Elephants, elephants, elephants...

Elephants. I just can’t get enough of them!

Last week Laura and I traveled up to Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand. On the top of our list of things we wanted to do was spending time with elephants. We went to the tourism ministry and asked about what we could do with elephants. They described to us many one day treks into the mountains that involved a one hour elephant ride as well as visits to “elephant camps” where tourists can both ride them and watch them perform in shows. We also heard about a conservation center listed in the Lonely Planet guide that offered mahout courses and shows.

But we didn’t book anything. We just had a gut feeling that nothing sounded quite right. Then we found out about the Elephant Nature Park. The park is a sanctuary for 32 elephants and allows them to just be animals. No shows. No rides. But the day at the park includes feeding and bathing the elephants. We signed up for it even though the cost was a lot more than the other options because it just felt right.

It was one of the best days of my life.

We rode to the market in a little van with only 6 other people and helped load what seemed like several tons of bananas, watermelons, cucumbers and sugar cane into trucks. Then we drove about an hour into the mountains and entered…well, Amanda heaven.
Elephant Nature Park is located in this lush green valley surrounded by mountains and tropical fruit trees with a sparking river running through it. There are several tree house type huts located in the park for the mahouts and volunteers to stay in and a main building with showers, an eating deck and porches running around it from which the elephants are fed breakfast.

We spent the entire day with elephants. Watching them roam through the valley, snacking on grasses, playing with their babies, spraying themselves with dirt. We were lead all day by a woman who leads the tourists and who herself came as a volunteer 4 years ago and stayed. Her husband is now a mahout (an elephant caretaker/trainer.) She explained to us about how many tourists take elephant rides and go to elephant shows but don’t know the pain inflicted on the elephants. The elephants have 5 different shapes of spines but the platform that holds the tourists for rides is only one shape and can damage the back of an elephant. To get the elephants to follow directions the mahouts are trained to use this sharp metal spike that they stab into the elephant’s forehead. We saw the marks and scars on the elephants at the park… They claim it doesn’t hurt them but anything that can get a several ton elephant to obey a human must hurt to some extent. The worst part was learning about the way that elephants have their spirits broken in a centuries old tradition/ceremony which begins their training. We watched a video of this that was made public, I think by Nat’l Geographic, in 2002. It shows the trainers stabbing the elephant’s eardrums, burning her, tying her into a cage and depriving her of sleep, food and water, etc. They do this for days until she is so upset and scared she will either go crazy or

become more docile. Many elephants die during this ceremony. The crazy ones have to be put down. The rest become the frightened docile creatures that roll logs

and paint pictures for tourists. It was horrifying. Elephants are not only wild animals that deserve to be treated with respect they are also these amazing social and emotional creatures who will remember someone for their whole lives. They are capable of remembering the hunter who killed their mother as a baby and taking revenge on that person 25 years later. They are capable of burying (!) their dead. There are stories of elephants saving the lives of other species for purely altruistic reasons. They cry real tears. They celebrate birth with wild abandon and the elephant version of a party. They create life bonds with others and live in close family groups. They are intelligent and awe inspiring. In America we would condemn the treatment of such intelligent life if this were happening close to home. And yet we freely travel to Thailand and jump to take these ridiculous and boring one hour rides without a second thought to how in the world these beautiful creatures have been trained into such submission.

The Elephant Nature Park is amazing. It provides a refuge for elephants who have been beaten, blinded, backs broken. The elephants are cared for and allowed to roam free except when they are chained in family groups at night so they won’t cross the river into other people’s lands. They bond together and create new families of moms, aunties and babies. The males are more independent. They are huge and fascinating and wild. Even though we got to feed them breakfast from the deck of the main building and bathe with some of them in the river, we still had to be careful to avoid swiping trunks and reckless babies and adolescents. At no time were we encouraged to pet them and treat them like big pets. The guide walked us around the park and explained a lot of the cases and personalities. Also on the land are 36 dogs, 20 cats, some cattle and a veterinarian! It really felt like heaven. I hope my photos reflect that!

If any of you have a chance to do an elephant activity in Asia please consider rejecting the commercialized rides and shows. We don’t accept that kind of treatment of the African elephant-we accept that it is a wild animal to be observed and cherished from afar. So why do so many well meaning people willingly hop onto Asian elephants without asking any questions?