Feeding the Elephants

 

One of the unique opportunities I had while spending time in Chiang Mai was to visit the very popular Elephant Nature Park north of the city.  The park was founded to rescue elephants who have been traumatized, orphaned, or injured.  Elephants have always been an integral part of Thailand, from working in clearing forests to performing for tourists in the city streets of Bangkok.  However, that doesn’t mean the elephants are treated kindly.  In an odd twist of fate, the elephants that bring in so much help to the Thai people are fairly often mistreated, and oftentimes brutally so.

The Elephant Nature Park was created to provide protection and rehabilitation for these stressed and injured animals.  The park currently contains about 60 elephants, some blind, some injured from car accidents, and some orphaned.  A harsh tactic used by Thai elephant handlers to subdue or tame wild elephants is to poke them in the eye when they are not behaving how the handler wishes.  This has led to blindness in some elephants.  Other elephants have been struck by traffic whilst performing in the streets of Bangkok or other cities in Thailand.  One very popular elephant in the park’s population, named Hope, was orphaned when his mother miscarried.  All these elephants now call the park home.

I spent a day visiting the park, which started with a two hour drive from Chiang Mai to the nature park.  During the drive in the minivan our group of eight were shown a documentary about the park and its inhabitants.  The documentary revealed to us the cruel tactics used to make a wild elephant submit to handlers, or mahouts, and the efforts of one courageous Thai woman.  The women, Lek Chailert, spoke out against these actions and ultimately created the park to bring in and rehabilitate the elephants.  In a strong current of Thai opinion and tradition in how to handle elephants, Lek decided to swim against it, one of the few who spoke out and created an international awareness of the plight of these elephants.

We arrived at the park well informed of its mission statement and goal.  We were then given a brief overview of the elephants in the park via pictures and names, as well as the handlers who were helping to bring them back to good health.  Next followed our first feeding of the elephants.

Elephants can eat.  A lot.  A bucket filled with bananas, watermelon, and pineapples constituted one meal.  We fed the elephants by hand, and the feel of their trunks on my fingers was something I’ve never experienced before.  The coarse, ribbed trunk felt oddly similar to a vacuum hose.  It was an interesting sensation for sure.

The park then hosted a buffet lunch for us as we rested before the next big event: giving the elephants a bath.  After lunch we gathered down by the river and watched as the elephants lumbered towards us.  They splashed into the river, we grabbed our buckets, and began to heave water onto the trunks, sides, and backs of these massive animals.  Up close I really got a sense of not just the size but of the ancientness of these creatures.  The cracked and wrinkled skin, the huge feet, the massive trunk, the small eyes.  It felt as if I had stepped back a few million years and into the land of dinosaurs.

I continued to throw bucket after bucket onto my elephant, and she rewarded me by sucking up water into her trunk and then flinging it onto her back, spraying me in the process.  Looking at her face, it really felt like she was happy, smiling at this daily ritual of feeding, cleaning, and bathing.

After the river bathing, we then fed the elephants again (they eat nonstop and they eat barrels of food!), watched as some handlers bathed some of the more aggressive elephants, including Hope, and then we were treated to another hour long documentary regarding the park.  This video showed in much more detail the brutality of the traditional taming of wild elephants by Thai mahouts.  It was distressing to watch, and after personally feeding and bathing elephants that had gone through this torture I felt attached to the park and its efforts.

The day concluded with a final feeding and final farewells to our new elephant friends, and then we boarded the minivan for the two hour trip back to Chiang Mai.  The day at the nature park was one that I will never forget due to the awareness it created in me regarding not only the tight relation between Thais and elephants, but the struggles, and sustained hope that is coming from the efforts of this magnificent park.