Elephunk

Everyone loves elephants!  I, for one, am quite charmed by those all-in-one, nose/upper lip/finger on the end of a slinky, prehensile trunks.  I’d challenge you to name a more useful and versatile appendage, but it’s about as possible as solving the elephant lotion shortage.  Elephants are the coolest because of their keen long-term memories, abilities of self-recognition, strong and cooperative social groupings, creativity, altruism, displays of grief, and other characteristics of sophisticated intellect.  They’re also matriarchal (elephants: 1; humans: 0), and they practice allomothering to improve females’ mothering skills and infants’ chances of survival.  Smart!  It’s like The Babysitters’ Club Super Special Number Elephant:

Our ele-love can be explained by the same human egotism that makes us love dogs, dolphins, and apes.  Oh, look, they’re awkward smoochers.  They really are just like (some of) us!

We’re so enamored with our similarities to them that we keep them readily available for gawking, confined and constrained in zoos, circuses, and other attractions without, ironically, managing to find much compassion for their obvious and profound suffering in confinement.  We know their needs simply cannot be met in these environments, but we just can’t stop ourselves from rewarding the perpetrators of cruelty and neglect with our money.  Sometimes their endangerment even creates a bizarre demand for their demise, like when rich people decide that bluefin tuna is really tasty or when sea turtle eggs boost virility.

Elephants have great symbolic importance in Southeast Asia.  Representations of elephants are seen on everything, from temples to beer cans.  You know, drinking Chang beer brings good fortune and wisdom to so many people; think of all of the great speeches, pick-up lines, and decisions that are made with its influence!

Their strength, intelligence, and gentle nature has made them quite handy to people.  Wild and domesticated elephants were used historically for pageantry and war, and more recently, in logging and tourism.   Habitat loss from encroaching humans, demand for ivory, tropical wood, elephant rides, and baby elephant ogling, and a penchant for crop nibbling have made life difficult for them. 

People looking to make a profit from elephants either snatch babies from the jungle, often killing their mothers in the process or take babies from mothers already in their possession.  The well exposed, but continually denied-by-governments process of “the crush” ensures that elephants will grow up obedient.  The crush involves caging and chaining young elephants so they cannot move, depriving them of food and water, and beating them into submission with hooks, canes, and nails.  After elephants are trained, they end up on city streets and elephant camps, doing tricks and begging for fruit from tourists. 

While the vast majority of elephant attractions in Thailand promulgate these cruel practices, there are a handful of responsible organizations aiming to help elephants and educate tourists about their circumstances.  While I was in Chiang Mai, I had the fortune of spending two days at the Elephant Nature Park, a sanctuary for injured and distressed elephants.  And when I say fortune, I really mean tear inducing, I-can-die-now, downright magical OMG-ness. 

ENP is run by Lek Chailert, who has received a lot of well-deserved praise for her work on behalf of Thailand’s elephants.  Animal Planet, the US Humane Society, and many others have sung praises of Lek and ENP, but the best coverage to spend your time on is Jennifer Hile‘s National Geographic documentary, Vanishing Giants.

ENP is home to many sweet and quirky ellies with unfortunate pasts.  The suffering of some is obvious, as is the case with the elephant who stepped on a landmine, the elephants blinded by their mahouts as punishment, elephants with fractured pelvises and hind legs from forced breeding, and the newborn who went without milk before arriving at ENP and eventually died after weeks of around-the-clock care. 

For all of the torment these scars represent, the ellies spend their days walking around, swimming to get clean, promptly getting dirty, sniffing things high and low, playing, and searching for and chowing down on pumpkins, bananas, and pineapples.  One of my favorite signs at the park identifies some of the elephants with two photos each: one of their faces and one of their feces.  Apparently elepoop is quite the individual identifier and gives the talented sniffers lots of information about each other.  Elepoop is also known for its unique composition of quite a lot of undigested pumpkin, banana, and pineapple and just a little actual poop, making it a favorite distasteful, but fruity snack of the dozens of dogs who call the park home. 

I spent the two days with three lovely couples and an awesome guide.  We met, fed, and bathed the elephants, competed with lots of confident dogs for a space at the dinner table, and enjoyed all-vegetarian buffets of amazing Thai dishes.  At night, we marveled at the complete blackness of the cloudy sky, the intense motivation of Thai mosquitoes, and the racetrack buzz of frogs who were targeted by hunters’ distant flickering flashlights.  After we went to bed, I struggled to sleep throughout the night- something about giddy reflections on my elephant interactions… or animals crunking on the tin roof… or the escaped, musth-y¹ teenaged boy elephant attempting to grunt his way into a pretty girl’s heart.  Elephants sound like tigers when trying to pick up chicks.

¹Musth is a period of girl-craziness in which male testosterone levels are about 100 times greater than normal… lock ‘em up, elemoms!)

That last part created drama that lasted well into the next day.  The randy elephant, whose attention was wrapped up in his quest for love (His soundtrack: Beastie Boys’ Girls), was not concerned with the mahouts’ efforts to get him back in isolation.  He even tore down a shelter with his trunk to show them his insouciance, but was eventually separated to leave the “unreceptive” girls in peace (New soundtrack: Eric Carmen’s All By Myself, with credit due to Rachmaninov, whose lonely melody Carmen egregiously plagiarized).  (A note to any musth-y young men reading this: many unreceptive women would really like to put a elephant-sized fence between themselves and musth-y men, so tone it down a notch.)

Our second day at the park was totally amazing.  We spent hours in the fields, traipsing through the mud, just watching the elephants do their thing.  Here are some photos from the morning:

      

 

 

 

And because saggy elebutts obviously deserve their own section: 

                                                   

In the afternoon, we bathed and fed the elephants again.  They don't waste time reapplying their sunscreen.  Then, our guide took us river tubing (sequel: planes, trains, automobiles, and tubing), ending back at the park where we got to watch elephants swimming and playing with their mahouts.  At the other side of the river, the herd with the youngest elephants also took a dip.  

There are no shortages of opportunities to patronize businesses that harm animals, in Thailand and around the world.  Many tourists mindlessly pay to pose with tiger cubs, ride elephants, and swim with dolphins.  I even went to a store in Chiang Mai that was selling ivory pendants carved into the shape of elephants.  When I asked the store manager why they would have such a thing, he said, “many people want it.”  Perhaps elephant rides are obvious examples of exploitative animal tourism (even the American Association of Zoos and Aquariums, not famous for its progress on animal welfare, is against elephant rides), but here’s a handy guide to sniff out problematic animal attractions at home and abroad.

And of course, more pictures: