We started out from our hotel in a big gray van with our tour guide, Zaa, and another American family who was visiting their parents (who live in Pattaya and work for Chevron). We got to the park and were instructed to leave our bags and things on picnic tables on a huge sort of platform building. Around all of the edges of the building was a large metal rail (about a foot in diameter and close to the ground) with a red line painted on the floor about three feet in front of it. Zaa asked us to stay behind the line when the elephants came up to feed, just in case one of them tried to grab any of our things. Sure enough, a few of the elephants were walking by and nosily stuck their huge trunks over the rail, searching for handouts. Zaa had a couple of bananas on hand, so we offered them to the elephants. At the time, this was astounding and really fun and amazing, but we had no idea how much closer and more intimate we would be getting to them in the next two days.
The Elephant Nature Park was started in the late 90s by Lek, which means "small" in Thai. She's a one woman dynamo. She was the granddaughter of a tribal shaman, and when she was five, someone paid her grandfather with an elephant (can you imagine). She says she's loved elephants ever since, which is why she's trying to save them from the horrors of circus life, working in harsh villages, and begging on the streets. Elephants used to be used as war machines in Thailand first, then were used for logging, which was very hard and brutal work. Logging was banned in 1985, though, so now elephants are used almost exclusively for tourism. That means that elephants, who have absolutely no protection in Thailand because they are classified as "livestock," no longer live in the jungle. The number of elephants in Thailand in 1900 was 100,000. Now, that number is 5,000, and that includes both domestic and wild elephants.
Lek is trying to teach people that elephants and tourism can be more humane. Visit her site at www.saveelephant.org and www.elephantnaturepark.org. She's truly an amazing person.
As we walked around the park, which is 300 acres of twisting river, trees, huts, and open fields, we were better able to survey the scenery and the elephants themselves. The park's 300 acres is nestled in a valley surrounded by mountainous jungle on all sides. The river that runs through the park provides water for the elephants and also several herds of water buffalo and cows that Lek has rescued from farmers who had no more use for them. The buffalo and elephants wander about the fields in seeming harmony, making Lek's sanctuary seem more "Animal Planet" than ever. From the sanctuary, we could see neighboring farms, which grow bananas, lychee, sugarcane, pumpkin, watermelon, squash, among other things. It's important for the elephants not to cross the river or the other boundaries of the park and get into the farmers' crops, especially since all of those things are tasty food for them. Other elephant camps (the touristy kind) keep their elephants on their own land by chaining them up all day. Lek has a different plan: each elephant in the sanctuary is assigned her own "mahout," which is a man who follows the elephant around all day and watches her, makes sure she is well, and keeps her on the sanctuary land. Lek does not approve of the harsh training methods called the "pujong" which involve pointed metal hooks and frequent beatings. Instead, her mahouts use positive reinforcement with food and verbal commands to keep the elephants in check. It looked and sounded a lot like training a several thousand pound dog.
Okay, now for the good stuff. As we walked around, we got to meet a lot of the 35 elephants on the sanctuary. They form "families," much like horses form herds. There are families that have two elephants, like Mae Perm and Jokia. Mae Perm was Lek's first elephant rescue. She looks out for Jokia, who came to the sanctuary from a circus. Jokia is blind in both eyes from both the effects of spotlights shining in her eyes and from beatings in which her former handlers shot rocks into her eyes using slingshots. When Jokia first came to the sanctuary, she was scared and couldn't navigate around. Now, Mae Perm leads her everywhere. The mahouts say they haven't been apart since.
There is also the Big Family. Our introduction to the Big Family came when the mahouts leading us around turned toward us and said, "Go back, Go back, Big Family coming." The reason why we had to run out of the way is that the Big Family just got a bit bigger with the addition of a baby girl. She's two months old, and she is sooooo cute (I can't figure out where the exclamation point is on this stupid keyboard, but I would use it now. Also the "z" and "y" keys and several other keys are just randomly in different places). The Big Family consists of the baby, her mother and grandmother, another four year old girl and her mother, and about three "nannies." The family dynamic is amazing. The families are only made up of females and males under six. We were lucky enough to get a chance to see the family defend the baby, which was a.....humbling....sight. When the baby is scared, the older females rush to her aid by surrounding her in a gigantic, impassible circle. She is so surrounded that it's hard to even see her in the midst of the other elephants. The time that we saw her scared was when the four year old boy from another, smaller family was trying to play with the girl and he charged at her too quickly. She got scared and cried for her nannies and they came to the rescue, trumpeting and surrounding her quickly. Mom and sister were feeding a little ways away, but when they heard what was happening, they charged the boy, sending him running back. Let me tell you, I can't really imagine a more impressive sight than a few elephants charging straight at you, grumbling and trumpeting. The ground shakes.
Some of the other elephants we met were Lucky, who liked us so much she followed us around, or one elephant who stepped on a land mine in the jungle. Her foot was partially blown off ten years ago, and she still need antibiotics and dressings from the sanctuary vet every day. Another elephant at the sanctuary stepped on a land mine as well, which is why all the guide books say never to travel unaccompanied in the jungle.
A lot of the elephants are blind in one or both eyes because of trainer cruelty. Apparently stabbing them in the eyes is a preferred method of "breaking their spirits" to get them to do work and obediently follow orders. If the blindness bothers them, you wouldn't know it at the sanctuary. All we saw there were happy, healthy elephants.
The first day, we followed lunch with a bathing ritual at the river. I knew elephants like to cover themselves in mud and dirt as sunscreen and to stay cool, but I didn't know that they need to be bathed every day to clear it all off. Their skin, though thick, is extremely sensitive, and the mahouts are careful to clean away all traces of flies and mud to keep it clean and healthy. It was pretty cool to throw buckets of water on the elephants, who were clearly loving it.
That night, we stayed in a raised hut that was really nice. It was open at the rafters and our beds had mosquito nets. The only thing that prevented me from sleeping were the piercing cicada shrills and the howling packs of dogs (forgot to mention that Lek also rescues cats and dogs: there are currently 400 dogs on the sanctuary).
The second day was wayyyy cooler than the first. We got to go out with our second mahout, Tony, to sit on a raised mahout platform. The Big Family, which we were told usually stays away from tourists, surrounded the platform and we got to even pet the baby (pretty much unheard of for strangers) from the (relative) safety of underneath the tree platform. Forgot to mention that the platform was built in-around a tree. The elephants like to scratch themselves on pretty much anything, and when one decided to scratch herself on the platform, the whole thing shook and moved.
"If platform falls down, we get in tree" said Tony, who explained that the platform had been taken out by an elephant before.
We also watched as one hungry elephant mowed over a fence that we had seen the week-long volunteers rebuilding just the day before. Apparently fence building is a never ending job.
I want to add pictures, but I can't yet because I don't have any on my phone. Go to the sanctuary website to get just a glimpse of what we saw and how amazing this project is. I would really like to get my students involved next year in some fundraising to send the sanctuary (those elephants eat a LOT of food). I'll try to get pics up asap.
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