there's these eleven elephants
in this enclosure and there's a guy back there who's
(20:34):
training them. So we watch this guy teach an elephant
how to shoot baskets with a basketball. We start talking
to him at length and he starts telling us, oh, yeah,
you know, these elephants came from this place, in this place,
in this place. Not only that, we developed a relationship
with this guy going forward, and we were able to
learn things like, for example, as I pointed out earlier,
(20:54):
it's illegal to sell an elephant a Laosian elephant to
export it out of the country. So what was happening
was false lease papers were being drawn up and it
was being made to appear that these elephants would be
least to this zoo in China for ten years or whatever.
But in fact this guy was able to tell us that, Yeah, basically,
(21:15):
that's all bullshit. Like you know, when you fork over
your twenty thousand or eighty thousand dollars for your elephant,
that's it. You know that elephant's not coming back.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Wait, it's legal to lease an elephant, but not to
buy one. I think that's weird.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
I think that's the case.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
That's a weird loophole. Yeah, of elephant buying. Yeah, then
you travel to Boten, which is a town in Laos
right on the border with China. And why are you
going there?
Speaker 2 (21:43):
We're told that Boten is the crossing point these elephants
are being shipped out of the country. And what we
learn is that sometimes these elephants travel by truck out
of the country and they actually go through the Laotian
and then the Chinese border agents, and you know, through
fake documents and such, they can get the elephants out.
Other times when that isn't an option for whatever reason,
(22:05):
these mohoots will walk walk, you know, trains of elephants
through the bushes, kind of around the proper border crossing.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
What is that city?
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Like, Boten is a crazy, crazy place. At one point
it was a gambling mecca. It was, you know, kind
of a red light district and all these Chinese tourists
would go there and it thrived for a while, but
then I think someone got killed and there was a
bunch of fishy stuff and then it kind of died
as a town. But when I arrived, new Chinese money
(22:38):
was coming into it, but it was very much a
wild West place.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
It's like the Nevada of totally of the East. Like
if you have a lot of money in China and
you want a crazy bachelor party weekend, you go to
Post exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
And so when I went there, there was a lot
of unoccupied tall buildings. There was like no one in
the town, but building was happening like crazy. There was
cranes all over the place, earth movers they were blowing
up hillsides to create flat space. I mean there was
just dust everywhere. And in the midst of all this,
(23:11):
there was this one theater that Chinese tourists would come
over in buses and go to this show and it
was a drag show. This place was called Club Excellente.
It had neon and you know, it was just kind
of this really sad looking place.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Did you go to the show?
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Oh yeah, I did go to the show.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
I did go to the show. I have to go
to the show.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
In the parking lot of clubex the very large parking
lot of Club Excellente, there's two elephants basically living in
the parking lot. There's a male elephant and a female elephant.
So late in the day, the mahout goes into the
patch of forest to get his elephant and he walks
those two elephants back and what he's that half mile
(23:55):
there's just dump trucks and earth movers and they're literally
making explosions, these construction crews to blow up these hills
to create flat space to build more buildings. So these
poor two elephants are walking across this moonscape of red
destroyed earth. And they come back and they get to
(24:15):
the parking lot and the hoot sort of chains their
their them by their feet to the parking lot and
then you know it's dusk. These Chinese buses arrive, they
disgorge all these tourists. The tourists are happy, you know,
they're getting their photos taken with the elephants. The drag
queens come out and they you know, they're entertaining the
these Chinese tourists. And and then at a certain point
(24:38):
it's time for the show. So everyone goes inside for
the show, the drag show, and for two hours. And
then when they come out, it's dark. Uh, someone builds
a bonfire, and then you know, there's dancing and techno music,
and then there's these giant conga lines that are whinding
around the parking lot, whining around the elephants. I mean,
it's just completely insane. And these two poor elephants, these
(25:01):
are two wild creatures and they're having to live like this,
and so the elephants are there as a further means
to entertain these these these Chinese tourists.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
So at this point, are you still undercover as elephant buyers.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Carl had said to me, you're going to meet the
mahout whose family owns these two elephants living miserable lives
in this parking lot of a drag show. If you
get an opportunity, I want you to talk to this
guy about buying those two elephants so that we can
have them move to the Elephant Conservation Center and allows
(25:34):
to live a better life.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
What how crazy? What do you what's your reaction to that?
