Pushkin.
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.
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 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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
Well thanks, I'm glad to be here.
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?
I should have.
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.
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.
How do you even get elephants on an airplane like they would just tear the place up.
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 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.
This is all illegal, illegal under Laosian law or international law.
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 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?
And Laos is like a global hub for wildlife tracking like ivory and rhino horn. It is what is going on with that country.
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.
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?
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.
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.
That's right.
Yeah.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
That's right.
As part of this Buddhist belief, people have thirty two souls, and the only other creatures that also have thirty two souls or elephants.
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?
You know, I've got a lot, Joel, five hundred souls.
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?
These elephants end up at this wonderful place in Laos called the Elephant Conservation Center, and.
This is like a forest somewhere. Can you pay to go there? You can?
You can, Tourists can go, and in fact, they were there when I spent time there.
Well, it's starting to sound a lot like a zoo.
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, 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.
So it's run by this young kind of American woman who's twenty five, and she has this sort of crazy idea right.
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. 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 have attempted in other Asian countries to introduce domestic elephants into the wild, and none of those efforts have really succeeded.
The Queen of Thailand did it, right, That's.
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.
Like attacked people's houses and stuff.
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 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 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 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.
Wait, they like wrap their trunks around the young elephant's penis to see if he is upset.
That's right, that's right.
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.
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?
Like?
Do we not shy that?
I have no idea. My mother certainly didn't do this with me, Joel. If that's what you're.
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?
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.
Okay.
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 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.
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.
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.
Dinner that night.
I mean, these guys are just incredible.
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.
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 you know, I had leeches all over me, and it was it was tough going, that's for sure, all right.
So it goes pretty well. It seems like with the elephants in the conservation center.
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 very good thing. So it went pretty well.
It's like love Islands for elephants.
That's exactly what it is. I should have titled my story love Island for Elephants.
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 this city kun Ming, and you've gone there to go look at a zoo, right.
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 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
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
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 trade from Laos to China of these elephants.
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?
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 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?
If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me that question, you know, no, what's a Chinese zoo?
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 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.
Stick it through.
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 forty tigers would just like descend on this cow. And rip it to shreds. So that's just that that's a Chinese zoo.
Yeah wait, so it's like a zoo, but it's also like an amusement park. What is this?
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.
What's a fancy elephant outfit?
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.
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? 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 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, 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, 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.
Wait, it's legal to lease an elephant, but not to buy one. I think that's weird.
I think that's the case.
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?
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, these mohoots will walk walk, you know, trains of elephants through the bushes, kind of around the proper border crossing.
What is that city?
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 was coming into it, but it was very much a wild West place.
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.
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, 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.
Did you go to the show?
Oh yeah, I did go to the show.
I did go to the show. I have to go to the show.
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 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 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 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 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.
So at this point, are you still undercover as elephant buyers.
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 to live a better life.
What how crazy? What do you what's your reaction to that? When he asked you to buy an elephant or two elephants?
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 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.
So you're talking to this mahoot about trying to buy these two elephants from him? What's the asking price for an elephant?
Like?
How high were you allowed to bid.
The mahoot wanted one hundred and ten thousand dollars for the elephants.
Is that kind of the normal elephant price? You know?
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.
Oh the babies go for more.
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 the very the very beginning, is Paul, you're going to bout ten ask this guy if he would tell me of these elephants.
That's kind of you're more of an elephant broker, really, I'm.
An elephants middleman, Joel, get it right.
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.
Yeah, it's crazy.
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.
Well thanks, Joel. Yeah, yeah it did. It did request some bravery on my part.
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 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 learn nothing from Peta.
At the end of the show, what's next for Joel Stein. Maybe he'll take a nap poker Round Online.
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 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?
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.