Elephant Karma November 2014

Elephant Karma

It seems here in Thailand I’ve landed in a little whorl of elephant karma.  Never have elephants figured so prominently in my life.  Of course, years ago when I worked at Marine World Africa USA some of my friends were elephant keepers so I knew some of their elephants close up and personally.  But really, elephants always scared me, and rightly so.  They are quite capable of killing people and do so, in both captivity and in the wild.  I have always been respectful but admired elephants at a distance.

  

But here in Thailand this trip I find myself immersed in elephants.  Last week I took a train up to Lampang to visit an old Marine World friend and former elephant keeper, Richard Lair.  He moved to Thailand more than 30 years ago to study elephants, helped found the Thai Elephant Conservation Center (TECS) and he is still here, married to a Thai woman.

My day with Richard at TECS was great, and I left totally impressed with the care of their elephants and their commitment to their health and well-being.  In Thailand elephants were long used for transportation and for logging forests but they have since been replaced by roads and modern machinery.  Elephants are long-lived and expensive to maintain, and they need to earn their keep. Now, their only work is in the tourist trade, with some elephant facilities better than others. 

  

The elephants at TECS have a good life.  The fifty plus elephants here, retired from logging, or orphaned in the wild when elephant poachers kill the adults for their tusks, are put in different situations depending on their talents.  Some of them carry tourists on their back for rides.  Some perform in logging demonstrations, or paint   pictures, or play drums in shows for tourists. But none put in more than four hours a day of work, only four days a week. Between shows they are given daily baths in the lake, and fed lots of good quality food. At night they are tethered on long chains out in the forest where they can wander and select their own foods to eat.

 

Some of the elephants here are being taken care of at the elephant hospital.  Three elephants there lost part of their legs to land mines, and are fitted with prosthetic limbs.  Elsewhere two orphaned baby elephants are being taken care of by “wet nurse elephants”, cows whose calves have already been weaned but still have milk, and readily take to a new offspring to raise as their own.

TECS is a government-run facility and the mahouts have an equally good life at the center, working civil service jobs, with their housing provided, and health care, school for their children and retirement subsidies. Elsewhere in SE Asia, at private run facilities this is not the case and both elephants and mahouts are over-worked and “under paid”.

It wasn’t only captive elephants I learned about this trip to Thailand, but wild ones too. I spent a weekend with my friend Sompoad Srikosamatara and his graduate students in a village on the Burma border where wild elephants and humans have had negative interactions including deaths on both sides.

The villagers were moved to this elephant area when their former homes in the valley were flooded by a dam.  The elephants attacked their huts, ate their crops, etc at first, but Sompoad’s students have been helping the villagers devise non-lethal ways to keep them away.  And, the weekend I was there the villagers were holding an “elephant merit-making” festival to help people understand and appreciate elephants and to reward the wild elephants too, with spiritual things like blessings by monks, and practical things like salt licks too. 

The day long festival included people from three different ethnic groups, all living near this village, with the children and most adults dressed in their traditional clothing.  Monks chanted prayers, dignitaries like Sompoad gave talks about elephants, students painted pictures of elephants for a contest, various groups performed traditional dances and songs, women cooked and served lots of their traditional food, all for free, as part of everyone’s “merit making”.

 

At one point we all signed a large piece of orange cloth with our names and good words about elephants and helped tie it on a huge tree.  Later on we all traipsed into the forest to help dig holes and add salt to make a salt lick as a gift to the elephants in an area they frequent with elephant dung to prove it.

I was the only farang (non-Thai) at this festival and felt very fortunate to be there.  I left with a better appreciation for elephants and an even stronger love for the Thai people too!