When he asked you to buy an elephant or two elephants?
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Well, you know, it was just there had been you know,
we had just done this whole undercover thing and you know,
I don't know how spies do it, man, but you know,
so for him to actually ask me to do that, yeah,
it seemed a little weird, but it did seem any
weirder than anything he and I had done to that point.
And it certainly didn't seem anything weirder than I had
(26:03):
already seen in all these Chinese zoos, and as I said,
I was at at least three of them, and then
when I got to ten and saw what these elephants
were living through, it made perfect sense that if someone
needed to buy these elephants and get them out of there.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
So you're talking to this mahoot about trying to buy
these two elephants from him? What's the asking price for
an elephant?
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Like?
Speaker 1 (26:27):
How high were you allowed to bid.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
The mahoot wanted one hundred and ten thousand dollars for
the elephants.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Is that kind of the normal elephant price? You know?
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Working on the story, I saw prices for elephants ranging
from twenty thousand dollars for an adult male to two
hundred thousand dollars for a much prized elephant calf.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Oh the babies go for more.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, because you can teach them more tricks.
They're going to live longer. So yeah, the babies were
super super important in this, in this illegal trade. You know,
once we realized that the guy was open to it,
then Carl got with the guy and began the real
work of the deal, and then it came you know,
then we started the gofund me page. I was at
(27:12):
the very the very beginning, is Paul, you're going to
bout ten ask this guy if he would tell me
of these elephants.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
That's kind of you're more of an elephant broker, really, I'm.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
An elephants middleman, Joel, get it right.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
But Carl pulled this off, like he raised the money
or paid for part of it. He moved them into
the elephant conservation center where you started. That's right, right,
every part of this story is shocking. I know so
little about the world.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Paul Kevint, a two time guest, you wrote, I bought
an elephant to find out how to save them for outside.
Thank you for having the guts to return after what
we did to you the first time.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Well thanks, Joel. Yeah, yeah it did. It did request
some bravery on my part.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yeah, I've learned to be nicer a little bit. I'm
worried that we've been unfair to Chinese zoos. To clarify,
let me just say that American zoos are horrible places too,
not just the small local tiger king joints, but our
major La San Diego zoos too. They're so awful for
(28:19):
the animals there that a huge portion of the animals
are actually given antidepressants every day, Like more of the
animals there than the human beings who are in La
and San Diego. If you want to see animals, just
go see them in the wild or the poultry section
from the Acme supermarket in Wilmington, Delaware. I really did
(28:40):
learn nothing from Peta.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
At the end of the show, what's next for Joel Stein.
Maybe he'll take a nap poker Round Online.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Our show is produced by Joey fish Ground, Mola Board
and Nishavenka. It was edited by Lydia jen Kapp. Our
engineer is Amanda kay Wang and our executive producer is
Catharinald Cherradah. Our theme song was produced by Jonathan Colton.
A special thanks to my coach Vicky Merrick and my
consulting producer Laurence Alasnik. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen
(29:15):
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your podcasts. I'm Joel Stein and this is story
of the week. How much would an elephant that can
fly go for?
