giraffe women's appearance in danger

“Visit the unusual and exotic Long-Neck Giraffe Women in the jungles of Thailand. They wear numerous brass rings around their elongated necks.”

This is what you can find nearly all the descriptions of organized tours in Thailand purposed by travel agencies. The Karen women, commonly named “giraffe women” live in a kind of village in Thailand.

According to the tradition, brass rings are put around the neck of girls as early as their five years old. Before, dog grease pomade, coconut milk and royal jelly are spread on their neck. Every year, one or two rings are added until the young girl gets married, twenty-eight being the maximum number of rings that they can wear.

The origin of this tradition is still a mystery, nevertheless, several hypothesis are emitted. The first one is that they wear these brass rings in order to protect them from tigers’ attacks when men went hunting. Another hypothesis explains that men wanted to make them ugly to prevent them to marry with men from another tribe and so leaving the village. It can be also explained by the fact it is a way to guard their wealth in place of safety. Many other explanations are possible, like superstitions or beauty criterions.

Contrary to some generally accepted ideas, the neck is not elongated by the rings, indeed those rings rest on their shoulders and as a result muscles and ribs are subsided under their weight. So the vertebras are not separated and that’s why the withdrawal of the ring does not involve their death.

Those women were welcomed, after their escape from Myanmar. In fact, over there, they were persecuted by the uncompromising army, well known by them as rebellious. So they came to Thailand for many of them, and they established themselves in villages that had been given by Thailand government. It seems useless to precise that, in offering them those villages, their first idea was to take advantage of them. Obviously, they had guessed those strange women with elongated necks by a dozen brass rings will satisfy the increasing tourist’s hunger of incredible pictures.

For many years, wearing those brass rings, clearly meant for the Karen women their belonging to the group. And now, this belonging proof is jeopardizing their liberty and moreover, their status of human being.

Today, they are really locked in those villages, such as horses could be put in paddock, and they have to act all the day like models in front of the aggressive flash-lights of the tourists, who paid 250 B (6€) to enter this new kind of “zoo”.
That is the reason why Zember, 21, decided in March 2008 to deny her rings and casted them off.

Zember, 21, without her brass rings.

Although the first generation of the tribe accepted without frustration the idea of being locked in “zoo-villages” because they knew they had got away from the army offensive, the new generation understood that they were humiliated and under-human treating by having this way of life.

Furthermore, Zember explained to a journalist that when they arrived they used to receive a little part of the profits made by the entrance tickets and post-cards’ sells, however it is not the case anymore.

We can easily imagine that this young woman is torn between two opposite feelings when she said to a journalist: “I want to keep my people’s traditions but we are suffering because of those rings.”


Nowadays, it seems more and more difficult to save some groups appearance when they are too marked or too much unusual in the era of globalization, an era of standardization, and paradoxically, with an increasing will of the human to slake their thirst with incredible things. And that is for this reason that, Karen women are isolated in villages, or decide to repudiate their origins: there is no way anymore for them to find a happy medium.

On May 2008, a new village of Karen women has opened in Sattahip, 100 km south-east of Bangkok, despite all the international criticisms. This is a vicious circle, more there are visitors, more they will exploit them.