| Original Message: Sanctuaries for endangered species |
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Hi Rosanna, I was thinking about your comment yesterday. With a group of friends and family I went to pay my respects at the local wat. It's in a small farming village in the foothills of the mountains, and the abbot is a fairly old man with lots of tolerant compassion and a great sense of humour. His monastery and some of the surrounding forest has become a protected area for pangolins, the scaly anteaters that are prized by local people for food and by the vast Chinese market for "traditional medicine" - which in this case, and in many other endangered species, means aphrodisiacs. Anyway, I was sitting outside in the shade and the abbot came over and placed a bundle in my lap, which turned out to be a snoozing pangolin. As I stroked it, it stayed there quite happily for more than an hour, and really filled me with a lovely sense of well-being. Finally, when my leg had gone to sleep, I had to put it down and it loped off into the shrubbery to look for ants. There's a lot of publicity in Thailand these days about the corruption of the monkshood - which is real indeed - but fortunately there are still rural monasteries like this one that serve as sanctuaries, both for pangolins and for wandering writers. All the best, Will All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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