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Fly like a seven forty seven on its way to
Dubai and I'm more like Dumbo. Yeah, you're probably looking
at a few million for that.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I'm Paul Cavina, and I wrote I bought an elephant
to find out how to save them for Outside magazine,
and it's the story of the week.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Look, I don't really care about animals, but I do
love a prank, and there aren't a lot of organizations
professionally dedicated to pranking other than People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals. So back in the summer of two thousand,
I called PETA and asked if there were any cool
pranks coming up I could join them on. They invited
(00:49):
me to enactme supermarket in Wilmington, Delaware. Wilmington is in
the heart of chicken raising country. When I got there,
they gave me this giant chicken suit and told me
to go inside the supermarket and to fix these little
stickers to all the raw chicken products. And the sticker
said warning, this package contains the decomposing corpse of a
(01:14):
small tortured bird. I went in and tried to put
as many stickers on packages as I could, which was
not easy with the fake chicken hands and the lack
of visibility from the big chicken eyes that were way
too high for me. And I yelled at my lines
like give a clock as best as I could, but
(01:35):
someone started making threatening bocking noises at me, and that's
when the police came. They started escorting me towards the exit.
When I got outside, this officer made me stand against
the wall and started taking pictures of me, some of
them with my chicken head on. I was nervous that
(01:56):
these were mugshots, but they were just for the personal
use of the police officers. So I've done my part
for the animal movement, but not nearly as much as
today's guest Paul Kvinta. Writing is hard.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Who's got that kind of time when you're already busy
trying to be you all stand so it turns on
a mic. Maybe the twiddles nap because a journalist trand
has got in that juble job outories single story. Just listen,
smart people speak, conversation, film and information. It's a story.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
UK. I once ate a five hundred dollars dinner alone
at a restaurant called Elnea in Chicago and put it
down on my expense report for Time Magazine as dinner
(03:02):
with Bruce Willis. For his article for Outside Magazine, Paul
Covinta bought an elephant. I cannot imagine what he wrote
down on his expense report. Paul, thanks for coming on.
It's the second time we've had you on the show. Congratulations.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Well thanks, I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
This story is even crazier than the last one. When
I first read the title I bought an elephant, I
thought it was like an exaggeration just to get me
to read the piece, but it is not. In fact,
it's an understatement because you bought two elephants. Why didn't
you brag about buying two elephants in the headline?
Speaker 2 (03:39):
I should have.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
So the story starts in Laos and there's a seven
forty seven that's landed at the airport at midnight bound
for Dubai and it's picking up some very unusual cargo.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
There were sixteen elephants, and Dubai was putting together a
new Safari park and they needed elephants. And there are
a lot of wealthy countries now including the Ua China,
who are creating new zoos and they need animals for
those zoos.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
How do you even get elephants on an airplane like
they would just tear the place up.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
No, So they had some specially made crates and they
were going to put the elephants in the crates and
then put the crates on the plane. These elephants had
been staged outside of the capital of Laos Vntien, and
this was all going to take place under cover of darkness.
Those elephants were going to be moved by big trucks
(04:37):
to the airstrip and put on this plane. That was
the plan. But you know, as these things go, there
was there's a lot of you know, dark money floating around.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
This is all illegal, illegal under Laosian law or international law.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Under Laos law, that's correct. And apparently the Zoo and
Dubai had sent middlemen to negotiate with these mahoots in
these elephant owners in Laos and they had, you know,
reached all sorts of under the table deals. Well, somebody
didn't get their payments. Somewhere along the line, somebody complained
about us right, complained about this to officials. We don't
(05:12):
know exactly what happened, but literally, as this was about
to go down, suddenly all these officials appear. The elephants
get confiscated, they don't make it to the airport, and
everything falls apart, and then the president of Laos makes
the statement saying we will never part with our elephants,
and how could this have happened?
Speaker 1 (05:32):
And Laos is like a global hub for wildlife tracking
like ivory and rhino horn. It is what is going
on with that country.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
The institutions of Laos aren't particularly strong. There's a lot
of corruption in the government. And if you have money,
you can do do a lot of things in Laos.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
It's nearby countries that now have a lot of money.
And you said that when these countries get money, they
tend to like build these lavish zoos. Is that something
you do when you get rich as a society, like
build the world's tallest building and build zoos?
