Elephant Nature Park

Sarah and I have just come back from a life-changing experience: 9 days at a place outside Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand called Elephant Nature Park. The place was just incredible, I could write pages and pages and pages about it, but will try to keep it short and sweet and just deliver the highlights for the sake of my beloved readers.


Ok let me describe the place. Twenty-two elephants (including a couple of really big bulls, three adolescents and a baby), thirty-three dogs (pretty much all strays taken in) and about a dozen cats.

For real info check out the website - http://www.elephantnaturepark.org/index.htm - but here's my (possibly error-ridden) summary:

The place was founded by a truly inspirational Thai woman called Lek who has the biggest heart when it comes to all animals, but especially elephants.

She rescues elephants which have been injured, are sick or simply brutalised from their training and work in Thai elephant camps. The stories about what these elephants have gone through are mind-bogglingly awful and I won't go into them, except to give you an idea. One big male was rendered paralysed (but still conscious) and had his tusk sawn off with a chainsaw deep near the root which apparently is full of nerves and causes intense pain. One beautiful female was deliberately blinded in both eyes at the whim of the owner. Another female was addicted to amphetamines so her owners could work her around the clock, by day taking tourists for rides and by night doing illegal logging.

There are loads of tourist elephant camps in northern Thailand where travellers come in for an hour or so riding an elephant, sometimes as part of a multi-day trek. The problem is that the owners want to get as much out of the elephants as they can for as little outlay as possible so they are completley overworked, underfed (it costs a lot to feed those big boys) and made to work while sick, injured and within days after giving birth. The 'saddles' which tourists ride on them rub and cause infectious wounds which are never given a chance to heal. Plus an elephant's spine is not designed to be weight-bearing and the constant work gives them a lot of pain. The mahouts (the guys in control of the elephants) use wooden sticks with a savage metal hook on the end to dig into the elephants sensitive ears or foreheads.



This is not to mention the "training". The Thai tradition used to break the elephants to be receptive to human commands is a brutal 3-days of being strapped into a tiny crush where the elephant can't move and is constantly beaten and poked with sticks in which nails have been embedded. Some elephants don't survive. We saw a video of it and it was completely brutal.

Anyway I'm going on a bit, but the point is that this is the one place in Thailand where Lek buys all elephants she can get her hands on, no matter what their problems, and gives them a place to just be elephants. They don't do any work, there are no hooks, people don't ride them as a rule, they can just relax and socialise.

If you're ever going to Thailand and want to have an elephant experience I cannot recommend this one highly enough. Why ride on some poor tortured overworked beast when you can spend a day or a week or more hanging out with happy elephants behaving naturally (or as naturally as possible).

That's my rant, next post is about our experience there!