by Dr. Iain
Corness
Martin
Smith is Mein Host at the Old Speckled Hen Pub in Jomtien, and a man who
has spent more than half his working life working with elephants. That
includes such backbreaking work as shovelling elephant poo! He is also a
man who managed to sell elephant poo souvenirs for profit.
His father was in the Commandos and the family lived a
nomadic existence, with postings all over the world, including a stint in
Singapore, a country that stuck in the memory of young Martin, with the
heat and the smells conjuring up all kinds of excitement.
After returning to the UK, schoolboy Martin was unsure
where he was heading career-wise, but his biology teacher knew, informing
Martin’s mother that he would work for a Safari Park. As he grew older,
his father tried to interest him in the Services, but by that stage Martin
also knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to work with animals.
He followed the biology teacher’s idea and began
knocking on safari park gates. The knocking was partially successful and
he was promised an interview with the Royal Windsor Safari Park when he
was 16. At 16 years he presented himself, only to find that they had upped
the age for their personnel to 18. To fill in the two years he went to
Agricultural College where he immediately said he wanted to work in the
dairy and pig units. There, one of his jobs was to put the rings through
pig’s noses. “It’s to stop them rooting and digging,” said Martin
after I showed my ignorance of porcine jewellery! And apparently pigs are
nice gregarious animals.
As soon as he had turned 18 he was back at the gates of
the Royal Windsor Safari Park. They rewarded his devotion by giving him a
job. He had always dreamed of working with tigers and cheetahs, but was
thrown in at the deep end with elephants, that being the only vacancy.
“From there I never looked back,” said Martin. “After that I
didn’t want to work with any animals other than Asian elephants.”
He was still very young and had dreams of one day
becoming a game warden in the Serengeti. However, reality was much removed
from that. “I was really a security guard in a safari outfit, making
sure the customers stayed in their cars, and the animals stayed in their
enclosures.”
His next career move was to John Aspinall’s Port
Lympne zoo, a privately run outfit in Kent in the UK. This was an
establishment that encouraged people to get in with the animals. Martin
stuck with elephants, admitting that this was partly because of his poor
eyesight. “With smaller animals I couldn’t see them coming, but
elephants were big enough for me to see them moving!”
Up till this time, Martin was a young lad with no
worries. Life was one round of enjoyments after another. There was no need
to be serious in the UK of the ‘Swinging’ 70’s and 80’s. But that
hedonistic round ended in 1984 when his best friend, another safari
worker, was killed by a bull elephant and Martin found the body. “After
this I became serious about animal husbandry.”
He was then sent around the world by Aspinalls to study
elephant management. This took him to the US, Singapore and Thailand to
study handling methods and enclosures. The answer was total zero handling,
with studies showing that male elephants would look upon the ‘keepers’
as rivals and would therefore eventually attack their adversary one day to
gain supremacy. Martin was called upon to design the elephant enclosure in
the UK, a structure that he remains very proud of, complete with its
hydraulically acting gates.
However, the UK was losing its attraction after he had
experienced life in Thailand, and in 1990 he came over and spent six
months with Phairat Chaiyakham at the Elephant Village just outside
Pattaya, having been sponsored by a charity foundation run by movie stars
Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna. When the sponsored six months ran out,
he was not ready to return to the UK, and worked in an import/export
furniture outlet in Bangkok for 12 months. Even then he had not run away
from his love of pachyderms. The outlet was called The Elephant House!
He returned to the UK to find that there were no
openings for elephant keepers and ended up taking a job as exhibitions
coordinator for Garrards the Crown Jewellers. This involved world travel,
and lugging heavy trays of jewellery, and was a long way from Thailand and
elephants. He stuck this out for more years than he wanted, but he was
working to a plan - a plan to have enough money to set himself up in
Thailand at the end. “I didn’t want to come over here to live on B.
5,000 a month as an elephant bum.”
Five years ago he returned to Thailand, going first to
Nong Khai, looking at running a guest house, gaining some experience in
the direction he could see himself heading. After there it was to Pattaya
where he ran a bar, before finally getting himself set up in the Old
Speckled Hen Pub at Jomtien. There he can also indulge himself in one of
his other loves - motorcycles, and his pub is now a meeting place for all
types of family style motorcycle riders and enthusiasts on Friday nights.
However, he has not forgotten elephants and would like
to get involved in elephant conservation, a field that he believes needs
further involvement from Thai authorities as well as NGO’s. The
elephants on Jomtien Beach Road are just symptoms of the ongoing problem
that the decrease in logging and subsequent lack of work for the elephants
has produced. “Elephants are part of Thailand’s heritage, it’s a
shame that there’s not more being done for them.”
Oh, the elephant poo souvenirs? They cost 5 pounds each
and were mounted! You can ask Martin about them yourself.
