Elephant Shelter, Thailand, December 2010

 my lovely travel companions, Anna and Katrine










We arived at the elephant shelter just after lunch. What we saw was not what we expected - 6 female elephants under a tin roof, chained to their positions, swaying.

We asked our guide (who was not attached to the shelter) why they were chained - 'Control', he said. And why were they swaying? 'Exercise'. It didn't look like exercise to me. If I had to guess I would say it was distress.

 





swayin'....








Nice man, but English wasn't his strong suit. We saw him struggling over difficult concepts a number of times - there was something in there trying to get out, but he just didn't have the command of the language. I remember at one point him trying to explain that the word he was looking for was a 'conceptual noun'.

We were in Wang Thong in rural Thailand. We'd come here to work - a 'volunteering vacation'. We thought we were here to make a difference, however small, and elephants are endangered in that country - maybe only 3000 left. We weren't quite sure what the sactuary was about - were they rescued? were they there to protect them from hunters? We never really found out - but elephants are work animals in Thailand - they use them for logging, amongst other things. And it was not what we were expecting.None of us (3 of us) really knew WHAT we were expecting. Maybe something that was a bit like a stables, with each elephant getting a stall, which we would joyfully muck out each morning, except with a bigger shovel. We had visions of elephants frolicking in the river, perhaps with us sitting on top, driving them into the water for them to play. Instead we were watching these swaying beasts in chains. And the handlers (who spoke not a word of English) seemed mostly indifferent to their charges - if the elephants got out of line,they whacked them a bit with their sticks.

One of the handlers put chains on the middle sized baby (both of the babies roamed free) and wrapped it around her. She got all tangled up in them and seemed very frutrated. The handlers seemed to think this was hilarious. We were not so amused.

Funny how looks can be deceiving.

On one side of the open air shed was a pile of banana plants and leaves. We watched the handlers pick these up and shove them in front of an elephant. The elephant would then usually step on it, to break up the thick plant. It would then strip the outer bits off with its trunk, then start stuffing itself. Often, they would pick up a piece with their trunk and thwack it against their legs, or against one of the posts of the shed, to split it up further, before sticking it in their mouths. It seems elephants can walk and chew gum the same time - often they would be chewing one piece while preparing the next piece with their trunk.

And they eat a *prodigious* amount. I don't think I ever saw an elephant who wasn't eating, or trying to eat. Don't suppose there are that many calories in a banana plant, and they have a big frame to support.

It's quite extraordinary what they can do with their trunk. It looks rather like a giant leach, close up - but they can contort them in any direction - sort of a mixture between a tail and a hand - and, of course, a nose. When the trunk comes towards you, sniffing, it looks like there is a digit on the end, pointing at you.

I can haz some sugarcane?

Towards the end of the day someone pulled out some sugar cane. Turns out elephants LOVE sugar cane. The little ones came snuffling around the platform we were sitting on, trying to mop up the last pieces.

At one point one of the handlers showed up in the distance with the big daddy elephant. He was both front legs chained together, and we were taken to see him - but we weren't allowed to get close.

At the end of the day, they unchained the elephants, got them to kneel down and got us on them, and then we ambled off into the bush. There was a fair amount of shouting, grunting and a little bit of pushing to achieve this, but then they just went off in the direction they were told. After about 10 minutes walking, we got to a clearing, we got off, and then our guide took us off. They apparently got to spend the night in the wild.

The next day we went back to the shed area, and there were no elephants there. After a few minutes they ambled out of the bush, it seemed, on their own,
though we later saw some of the handlers behind them. Then they were chained down, and a bunch more banana leaves were put in front of them.

And that, it seemed, was that - we were going to watch elephants eat all day, chained in a shed, and, if we wanted to, we could feed them ourselves. So much for making a difference or really learning about the elephants. The shelter was in the (extensive) grounds of a hotel (which we weren't staying at). It seemed that the whole setup was some sort of ecotourism resort - people from Thailand would come for conferences and such, and as part of that would come to get to look at the elephants in the 'wild'.