Speaker 2 (06:05):
I guess so, I don't know, or send people to
outer space, right right? China is building a lot of zoos,
a lot of aquariums. People have disposable income, they want
to you know, different kinds of entertainment and zoos and
aquariums would fall into that category.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Okay. And the reason there are all these elephants in
Laos that are kind of available is this unintended consequence
of a law to protect the environment there, right.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Laos traces its history to the fourteenth century kingdom of
lang Zeng, which means land of a million elephants. So
there's always been a ton of elephants in Laos. They
are just a celebrated species there historically, but now the
country has only eight hundred elephants. Half of those are wild,
half are domesticated. In twenty sixteen, Lao ban the export
(07:02):
of unprocessed timber and elephants and their mohots had really
been the backbone of that industry. So when that was
banned and suddenly you had all of these unemployed elephants
and unemployed mohots, So that's.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Been one of the hoots. Are the people that have
for I guess centuries trained elephants to do things including
logging which is now correct, which is now illegal, to
protect the forests or.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
To protect the forest And yes, as you say, the
irony is that those owners are much more you know,
there's an incentive for them to now sell their elephants,
and so they're doing it to these people in China
who are trying to create these zoos.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
And I imagine the mohots, the people that train these
elephants are not happy about having their way of life
destroyed and having to sell these elephants because they're like
spiritual creatures in Laos.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
As part of this Buddhist belief, people have thirty two souls,
and the only other creatures that also have thirty two
souls or elephants.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
I don't even think I have one soul thirty two.
That's exhausting just to think about how many souls do
you think you have? I have?
Speaker 2 (08:10):
You know, I've got a lot, Joel, five hundred souls.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
You've got a hundred lives to live through all these things.
I have not done reporting like this. Okay, So they
have these sixteen elephants that are not going to Dubai.
They have a lot of free time in their hands
now as elephants. What are they going to do with them?
Speaker 2 (08:31):
These elephants end up at this wonderful place in Laos
called the Elephant Conservation Center, and.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
This is like a forest somewhere. Can you pay to
go there? You can?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
You can, Tourists can go, and in fact, they were
there when I spent time there.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Well, it's starting to sound a lot like a zoo.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
That's funny. It's not caged in at all like a zoo.
They basically live in the forest, but they always keep
tabs on them. And if you're a paying tourist, you
can go and you stay in this sort of not
fancy lodge and and you can you know, get guided
out into the forest and where you can see these elephants,
(09:10):
you know, drinking at the riverside or the mood is
bathing them in the river. So it's not a zoo,
it's not completely wild either, it's somewhere in between.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
So it's run by this young kind of American woman
who's twenty five, and she has this sort of crazy
idea right.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Right, So her name is Chrissantha Pinto. She is a
scientist from the United States. And so what she wants
to do, or wanted to do, is, can we take
these elephants we have here at the Elephant Conservation Center.
These are all, you know, formerly these are all domestic elephants.
(09:48):
They don't know each other for the most part. Can
we put five of them together and create a herd?
