One of the reasons for selecting Thailand as a vacation destination was my desire to interact with elephants. I was told that Thailand was the place to experience them, and I even joked that I was looking forward to spending time with an animal I wasn’t too fat to ride. But when an opportunity presented itself for me and my wife to visit an elephant sanctuary, I didn’t know if I was brave enough to see elephants crippled and abused by members of my own species.
I finally jettisoned my hesitation and we made the visit. At an elephant nature park 60 km north of Chiang Mai, I saw my first Thai elephant, and began my fascinating yet painful education of these magnificent creatures. At the dawn of the twentieth century there were approximately 100,000 elephants in Thailand. There are now fewer than five thousand. Elephants were used to supply the world’s unquenchable desire for teak. Then in the 1980s the timber industry was outlawed in Thailand to preserve remaining forests. Elephants no longer had jobs and most were sold to vendors for the tourist industry. These elephants were expensive to maintain and not always treated well.
In the 1990s, an elephant nature park was created as a sanctuary for rescued elephants. Here, the animals were allowed to live much as they would in the wild. Sticks were no longer used to punish elephants that didn’t obey human commands. Instead of corporal punishment, only positive reinforcements in the form of food treats were used. For an abused elephant, this must have seemed like heaven.
Before coming to the park, one of the elephants had been sold to someone who beat her terribly. When she became pregnant and gave birth, her owner wouldn’t let her tend to her baby and it died. Depressed, she refused to follow commands. The frustrated owner took a sharp stick and blinded her. The nature park came to the rescue, purchasing her for three thousand dollars and bringing her to the sanctuary. Another female elephant, a longtime park resident, stepped away from the herd to greet the new arrival. Exploring the stranger with her trunk, she soon discovered the damaged eyes, bellowed, and entwined her trunk around the blind elephant as if to say, “I’ll be your eyes.” The two have been inseparable for ten years.
We were afforded an opportunity to watch several elephants being treated for injuries, as well as experiencing them doing what they enjoy most, bathing in the river. Buckets were passed out allowing us to toss water at them, but elephants are bigger than I’d imagined and throwing a bucket of water high enough to reach their backs was challenging. My wife must have had trouble distinguishing me from an elephant because she doused me with more than one bucket of water. Experiencing these gentle giants playing in the water like children was exhilarating.
There were approximately thirty-five elephants at this park, mostly female. It didn’t seem like that many elephants until we started feeding them—those guys could pack it away. The boys like to fight with the females—and often lose. They’re kept separate, but not always. Babies are born at the park. At the conclusion of our stay we traveled to a section of river where two females guarded the park’s newest resident, only three months old. One of the adults was injured in Myanmar when a buried land mine blew off her rear foot. In spite of her ability to hobble about, she wasn’t doing well. Then the other elephant gave birth and recruited the crippled elephant as a nanny. Now the injured elephant has a job and the two adults are happily raising the baby together.
Visiting an elephant sanctuary was thrilling yet humbling; I couldn’t help feeling guilty for the abuse heaped on these magnificent creatures. I never got my elephant ride, but I did receive strength to step outside travel brochures, to avoid cliché photo opportunities and discover a more honest reality. This experience made me feel as brave as a superhero, ready to spread the word that we all need to be better caretakers of our planet and all its inhabitants, even if it means denying chubby tourists like me from getting that ride.
Thank you for reading and commenting. Please enter the Inspiration Travel Writing competition and tell your story.
