Postcards from Thailand #32: If You Pay Peanuts...
How could your weekend possibly be complete without seeing a photo of some monkeys in a petrol station?
Animal lovers look away or go and pour your coconut oil down the sink in protest as these are two of the infamous 'coconut picking machines' (PETA's words, not mine) who are sent up trees on ropes to throw coconuts down.
A few years back, the UK was up in arms over this practise, and supermarkets took products known to contain coconuts farmed by monkeys off the shelves.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53276071
There are a number of abhorrent animal shows right on my doorstep such as a monkey show, snake farm and elephant riding and these really need to be stamped out. However, as they are still going, it means that mainly Western tourists are still paying the gate money to support them.
As for the coconut picking monkeys, it's a little more complex. Obviously, it would be nice to see the practise ended but there are traditional and cultural values to consider, as well as the livelihoods of subsistence food producers. At this level, no one's getting rich from using monkeys to collect coconuts.
Is this not a case of richer Westerners preaching to poorer, developing nations and forcing their values and practises upon them without having any understanding of the situation?
My point is this. Instead of hollow protests, pay more for your products and help poorer nations develop better and cheaper technology to make the use of animals, such as these monkeys, naturally redundant.
My grandad was a farmer, he used horses to farm the land, the cruel bastard, right up until the time tractors became affordable.
Nobody wants to see animal cruelty, but technology and creativity can fix everything, including the climate!
I Hope everyone is having a great weekend!
This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io
Now is probably not a good time to say how we clean the rain gutters.
Mexicans?
I really need to practice speaking more cryptic.
I really need to be less obtuse with my replies lol
You have a great week and I hope all your projects are coming together :-)
That's the thing isn't it, people won't pay a proper price for things and then like to lecture the people who do things like this about how they should be working whilst refusing to pay a reasonable price.
All the farmers are on the edge of going bust here cos the supermarkets have them locked in to cheap prices that don't cover their costs. They are probably missing all that EU money as well right enough.
Bloody Brits, lol
I've been hearing price controls will eventually make their way to the US as well and that concerns me. Has it gotten really bad by you?
Food inflation has. There are no price controls yet although the Government have asked but not told large corps to reign them in. It is getting expensive just to live from month to month though
Its a real dichotomy between cost to the consumer and fair pricing to supplier, especially if that supplier is just an SME. I don't particularly blame the supermarkets, they are just businesses doing what businesses do, trying to make money for the shareholders and wanting the best possible value for their customers.
There are no answers. Just another one to chalk down to human nature being absolutely contrary!
Human nature being an absurd series of bastardry!!
😅 so all those cheap coconuts are from those monkeys
That is exactly how they are harvested, especially from all smaller gardens and landowners. I was told that they can pull down almost 1000 a day !
You have to stand clear when they're working, they throw them all over the place and a coconut on the head can kill you lol.
Have a great week Mac :-)
damn, that's some profit right there. I saw those signs like " watch out for coconut" when I was walking around Queen Sirikit park. I genuinely miss thailand and I've been getting texts, people miss me too :D I can't wait to go back soon as soon as possible.
Hello :D
Hear hear.
That's all. Right there. What you said. "And we are all responsible". - Smith and Mighty 👍🏻
Now if they managed to get those monkeys to chase enormous spiders away that would be something, huh?
And if I could climb better and weren't afraid of heights I'd apply for that position. Totally.
Congrats on providing Proof of Activity via your Actifit report!
You have been rewarded 74.6405 AFIT tokens for your effort in reaching 5099 activity, as well as your user rank and report quality!
You also received a 0.89% upvote via @actifit account.
To improve your user rank, delegate more, pile up more AFIT and AFITX tokens, and post more.
To improve your post score, get to the max activity count, work on improving your post content, improve your user rank, engage with the community to get more upvotes and quality comments.
Actifit shared its growth plans for 2023 with focus on hive services and integrations. Please vote now for our DHF proposal in support:
Vote on peakd
Vote on ecency
Vote on Hive wallet
Vote via hivesigner
Chat with us on discord | Visit our website
Follow us on Twitter | Join us on Telegram
Download on playstore | Download on app store
Knowledge base:
FAQs | Whitepaper
How to signup | Maximize your rewards
Complete Actifit Tutorial
Actifit supports cross-chain decentralization. Support our efforts below by voting for:
Touching base on your talking about monkeys retrieving coconuts and rich westerners lecturing poor Thai farmers on their practices: I think that westerners kind of need to change their perspective because such as when I was living in Chiang Mai and all the world was coming down on them for the crop burning season and how terrible that is for the environment. It is true that it is terrible for the environment but there is no viable alternative for these poor farmers. It's easy for us to sit back and say "why don't you just use a piece of equipment that was designed for that???" without even stopping to thing that a combine, the likes of which are used in the USA, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Fire is essentially free. If there was legislation banning crop clearing with fire all these farmers would have no choice but to break the law, risk going to jail, or simply give up farming.
The riding of elephants is dying out due to international tourism pressure and this is a good thing. Before I left Chiang Mai I noticed that nearly all of the elephant trekking parks had transitioned to elephant washing parks or simply elephant watching parks.
This is exactly why real travel broadens the mind and gives you new perspectives and insights.
Another example would, of course be the closing of the tiger temple a few years back.
It always amazes me that in the UK, bananas cost roughly the same in the supermarkets as they do in the markets of Thailand!
Really nice to see tour name pop up and I hope life is treating you well still in Vietnam. Best wishes :-)
I was unaware they had closed that. Thank goodness because that place was an animal abuse nightmare and perpetuated by monks of all people.