Tuesday, January 26,2010
Me and 6 month old baby Chang Yim
Today I spent an amazing day at the Elephant Nature Park. It's a 2000acre healing, rehabilitation and rescue sanctuary for Asian Elephants rescued from years of abuse in the streets begging, logging or tourist trekking to live out their days in freedom. It is about 60km north of Chiang Mai. I had such a fun day and it was so incredible to feed and bathe in the river with them and interact with the cute, playful 6 month old babies.
Me and Mae Perm She is over 80!
FFeeding Lilly, an e-logging elephant. Drugged with amphetamines to the verge of death so she could work around the clock... she came to the park drug addicted.
Giving Jokia a bath! Jokia was a logging elephant. Forced to work up to the minute she gave birth she delivered her calf on the top of a hill. It rolled down and she was not allowed to go find it. It died and she refused to work after that. They stabbed her eyes out with slingshots and arrows to force her to work. She is completely blind. Mae Bern immediately adopted her when she arrived and stays by her side at all time to help her get around.
The Sanctuary's founder, Lek Chailert, is a truly inspirational woman. She has dedicated her life to saving Asian elephants and along with a s
taff of veterinarians and volunteers they treat the emotional and physical scars left on these poor abused animals. Her efforts have been recognised world wide and she is the recipient of many awards. She also runs a medical clinic that travels to remote villages and treats the working elephants and vaccinates the dogs for rabies in her project Jumbo Express. If that's not enough, she fiercely defends the rain forests that are quickly being destroyed by deforestation. Along with nearby monks they disperse into the forests and tie monk blessed cloth around the trees that prevent the villagers from cutting them down...lest they have a life of bad luck. You can see the orange cloth wrapped trees lining the roads out of the park. She is something of a celebrity in these parts but has also received many death threats and once had one of the baby elephants poisoned.
taff of veterinarians and volunteers they treat the emotional and physical scars left on these poor abused animals. Her efforts have been recognised world wide and she is the recipient of many awards. She also runs a medical clinic that travels to remote villages and treats the working elephants and vaccinates the dogs for rabies in her project Jumbo Express. If that's not enough, she fiercely defends the rain forests that are quickly being destroyed by deforestation. Along with nearby monks they disperse into the forests and tie monk blessed cloth around the trees that prevent the villagers from cutting them down...lest they have a life of bad luck. You can see the orange cloth wrapped trees lining the roads out of the park. She is something of a celebrity in these parts but has also received many death threats and once had one of the baby elephants poisoned.Take a few minute to go to the parks website and read some of the stories about the harsh lives of some of the park's rescued elephants. They are heart breaking.
In Thailand, it is estimated that 3800 of it's 5000 endangered Asian elephants are in private hands...mostly used in tourist camps forced to give trekking rides to tourists and forced to beg on the streets of the big cities where tourists pay to feed them and take a photo. They are considered livestock and have no rights. The penalty for mistreatment is pennies and not enforced. For a culture that reveres the elephant, worships it and considers it the national animal they do not treat them very well and the numbers are rapidly decreasing. At the beginning of the 20th century there were 100 000 elephants, 10 years ago there were 25000 and now less than 5000....
They are "trained" through torture and extreme abuse. Baby elephants are tr
aumatically torn from their mother's as young as 4 and tortured mercilessly into submission. They are forced into a cage just big enough to hold them and bound by their feet as they scream. Then they are deprived of food, water, sleep and tortured by merciless beatings, being poked repeatedly with sharp metal hooks and shocked with electricity. This lasts for as much as 7 days until they feel it's spirit is broken. Elephants "off duty" are often chained up on short leashes, often in the hot sun, and forced to breed only to have their baby ripped from them to undergo the same torture. Every captive elephant in Asia endures this sadistic ritual and tourists don't realize that the spectacles they're participating is the product of severe animal abuse. The heavy wooded seats you see on their back for tourists to sit on are sitting on the weakest part of the elephants back, this causes pain and eventually debilitating back injuries.
aumatically torn from their mother's as young as 4 and tortured mercilessly into submission. They are forced into a cage just big enough to hold them and bound by their feet as they scream. Then they are deprived of food, water, sleep and tortured by merciless beatings, being poked repeatedly with sharp metal hooks and shocked with electricity. This lasts for as much as 7 days until they feel it's spirit is broken. Elephants "off duty" are often chained up on short leashes, often in the hot sun, and forced to breed only to have their baby ripped from them to undergo the same torture. Every captive elephant in Asia endures this sadistic ritual and tourists don't realize that the spectacles they're participating is the product of severe animal abuse. The heavy wooded seats you see on their back for tourists to sit on are sitting on the weakest part of the elephants back, this causes pain and eventually debilitating back injuries.Simply google "phajaan" to read the gory details. Search it on You Tube...if you dare. We watched a documentary at the sanctuary and the last 10 minutes show a young baby elephant going through this, it was extraordinarily disturbing.
NEVER PARTICIPATE IN ELEPHANT TREKKING OR RIDING, ELEPHANT TOURIST SHOWS THAT MAKE THEM PREFORM TRICKS OR GIVE MONEY TO THE MEN USING THEM AS BEGGARS ON THE CITY STREETS.
My day at the elephant nature park involved volunteering with the feeding, learning about the elephants/ hearing their stories and walking along with the elephants to the river to bathe with them...No riding, No tricks. The tourism dollar that comes to the park pays for food, medical care, and goes toward buying abused distressed elephants from their "owners" to live in the park... The sanctuary costs Lek over $250 000 a year to run and is run entirely on donations.
ELEPHANT TRIVIA
Elephants are known to be intelligent, emotional animals that have extremely strong social bonds between mother's and offspring and complex social bond with each other.
They are a lot like humans in that they live 70 years or more, reach puberty at 13 or 14, can have babies until age 50, have single calf's.
Elephant cry when they are sad...and can laugh and smile.
Elephants are extremely smart, putting them on par with other sophisticated animals like dolphins. Like primates, they play with objects found in their environment, use sticks to scratch themselves or shoo away flies and elephants have used large rocks to short circuit electrical fences.When a member of the herd dies, the other elephants will gather around and touch the body with their trunks, they will watch over the body for days making mournful sounds with their trunks and only leave for food...they will show the same act of mourning for humans too. You've heard the line "elephants never forget"... it's true, elephants have an extraordinary memory. When migrating over hundreds of miles of grassland they will collectively pause over the spot where a family member died and even visit the graves regularly and make sounds of mourning. If there are bones they will all touch skull bone with their trunks. Most animals only show a passing interest in dead remains of their own species. Read this story about a death at the sanctuary.
They communicate both verbally and with body language, they can hear lower frequencies than humans and sense vibrations from miles away with their hypersensitive feet that they can send and receive messages with.
The strongest case for elephant intelligence is that they recognise themselves in the mirror indicating that they have a high sense of self awareness, an elephant with a smudge on it's face will try to wipe it off. Like humans, elephant brains are born at 35% of their adult weight and grow over 10 years giving them lots of time to acquire knowledge, they depend more on learned behaviour than instinctual behaviour for survival...making elephants and humans unique in the animal kingdom.
They live in tight family units run by an older female. The men leave the herd at age 14 or 15.
The 33 elephant herd at the sanctuary has split off into 5 different family groups. There are elephants that are best friends and spend all their time together, and adoptive mothers and aunties for the orphaned calf's.
Feeling charitable? Click HERE to donate to Lek's amazing rescue sanctuary. $10.00 buys food for one elephant for 1/2 a day, and $25.00 buys enough medicine to treat an abused or sick elephant for 2 visits.
THE END...ha ha
