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When visitors come here I want them to leave with the truth and go tell other people that the elephants here are just a few percent of the elephants that need to be rescued from abuse. I want them to think, “How many other elephants are still out there suffering and dying, working until the day they fall down and die from exhaustion?” I want them to educate others and tell people that it’s time for humans to be more kind to other living creatures.

-Lek Chailert

By 6pm sharp on our second day at Elephant Nature Park we had all filed into the assembly room and were anxiously waiting for Sangduen “Lek” Chailert – the woman who had inspired all of us to come here from around the globe and volunteer to shovel elephant poop and wield machetes in the hot, humid Thailand climate. The anticipation was so high it felt like we were waiting for a rock star. And Lek is a rock star of sorts. Or, as Craig so aptly put it, “Punk rock, full-on!” She has earned global respect for her tireless work rescuing abused elephants and providing them with a life free of abuse, as well as educating tourists about the horrors of phajaan, and elephant owners on better ways to care for their charges. She’s collaborated on laws that would provide protections for elephants and is an open and outspoken supporter of rights for all animals. She has won international awards and been featured in articles and documentaries seen around the world.

Despite the accolades, every day is still a struggle at home. In her own country she has been persecuted, threatened, ridiculed, raided, disowned by her own family, and even forced to go into exile for a period of time. But she has never given up fighting for her beliefs, even when they go against her country’s long-held traditions.

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At night, the broad brow of the colossus, its trunk, tusks, tower, huge hindquarters, and four pillar-like legs stood out, astonishing and awesome against the starry sky.

-Attributed to Les Misérables

At quarter past six every morning I would make my way from our dorm room towards Elephant Nature Park’s main complex for a coffee. It was my favorite time of day here. Quiet and still dark, the hustle and bustle of the day’s activities had yet to begin. Coffee in hand, I’d take a seat on one of the viewing platforms and watch the darkness slowly lift. A few of ENP’s 400 or so rescued dogs would be meandering about and in the distance I would see the silhouettes of the elephants slowly moving towards the river for a morning drink with their mahouts. This calm before breakfast helped me collect my thoughts, pen a few words in my journal, reassess any lingering aches and pains from the previous day, and get ready for the one ahead.

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All beings tremble before violence. All fear death, all love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?

-Buddha

In order to have any serious discussion and understanding about elephant conservation in Thailand and Asia – whether it’s about elephants used in the illegal logging trade, or elephants used in tourist camps for rides and other “entertainment” – it’s important to understand how they ended up there and the process each has been put through in order to willingly submit to painting pictures, having tourists put on their backs, or hauling logs up and down steep mountain ravines. It’s further important to understand that, unless you’re lucky enough to come across elephants in the wild while visiting Asia, with only rare exceptions every elephant you encounter will have been both literally and figuratively broken in a process called phajaan.

Every elephant.

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A tinny PA squarbles some unintelligible noise in the distance, like the voice of the unseen teacher from Peanuts, drawing me from a jetlagged induced afternoon nap and reminding us that the Sunday market is about to kick off. Outside our hotel, Rachadamnoen has been wondrously transformed from a hustling, exhaust-filled road choked with cars, tuk tuks, and scooters to a bustling thoroughfare of market stalls brimming with a vibrant array of tastes, smells, sights, and sounds. It feels like Dorothy waking up to the splendor of Oz, and after a brief pause for the Thai National Anthem  we’re whisked away into its colorful menagerie.

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I had fallen a little bit in love with Chiang Mai, a city with a population of around 200,000 in the northern region of Thailand, before I ever stepped foot in this colorful, multi-layered city known as “the rose of the north.” I had read about the temples, the food, the markets, the friendly people; a city where the modern and familiar comforts of home could be found while still maintaining a distinctive Thai atmosphere focused on arts, history, and culture.  Happily, while indeed it is a city with many of the modern conveniences you might desire, it doesn’t feel a bit like a replica of a western city with Starbucks and The Gap on every corner. Okay, there are four Starbucks stores in Chiang Mai, but I never actually saw one, and there were plenty of unique, local coffee shops to satiate one’s caffeine addiction. It is a popular city for expats and despite seeing a few too many Westerners fitting either the young, scruffy backpacker mold or the older hippie seeking to find themselves stereotype, my only real disappointment was that I didn’t have more time to explore all the sights, sounds, and tastes it had to offer. In fact, we never got more than a few blocks from our hotel because there was so much packed into the immediate area.

