Thai Elephants - Urban Giants in Motion

Big, powerful and reliable are the gentle giants of Thailand - Thai elephants.  With a checkered past and shaky future, these precious beasts are worth seeing while you’re in Thailand, and a cause definitely worth supporting. Thankfully, there is a great awareness here to revive their numbers, respect their being and revere their magnificence. 

Work by many is helping to save these gentle giants

The elephant is more than a cultural icon in Thailand - existing since long before the first civilisations when they roamed free, right up to their domestication, where it was realised they could be utilised both for work and war. 

The elephant is a symbol of fortune and believed to carry luck.  Their image featured on early Siamese coins and can be found in abundance on many of the older temples in Thailand.  The red national flag of Siam depicted a white elephant in its centre - the white, or albino elephant, had added importance - deemed so special in the kingdom they became the rightful property of the reigning monarch, which is how they ended up on the flag.

There are three types of elephant in the world today: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant and the Asian elephant (aka the Indian elephant).  The African elephants have bigger ears, bigger build, with a concave back and both males and females have tusks.  The Asian is more hairy than the African - and it’s very coarse to the touch! This may sound logical to you but I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Here in Chiang Mai, there is no shortage of elephant parks for tourists to go and ‘experience’ elephants, but which one to go to?  Personally, I wasn’t keen to ride or watch them paint pictures; I wanted to see them being themselves, so the Elephant Nature Park was my choice.  Situated around 40km north of Chiang Mai, its set up was the dream of one woman, whose mission was to rescue and save elephants and let them live how nature intended, whilst allowing tourists a chance to interact - albeit with minimal contact.  I’m not here to promote any particular elephant park, it’s an individual choice, but I was blown away by what ‘Lek’ has done, and the set up for the elephants she has. 

The elephant parks are becoming more eco-friendly

We got closer to the elephants for bathing time, where we were able to scrub their skin, scoop water over their mammoth bodies and get lots of photos!  There are a total of around 25 elephants here, each with its own keeper or ‘Mahout’ (and many of these guys are ‘rescue’ cases to, having escaped unrest in Myanmar and made their way over the border  and into Thailand), which was great to see.  Tourists learn how to interact and respect the elephants, and there’s absolutely no use of nails or hooks as a form of punishment on the elephants.  Nails or hooks? Yes, apparently that’s how many Mahouts control their beasts. 

This brings me to the more commercial side of elephants.  I learnt a lot during my visit to the nature park. Those elephants you see ‘touting’ the downtown streets of tourist areas?  Well, there is a movement that wishes to stop this, and want cases reported to them, especially here in Chiang Mai.  It is both distressing and dangerous to elephants, they are ‘wild animals’ after all.

While at the Elephant Nature Park we were shown a disturbing video about the taming of elephants.  They are ‘broken in’ essentially, mistreated to ‘break their spirit’ so that man can then rule beast. How?  We saw the footage from a local village – an elephant is shackled and led into a pen, it’s still very young and it cannot move once within the confines of the pen.  It’s then tormented, repeatedly hit, poked, punched etc and not fed or watered until it surrenders – which usually takes around three days.  Another example of mans insidious mistreatment and disrespect for animals, but at least someone is getting this information out into the world.

Elephant and Mahout are working towards a better understanding and more stable relationship

There’s kind of a catch 22 though.  When forestry was stopped in Thailand, there were all these elephants left out of work.  They were tame and used to working full days in the forest, and then they were unemployed.  Great, deforestation is stopped, but what to do with the elephants?  There is now a ‘Mahout Training School’ in Thailand that takes working with elephants very seriously.  It promotes gentleness and understanding from Mahout to elephant, so yet again the message is getting out to give the elephants the respect they deserve.  The elephant trekking, picture painting and any other ‘dollar earners’ keep them fed and watered, but it’s reassuring to know that the education is getting out to the people who are in the need to know. This is very refreshing and very forward thinking… love it.

I am now the proud foster parent of an elephant from the Nature Park.  She was forced to mate with a bull when she wasn’t ready, and her back was broken in the process.  It’s painful to watch her getting around; her big back is bent at a horrendous angle, but she does get around, and she has a ‘friend’ - a bigger elephant who is beside her every step of the way.  There are volunteering opportunities at the park also, a great opportunity to learn elephant!

What a fantastic day out, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit intimidated by the size of these ‘pachyderms’ - but once you get up close to them they seem so gentle.  I was totally captivated by the eyes!! The eyeball looks human, and they have the beautiful eyelashes to match. 

Long live the Thai elephant!

Comments

• dcar says:

  I love this article! Thank you for sharing your experience and for educating us all about what is being done to help these gorgeous creatures!

  2 years ago

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