Now in the wild jowl an elephant herd is made
up of adult females and they're young, so no one's
ever really tried to just sort of slap together a
herd of elephants that don't otherwise know each other. People
(10:10):
have attempted in other Asian countries to introduce domestic elephants
into the wild, and none of those efforts have really succeeded.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
The Queen of Thailand did it, right, That's.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Right, she did. They put together, you know, a handful
of elephants, put them out in the wild, and these
elephants suddenly just you know, roamed everywhere and did not
stay together as or herd, and you're just.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Like attacked people's houses and stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Right exactly. Yeah, So that's one of the concerns is
that there'll be this human elephant conflict. They'll trample crops,
they'll run over houses, they'll stomp on people. Chrysantha Pento
at the Elephant Conservation Center in Lause. When she decided
how am I going to put together an elephant heard
she started with three of the elephants that had been
bound for Dubai. One was an older female and one
(10:55):
was a young a young elephant, a young male elephant,
a five year old and another adult who sort of
served as the doting aunt. So Chrissantha started with those
and then she added another female, and then she also
added a fifth adult female elephant and these were the
This was the herd that she watched for months there
(11:16):
at the Elephant Conservation Center. And you know, Joel, all
this drama unfolds inside this elephant herd. You know, the
three elephants don't like one of the other females. They
you know, they they kick at her and whatnot. And
then when the little guy, when the little elephant, the
little male elephant, gets upset, what all the females do
(11:37):
their mothering instinct is to reach their trunks in uh
to his growing area, because then they can somehow by
doing that, discern what his stress level is. So Chris,
every time, every time the little guy got upset and
started crying, you know, these four mother figures would come
in and you know, touches growing with their trunks.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Wait, they like wrap their trunks around the young elephant's
penis to see if he is upset.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
That's right, that's right.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
And when they did this, Chrisophatch, that was awesome. You know,
this this meant that they cared, you know, and they
you know that this was another one more clue that
they were going to stick together in the wild hopefully.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
So this is not awesome. This is going to send
these elephants into elephant therapy for the rest of their life.
But does this work with humans?
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Like?
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Do we not shy that?
Speaker 2 (12:28):
I have no idea. My mother certainly didn't do this
with me, Joel. If that's what you're.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Asking, your trip to this elephant conservation center sounds kind
of amazing. First of all, you're meeting all these mahoots
and what are they like?
Speaker 2 (12:44):
So uh, these five elephants that we set free into
non Fui National Park, each of them came with a
mahout that had known these elephants pretty much all their lives.
Almost These men were amazed, and they were all guys.
They were amazing. I'll give you an idea.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
There was another a British guy, a guy named Mike Foulshaw,
who also worked at the Elephant Conservation Center. There were
times when I was with this group of people, me, Mike, Chysantha,
the Mohoots, the elephants, when Mike would say, well, the
GPS says we should go this way, and the mohots.
One of the moots said I've got a GPS. I've
(13:21):
got two and he pointed to his head and he
pointed to his heart, and he would say, yeah, we're not,
we're not. We're not listening to your GPS, Mike Felshot,
We're going that way, you know. And these guys just knew.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
And they'd be right, like he'd say it. We took
an hour, and they'd get there in like ten minutes, right,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
I remember the first day we spent all day out
in the wilderness. We'd come back to camp. These guys,
you know, with their pocket knives, had created a table, chairs,
a whole lean to to cover up all of our tents.
They had gone into the river and caught all these
frogs for us to eat for dinner.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Dinner that night.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
I mean, these guys are just incredible.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
So they walked in with no food and they made
you a whole like dinner. Yeah yeah, yeah, okay. And
the mohots are like flying through this place, and you're
struggling to keep up with them, I assume.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Yeah, me and Chrysantha actually are having a hard time
keeping up with these guys. They're they're you know, climbing
up you know, these really steep hills. Were halfway up
this cliff, and Chrissantha realizes she has a leech in
her groin and she's she screams out, Ah, it looks
like I'm on my period. So she was upset, and
(14:28):
you know, I had leeches all over me, and it
was it was tough going, that's for sure, all right.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
So it goes pretty well. It seems like with the
elephants in the conservation center.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yeah, Chrissantha saw things that she thought was was quite hopeful.
The elephants were mostly staying together after I left. I
later learned during that three month span when I spoke
with Chrysantha, that male elephant started developing a relationship with
some of these female elephants, which again she considered a
(14:58):
very good thing. So it went pretty well.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
It's like love Islands for elephants.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
That's exactly what it is. I should have titled my
story love Island for Elephants.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Oh no, no, you I should have told your story. I
bought two elephants. When we come back, Paul's going to
a zoo in China to try to buy his elephants.
