The visitor then produced a red banknote that looked like a Rp 100,000 bill and offered it to the animal. The pachyderm used its trunk to take the money, but this time, passed it on to the mahout on its back, who kept the money for himself. 

The domesticated, well-trained elephant certainly deserved a round of applause for its ability to distinguish the edible from the inedible. Its human rider, however, wasn’t able to differentiate between the permissible and the forbidden.

If the mahout’s basic salary was last year’s West Java monthly minimum wage of Rp 1,420,642, a Rp 100,000 banknote would account for 7 percent of his wages. 

Should the money be considered additional income he is rightfully entitled to outside of his salary? Should he return the money to PT Taman Safari Indonesia CMB, the company that employs him, because he wouldn’t have received the money if he hadn’t been in the company’s employ? The visitor had put him in a sticky situation.

This was not the first time a visitor “fed” an elephant money, which might inspire other visitors to imitate the behavior.

Christian Joshua Pale of Animals Hope Shelter posted video clips showing similar incidents on Instagram, which was covered by online media.

The clips show, among others, a young Indonesian woman handing a banknote from the backseat of a car to an elephant strolling along between cars. She exclaimed excitedly that the elephant’s trunk touched her hand when it took the money. 

Conversations heard in the clip suggested the money was a Rp 2,000 bill — a far cry from the foreign visitor’s suspected Rp 100,000. Whatever the amount, however, their behavior reduces the elephant, and its keeper, to mendicancy.

The park’s official response was that no employee was allowed to demand or accept tips from visitors. Understandably, if tips were allowed, chances are that the park’s employees might be tempted to get as many tips as possible from visitors.

“The mahout has been sanctioned,” Jansen explained on the last day of the visit with Environment and Forestry Ministry officials.

He was pondering the propriety of equipping mahouts with a donation box for collecting money from visitors. “That would be wonderful, wouldn’t it? The money could be used for, say, promoting the welfare of Sumatran elephants in the Way Kambas Elephant Conservation Center,” he said. Jansen, however, added that “careful deliberations would be needed” to weigh the benefits of such an idea.

Jansen’s purpose for showing the video clip was to highlight the delicate situation that might arise from such incidents, especially given today’s information ecosystem fueled by social media. This manmade ecosystem was rife with misleading, polarizing and manipulated information that is often accepted at face value without critically questioning the logic behind them, nor checking and rechecking their accuracy.

Apparently, the foreign visitor was amusing himself by offering money to the elephant to see what would happen. Yet, by doing so, he might have inadvertently made the mahout think that he was using the elephant to give a tip. 

“Which may lead foreigners to think Indonesians are prone to bribery and corruption,” Jansen expressed his fear. Indonesia ranks 90th on Transparency International’s 2016 Corruption Perceptions Index, so the footage won’t be doing any favors for the country’s image. 

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