The Asian water monitors, omnipresent fixtures sunning themselves at Lumpini Park, just crawled out of legal limbo and into economic opportunity. The Department of National Parks has lifted these prehistoric reptiles from decades of commercial prohibition via a Royal Gazette announcement. While still under the watchful eye of wildlife conservation, water monitors can now be legally farmed for commercial purposes – their skin supple as fine leather, with a finesse worthy of haute couture, driving an entirely new economic sector.
The rule is you can breed them but only at licensed hatcheries. No wild capture. No bare-handed snatching from the wild. Each one gets a microchip, a barcode beneath the skin. They’re not trophies, not to be hunted as prey, but to be handled as important national economic assets.
But this eco-entrepreneurship of water monitors settles into an ethical grey zone, rooted in wildlife-to-wardrobe capitalism. The fashion world knows intimately how to romanticise skin, call it exotic leather, ship it to Milan, shoot it in monochrome. Yet many see that beneath those arm candies was a living creature, once breathing air. This thrums with the weight of extinction, survival and the strange tension between power and preservation.
Water monitors were originally only ‘tolerated’ as urban scavengers. Acting like low-key park janitors, they helped clean the city and control pests naturally. But when their numbers exploded to an estimated 400 giants, some reaching three metres, they began disrupting Lumphini’s ecosystem (devouring fish and eggs, crushing flowerbeds underfoot, snatching joggers and cyclists in a blur). They immediately went from helpful squatters to pests.
The Asian water monitor became Thailand’s 63rd approved farming species, no less glam than the swiftlets’ cave-to-cup operations – those architects of elusive bird's nest soup. This is all probably to meet Asia’s insatiable appetite through farming instead of raiding the rare and coveted. Thailand seems to be reading the room in this regard: rather than criminalizing the obsession, they regulate it.