But first today's sponsor has an incredible offer on some
ivory tusks. Okay, So then you go to China to
(15:38):
this city kun Ming, and you've gone there to go
look at a zoo, right.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
That's right. So after I spent time with on this
experiment of reintroducing these domestic elephants into the wild, I
connected up with an investigative filmmaker named Karl Aman. He's
a Swiss guy and he has documented different sorts of
animal trafficking all over the world. What's he like that
has these sort of sleepy eyelids? And he the person
(16:04):
who comes to mind to me when I think of
Carl as Peter Falk playing Colombo, got it, this kind
of frumpy guy who maybe you don't expect a lot
out of, you don't realize he's a really good investigator.
And Carl had identified two different business groups. One was Chinese,
another one was Laotian, and these two groups had been
(16:26):
steadily trafficking elephants out of Laos into China. And so
at one point Carl contacted the Laotian company pretending to
be a Western man who was going to start a
new zoo in Guangzhou, China. And so he asked these
this Laotian business, you know, how much can you get
(16:47):
me elephants? And how much would I be paying for them,
and so he started this relationship with this Laotian company
and what he learned from them was that very recently
they had just sent elephants, you know, illegally out of
Laos into China, and Carl learned which zoo they had
gone to, and if we could confirm that those elephants
were at that zoo, we would have documented this illegal
(17:10):
trade from Laos to China of these elephants.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
So I know that Carl is pretending that he's starting
a zoo in China. Are you there as do you
tell them you're a journalist, Do you tell them that
you're working with Carl or what do you tell them
you're there for?
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Carl and I are basically working under cover. We are
pretending to be a pair of Western businessmen who are
starting a zoo in Guangzhou, China, And so we are
out looking to purchase elephants, and you know, we've been
told that this particular zoo has some elephants, and we
want to see if we can buy some of those
(17:45):
elephants and how much they'll they'll they're going to charge us.
And so I went with Carl to this zoo and
that was a really trippy thing. Do you know much
about Chinese zoo's Joel?
Speaker 1 (17:56):
If I had a dollar for every time someone asked
me that question, you know, no, what's a Chinese zoo?
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Like a Chinese zoo, the relationship between the paying customers
and the animals is quite different from what we have
here in the United States. So, for example, there would
be these enclosures of predators, big big enclosures of tigers
and lions and bears and oh my, and you could
buy a ticket, and Carl and I did this. We
(18:24):
bought a ticket and a little mini bus can drive
you through these enclosures and you can buy food skewers
of raw chicken or just a live chicken, and you
can hold it out.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Stick it through.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
By the way, these little buses they're covered in wire mesh.
Why because you're going to drive into where the lions
and the tigers live. And then you can stick your
little skewer through a hole and it's got raw chicken
on it. And you could buy a whole cow where
this hydraulic lift would would then send the cow down
a ramp and the tiger cow a live cow, and
(18:59):
forty tigers would just like descend on this cow. And
rip it to shreds. So that's just that that's a
Chinese zoo.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Yeah wait, so it's like a zoo, but it's also
like an amusement park. What is this?
Speaker 2 (19:14):
I would call it an interactive zoo. So with the elephants,
and this is a very popular part of any Chinese zoo.
You go see the elephant show, and so these five
elephants come trotting out and they're wearing these really fancy outfits.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
What's a fancy elephant outfit?
Speaker 2 (19:30):
You know, it's got decked out and robes and spangles
and mangles and all sorts of glittery whatnots, and these
mohoots or these elephant trainers come out there with them,
and then they roll out the soccer ball and the
elephants play soccer, you know. And then they bring out
the paints and the easels and the elephant's paint pictures.
They've been taught how to paint a picture. And or
then someone will volunteer from the crowd to come out.
(19:52):
Someone will go out and the elephant will give it
a quote unquote massage where the person lays down the
elephant and take its big giant foot and kind of
tap along the back of the person, and the elephants
will dance and they'll spin around and they'll just do
all sorts of stuff. And then after the show's over,
we just kind of wander backstage go to the elephant
enclosure area. When someone says, well, what are you doing?
