There are a lot of elephants in Thailand, and apparently a lot of them earn their keep by plodding up and down city streets like this one. People buy little bags of sugar cane from the elephant's owner and feed them to the elephant. The elephants know the score: as you approach, it starts nudging you with its trunk, looking for the sugar cane it knows you're going to buy. Once you buy it you're supposed to put one piece at a time into its trunk, but again, the elephant knows the score and puts its trunk directly into the bag.
According to the reading I've done, many of these itinerant elephants are out-of-work loggers. In the past, elephants were used as beasts of burden, dragging felled trees and the like, in the logging industry. However, at some point in the recent past (1980s?) the Thai government realized that Thailand was becoming severely deforested, and put heavy restrictions on logging. This left many, many tame elephants with no work to do, putting their also out-of-work owners in a dilemma. The elephants were too tame to go back into the wild, but it costs a lot of money to feed an elephant, so with neither the human nor the elephant able to get any work logging, it often became impossible for the owners to support their elephants.
Some elephants went into sanctuaries, some (like the ones we've seen, including the one in the picture) became urban curiosities, and some, sadly, were just abandoned. There are organizations (charities? companies? nonprofits? who knows?) that collect money to go towards retraining these elephants to live in the wild. Because elephants live so long, there are still a lot of these former logging animals in Thailand. The one in the picture is fairly small, so Husband thinks it may be the offspring of two logging elephants, too young to have done any work itself. But since I'm lacking a lot of data (when the logging stopped, how long elephants live, exactly, and how big they're supposed to be) I'm not sure if he's right about that or not.
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