The Big Field Trip

From The Big Field Trip – Thailand, February 2010

My family and I just visited Thailand for two weeks. It was a lot different from India because they treat animals a lot differently. Thais keep many different kinds of animals as pets. Some of them are captured from the wild and some of them are bred just to be sold as pets. Thai people kill and eat almost every type of animal. But animals also eat people and give them diseases. There are lots of different relationships between people and animals in Thailand.

Thai people eat the meat from all kinds of animals. The first night we were in Bangkok, we ate at a street kitchen with plastic chairs and tables for people to sit on. They served us steaming bowls of rice noodle soup with slices of pork and fish balls. There were cockroaches under our feet eating the rice noodles that fell from our bowls. A few days later we walked down the same block where we ate the first night, and we saw a man selling fried cockroaches, frogs, grasshoppers, and maggots. People grill meat on skewers like chicken, beef, pork, and shrimp. (Fact: Thailand is the country that exports the most farm-raised shrimp in the world!) They even grill chicken livers and chicken tails. When I went to the beach in Ko Samet, I saw a vendor selling flat squid with writing on it. The man had a grill to cook the squid. He also had a machine to flatten the squid. When he flattened the squid, it looked like cardboard because of the ridges in it. All of the squid he flattened was hanging from a cart that he was pushing. As I walked down the beach I saw a restaurant with a display table out front. It was full of shrimp, squid, crab, fish, horseshoe crab, cockles, and clams. The people in Thailand eat everything!

From The Big Field Trip – Thailand, February 2010

In Thailand, many animals carry sicknesses. Many dogs in Thailand have rabies. If there are 1000 dogs, about 100 of them will have rabies. If a dog with rabies bites a person, then the person could get rabies. Then they would have to get shots in their belly. Ouch! My mom and dad were very scared about the rabies, and did not let us get near any animals that lived on the streets. Every time the sun went down, we had to put mosquito repellent on because there are diseases that mosquitoes carry such as Japanese encephalitis and malaria. Luckily there are geckos on the walls of every single home. The geckoes eat insects (and maybe even mosquitoes). People are very glad to share their homes with the geckoes.

We went to a market called Chatuchak Market, and we saw a lot of different animals for sale as pets. Some of them were endangered. The pet market was huge. It could have taken up 10 city blocks! People shoved their way through aisles full of squawking parakeets in wire cages, lizards climbing fake branches, crocodiles in glass tanks, fish in coral filled aquariums, monkeys in plastic pens, and flying squirrels with collars and leashes to prevent them from escaping. There were kittens mewing, puppies yapping, hamsters sniffing, and rabbits eating pellets. Many of the animals were for feeding other animals. Tiny mice were food for snakes, crickets were for the tarantulas, and beetle larva was for the lizards. There was a clothing store for pets. It sold teeny little skirts for Chihuahuas. Thais are crazy for their pets.

From The Big Field Trip – Thailand, February 2010

I enjoyed going to the pet market because there were lots of different animals that I had never seen. It was like going to a zoo. Some of the animals were captured from the wild, but most of the animals were bred to be sold as pets. It is a good thing when a person buys a pet and takes care of it, but if you buy an endangered animal, the person who sells it will be more eager to catch more and put them in the market to sell. If this happens the endangered species cannot breed, and if more are caught from the wild, they will go extinct. People should not buy endangered animals like jungle birds.

Visiting Thailand was fun. There was lots of good food to eat. There was also a lot of animals to see, mostly pets in the market and on the street.

Tags: 7 Comments