(20:14):
We explained, and we have a woman there working with us,
traveling with us, who's serving as our interpreter. Her name
is b. B explains that these are these two Western
businessmen starting a zoo in Guangzhou. They want to see
the elephants, and people say, oh, yeah, have a look.
So we go back and we there's these eleven elephants
in this enclosure and there's a guy back there who's
(20:34):
training them. So we watch this guy teach an elephant
how to shoot baskets with a basketball. We start talking
to him at length and he starts telling us, oh, yeah,
you know, these elephants came from this place, in this place,
in this place. Not only that, we developed a relationship
with this guy going forward, and we were able to
learn things like, for example, as I pointed out earlier,
(20:54):
it's illegal to sell an elephant a Laosian elephant to
export it out of the country. So what was happening
was false lease papers were being drawn up and it
was being made to appear that these elephants would be
least to this zoo in China for ten years or whatever.
But in fact this guy was able to tell us that, Yeah, basically,
(21:15):
that's all bullshit. Like you know, when you fork over
your twenty thousand or eighty thousand dollars for your elephant,
that's it. You know that elephant's not coming back.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Wait, it's legal to lease an elephant, but not to
buy one. I think that's weird.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
I think that's the case.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
That's a weird loophole. Yeah, of elephant buying. Yeah, then
you travel to Boten, which is a town in Laos
right on the border with China. And why are you
going there?
Speaker 2 (21:43):
We're told that Boten is the crossing point these elephants
are being shipped out of the country. And what we
learn is that sometimes these elephants travel by truck out
of the country and they actually go through the Laotian
and then the Chinese border agents, and you know, through
fake documents and such, they can get the elephants out.
Other times when that isn't an option for whatever reason,
(22:05):
these mohoots will walk walk, you know, trains of elephants
through the bushes, kind of around the proper border crossing.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
What is that city?
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Like, Boten is a crazy, crazy place. At one point
it was a gambling mecca. It was, you know, kind
of a red light district and all these Chinese tourists
would go there and it thrived for a while, but
then I think someone got killed and there was a
bunch of fishy stuff and then it kind of died
as a town. But when I arrived, new Chinese money
(22:38):
was coming into it, but it was very much a
wild West place.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
It's like the Nevada of totally of the East. Like
if you have a lot of money in China and
you want a crazy bachelor party weekend, you go to
Post exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
And so when I went there, there was a lot
of unoccupied tall buildings. There was like no one in
the town, but building was happening like crazy. There was
cranes all over the place, earth movers they were blowing
up hillsides to create flat space. I mean there was
just dust everywhere. And in the midst of all this,
(23:11):
there was this one theater that Chinese tourists would come
over in buses and go to this show and it
was a drag show. This place was called Club Excellente.
It had neon and you know, it was just kind
of this really sad looking place.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Did you go to the show?
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Oh yeah, I did go to the show.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
I did go to the show. I have to go
to the show.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
In the parking lot of clubex the very large parking
lot of Club Excellente, there's two elephants basically living in
the parking lot. There's a male elephant and a female elephant.
So late in the day, the mahout goes into the
patch of forest to get his elephant and he walks
those two elephants back and what he's that half mile
(23:55):
there's just dump trucks and earth movers and they're literally
making explosions, these construction crews to blow up these hills
to create flat space to build more buildings. So these
poor two elephants are walking across this moonscape of red
destroyed earth. And they come back and they get to
(24:15):
the parking lot and the hoot sort of chains their
their them by their feet to the parking lot and
then you know it's dusk. These Chinese buses arrive, they
disgorge all these tourists. The tourists are happy, you know,
they're getting their photos taken with the elephants. The drag
queens come out and they you know, they're entertaining the
these Chinese tourists. And and then at a certain point
(24:38):
it's time for the show. So everyone goes inside for
the show, the drag show, and for two hours. And
then when they come out, it's dark. Uh, someone builds
a bonfire, and then you know, there's dancing and techno music,
and then there's these giant conga lines that are whinding
around the parking lot, whining around the elephants. I mean,
it's just completely insane. And these two poor elephants, these
(25:01):
are two wild creatures and they're having to live like this,
and so the elephants are there as a further means
to entertain these these these Chinese tourists.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
So at this point, are you still undercover as elephant buyers.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Carl had said to me, you're going to meet the
mahout whose family owns these two elephants living miserable lives
in this parking lot of a drag show. If you
get an opportunity, I want you to talk to this
guy about buying those two elephants so that we can
have them move to the Elephant Conservation Center and allows
(25:34):
to live a better life.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
What how crazy? What do you what's your reaction to that?
