A Day at the Elephant Sanctuary

Yesterday we spent the day at an elephant sanctuary an hour and a half outside of Chiang Mai. There's a lot of elephant-related tourism here--mostly elephant shows and rides--but there are few laws regulating the treatment of elephants and they're very laxly enforced. So, Jen and I decided to go to a more elephant-friendly place.

The elephant sanctuary is located in an extremely green and beautiful valley, and is home to 34 elephants, most of which had been pretty badly mistreated in their former lives as working elephants. In 1900 there were over 100,000 domesticated elephants, the bulk of which worked in the logging industry. The government banned logging in 1989, however, because deforestation was increasing the severity of monsoon flooding, and most of the elephants were released or soled to Burma (which still has an active logging industry). Today there are about 2000 domesticated elephants, and about 3000 wild in Thailand.

Here's Jen listening to our guide talk about the feeding and diet of the elephants. Most of the elephants eat 2 full baskets (seen on the ground) of fruit and vegetables a day, with varying diets depending on the specific nutritional needs of the various elephants.

Here's an outdoor shot of the valley with a few of the elephants. Even though most of them are unrelated, they've formed 5 family groups in the park. In the afternoon, we saw one family's baby elephant try to nurse from the mother of another family, and get pushed away. (Elephants give birth singly, and mothers only produce enough milk for their single offspring). The baby elephants family immediately charged over and formed a protective circle around the baby. It was quite an amazing interaction to watch.

Here's Jen holding an elephant tooth, which strongly resembles a mill stone. Each elephant has 4 of these. After seeing a tooth up close, it makes a lot more sense how elephants are able to eat the quite rigid sugar cane stalks.

This is one of the rescued elephants. She used to work in illegal logging, but refused to work after she gave birth to a baby which died from neglect. When elephants refuse to work they are generally subjected to painful punishments until they comply. Since elephant skin is so thick, one of the more common methods is to stab or shoot things into the elephant's eyes. This elephant was blinded in both eyes from this process.

Here she is during feeding time. Whenever she could smell food and hear people nearby, she would strike and hold this pose in the hopes that someone would feed her. She was one of the fatter elephants, and Jen and I thought it could well be from her endearing pose.

Though elephants only sleep 4 hours a night, another of the elephants had been given amphetamines by her previous owners and worked 24-hours a day for long stretches. Many of the other elephants' stories were also sad, but all the elephants appeared quite happy on the preserve.

Here's another shot of the lovely preserve. Each elephant has a full-time handler whose job is largely to make sure the elephants don't cross the river and destroy the farmland on the other side. Since tourists (like us) are allowed pretty much unrestricted access to the elephants, their job is also to monitor tourist interactions with their particular elephant for safety reasons. All of the animals on the preserve have been previously domesticated, and only a few of them were deemed unsafe to be close to tourists.

In addition to the tourists who come for the day-long tour, other tourists say for a 3-day, week-long, 6-month long, or year-long "working" vacation in which they help in the daily running of the preserve. Here are a number of these long-term volunteers playing in the mud pit after the elephant cleaning.

In the afternoon, we got to help with the cleaning of the elephants. They went into the river and we followed. We both (elephants and humans) covered them with water and scrubbed their bodies down. Here's a few shots of that...

Jen and I made friends with an awesome veterinarian from Australia who was also on the tour (and had come up for the weekend from her veterinary conference in Bangkok for the purpose). Here they are contrasting US and Australian politics along with one of the elephants who is using the walkway support as a scratching post.

And a final shot of one of the long-term volunteer houses on the preserve.

In addition to the 34 elephants, there were over 50 dogs, 50 cats, a handful of cows and a few handfuls of water buffalo. Most of the dogs and cats lazed around the volunteer houses and tourist entrance and were extremely friendly. Everyone there, humans and animals, seemed to be having a great time.

One last note. Lunch was a delicious buffet of 20 vegetarian Thai dishes! Though it was certainly more expensive than a lot of the other tours we could have taken, it was definitely worth it.