The next day we went to somewhere else in the bush - we could hear the elephants in there, but couldn't see much. Then we made our way into the bushes and saw elephants. I thought at first that these were the males, which were allowed to roam free. So we were somewhat reticent to get too near. But it seems they were the same ones as the day before - despite being a significant distance from either the clearing or the shed. They were eating up a storm - grass, trees, whatever. They were also drinking in the river, and one of them was picking up mud with her trunk and squirting it all over herself.

The elephants were quite widely distributed. At one point they all started trumpeting and one half of the group ran towards the other half. This was, to say the least, rather dramatic, as we were standing in between the two groups - suddenly you get these huge beasts crashing through the bush towards you. They pretty much ignored us, but I for one felt pretty small in that jungle and was grateful for a tree I could cower behind. Turns out some noise had spooked them, and the matriarchs called and they all gathered round. It's odd to think that such huge beasts would have to be scared of anything - even a tiger would have difficulty taking a baby elephant, not because it is so powerful, but just because it is so big, relative to any other animal. Even the three month old came up to mid thigh on me.

Man and beast....

This was when we got to see the handlers interact with the elephants in a different way. They seemed to have genuine affection for them, and certainly took care of them - one of my favourite images was of a couple of elephants standing by the water hose while a handler poured water into the trunk of one of them. They then hosed them down and got them to kneel again, and we hopped on board. Then we ambled back to the shed area.

This pic is taken from on top of an elephant - this is the same elephant's trunk, coming up to smell who is there.








I realised then that the elephants needed very little pushing to do what they were told. A few grunts, sometimes a quick hook around the ear, but mostly they just went where they were told. It made sense, really - they really do eat a lot, and they could forage for grass and bits of trees, or they could head to where the shed was and they would get banana leaves, sugar cane, etc. They also got the likes of us to come over and stroke their trunks - but I could never tell how the elephants felt about this - they just sort of stared back.

The exception to this was the babies, who did seem to interact more with us and were a little less concerned just with eating (though they did that too). As an aside, they had a rather scatological bent - when Mama dropped a big elephant cake, baby would come over and sniff it, and then start stuffing it in its mouth.

The babies were particularly interested in butts....

Anyway, sometimes you would be standing there, thinking about life or whether to feed a banana plant to an elephant, and you would feel this bump in the butt - basically it was baby, headbutting you. They seemed to want to play, to interact. Another favourite, which I never got the hang of, was to walk up to you and past you, making sure that you got stepped on by a baby foot - which I can assure you is quite heavy enough.





The trainers seemed to like playing with them

and it seemed that the chain they put on was in jest, even though we thought it seemed a bit cruel.

The babies were, of course, ridiculously cute in general - whereas the big ones were slow because they moved deliberately, the small ones were slow because they were awkward and hadn't got the

hang of their bodies (one of them was only 3 months old).

 I discovered much later why the sanctuaries exist. Elephants are traditionally working animals in Thailand - beasts of burden. They were used extensively in the logging industry, until the rules changed. Then many elephants became 'unemployed' and were taken over by people who went down the street, selling the food they have to people so that the people would then feed the elephant. I observed this happen in the local village, where the woman involved bought the food and fed the elephant, but then berated the two boys who owned it, for doing this. So the sanctuaries exist to take in those elephants, already tame, and protect them as well as to educate the general population about the animals.

Elephants have the most extraodinary eyelashes....

I also found out later why it was that the elephants would sway from side to side. They spent almost all of their day eating, and then they would come to the shed to be fed more. But there were times when either we or the handlers weren't feeding them, and they got bored. So it was a way of using up excess energy - not distress, exactly, but a desire to be doing something else, presumably. We saw this again when they would take the elephants to the parking lot of the hotel, where they had a special area. The elephants would be chained and then we, or the guests, would take papaya and water melon and feed them. This made for a better show, but you can't give a lot of food to an elephant when you are feeding it papaya - that's basically just an amuse bouche. One slurp and it's gone, and you want to feed all of them, so one bucket is just one round of canapes. So, they spent a lot of time doing nothing.

 give me a smooch....