When he asked you to buy an elephant or two elephants?
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Well, you know, it was just there had been you know,
we had just done this whole undercover thing and you know,
I don't know how spies do it, man, but you know,
so for him to actually ask me to do that, yeah,
it seemed a little weird, but it did seem any
weirder than anything he and I had done to that point.
And it certainly didn't seem anything weirder than I had
(26:03):
already seen in all these Chinese zoos, and as I said,
I was at at least three of them, and then
when I got to ten and saw what these elephants
were living through, it made perfect sense that if someone
needed to buy these elephants and get them out of there.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
So you're talking to this mahoot about trying to buy
these two elephants from him? What's the asking price for
an elephant?
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Like?
Speaker 1 (26:27):
How high were you allowed to bid.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
The mahoot wanted one hundred and ten thousand dollars for
the elephants.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Is that kind of the normal elephant price? You know?
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Working on the story, I saw prices for elephants ranging
from twenty thousand dollars for an adult male to two
hundred thousand dollars for a much prized elephant calf.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Oh the babies go for more.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, because you can teach them more tricks.
They're going to live longer. So yeah, the babies were
super super important in this, in this illegal trade. You know,
once we realized that the guy was open to it,
then Carl got with the guy and began the real
work of the deal, and then it came you know,
then we started the gofund me page. I was at
(27:12):
the very the very beginning, is Paul, you're going to
bout ten ask this guy if he would tell me
of these elephants.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
That's kind of you're more of an elephant broker, really, I'm.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
An elephants middleman, Joel, get it right.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
But Carl pulled this off, like he raised the money
or paid for part of it. He moved them into
the elephant conservation center where you started. That's right, right,
every part of this story is shocking. I know so
little about the world.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Paul Kevint, a two time guest, you wrote, I bought
an elephant to find out how to save them for outside.
Thank you for having the guts to return after what
we did to you the first time.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Well thanks, Joel. Yeah, yeah it did. It did request
some bravery on my part.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yeah, I've learned to be nicer a little bit. I'm
worried that we've been unfair to Chinese zoos. To clarify,
let me just say that American zoos are horrible places too,
not just the small local tiger king joints, but our
major La San Diego zoos too. They're so awful for
(28:19):
the animals there that a huge portion of the animals
are actually given antidepressants every day, Like more of the
animals there than the human beings who are in La
and San Diego. If you want to see animals, just
go see them in the wild or the poultry section
from the Acme supermarket in Wilmington, Delaware. I really did
(28:40):
learn nothing from Peta.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
At the end of the show, what's next for Joel Stein.
Maybe he'll take a nap poker Round Online.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Our show is produced by Joey fish Ground, Mola Board
and Nishavenka. It was edited by Lydia jen Kapp. Our
engineer is Amanda kay Wang and our executive producer is
Catharinald Cherradah. Our theme song was produced by Jonathan Colton.
A special thanks to my coach Vicky Merrick and my
consulting producer Laurence Alasnik. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen
(29:15):
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your podcasts. I'm Joel Stein and this is story
of the week. How much would an elephant that can
fly go for?
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Fly like a seven forty seven on its way to
Dubai and I'm more like Dumbo. Yeah, you're probably looking
at a few million for that.
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