Ceremonial eulogies for soothing white elephants are thought to date back to King Narai's reign. Rewards, however, are favored as the best incentive to good conduct. Each elephant has two mahouts, one of whom is often many kilometers away in Samut Prakhan gathering choice grasses. An elephant may consume over 300 kilograms of grass in a day, a large 30-kilogram basket of bananas and up to six kilograms of sugar cane. Coconuts are a special treat.
Dietary supplements are equally epic.
An experiment with feeding bananas laced with a couple of vitamin and iron pills worked only once before the elephants became aware of the ruse. Unfortunately, the alternative is an annual encounter with a syringe of truly elephantine proportions. The young royal vet is by no means the first to discover the Himalayan nature of doctoring elephants. Wood wrote from experience, having once stitched an elephant wound with gut form a tennis racket. Not all innovations at the royal stables have worked.