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I‘m just about to climb over the top of the gate and into the elephant barn to join Sangduen “Lek” Chailert, founder of Thailand’s Elephant Nature Park, as she softly sings lullabies to Faa Mai and the other elephants in the barn, when Kim loudly shouts my name in a panicked voice. I look down towards the ground just in time to see my backpack – filled with my camera, lenses, audio recording gear, and travel notebooks – get whisked away into the darkness by an errant elephant trunk like some unsuspecting victim in a horror movie. As I jump off the gate my first thoughts aren’t one of fear or anger. Simply, “But our trip has just begun!”

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If anyone wants to know what elephants are like, they are like people only more so.

-Pierre Corneille

1. There are two recognized species of elephants – Asian (Elephas maximus) and African (Loxodonta africana) – and they are the largest living land mammal on Earth. African elephants can stand up to thirteen feet tall, weigh up to 15,000 pounds, and have a concave back. Their smaller Asian counterparts can stand up to ten feet tall, weigh up to 11,000 pounds, and have a convex or level back.
2. Elephant development and life span is very similar to that of humans. They can live to be sixty-to-seventy years old. Elephants live in matriarchal herds that span generations. Males generally leave the herd at puberty and live solo or in loose bachelor herds. They come visit the female herds when they are in musth and are looking for a mate.
3. The closest living relative to the elephant is the hyrax, a small rodent-like animal, and sirenians such as manatees and dugongs.
4. An elephant uses its trunk for breathing, smelling, touching, grasping, and producing sound. It contains over 100,000 muscle fascicles.
5. Elephants have a complex language consisting of rumbles, squeals, cries, screams, roars, and snorts. Many of their sounds cannot be heard by humans and travel for many miles. In addition to sound, they communicate by touch, sight, and smell. They are self-aware and show distinct signs of grieving for deceased family members.
6. Elephants walk up to six-to-twelve miles a day, but distances of up to 100 miles have been recorded. Elephants sleep only three-to-four hours a day. The remaining hours are primarily spent eating. Elephants are herbivores and eat leaves, twigs, fruit, bark, and roots. African elephants are browsers while Asian elephants are grazers. They can eat over 150 pounds of food a day and drink thirty gallons of water.
7. An elephant’s gestation period is twenty-two months, longer than any other mammal. A calf is dependent on its mother for milk for three years; however, they will always stay with their familial herd. A newborn calf will weigh about 200 pounds and stand three feet tall.
8. An elephant’s skin is one inch thick. Elephants are grey, but Asian elephants have areas of depigmentation which results in pink and light brown patches around the forehead and ears. An elephant’s skin is very sensitive despite how thick it is, and mud or dust makes an excellent sunscreen. African elephants have larger ears than Asian elephants, and both flap their ears to keep help regulate their body temperature.
9. The elephant uses its tusks as a tool for digging and fighting. Both male and female African elephants have tusks – which can be up to ten feet in length. Only male Asian elephants have tusks, and in some cases males don’t grow tusks at all. Elephant tusks are in large demand due to ivory being viewed as a status symbol, particularly in upwardly mobile China. Because of this demand for ivory, elephants are being killed at a rate of one every fifteen minutes.
10. Elephants are a keystone species, which means they have a disproportionately large effect on their environment and how it functions, and a dramatic change would occur without them. The IUCN lists African elephants as vulnerable and Asian elephants as endangered. It is estimated that elephants will be extinct in our lifetimes without a major global shift in how we think about these majestic animals.

In just one short week we will finally – finally! – board the first of several flights that will take us more than 7000 miles over forty-eight hours to eventually arrive in Thailand on our first ever trip to Southeast Asia. We won’t make it to Bangkok, this time, or to any of the country’s famous beaches, or to any of the neighboring countries we’d love to visit one day. This trip is all about elephants, and we’ll be spending our time volunteering at two different sanctuaries where captive elephants rescued from lives filled with hard labor and mental and physical abuse have an opportunity to spend their days in as natural a state as possible, and we will have the amazing opportunity to simply bask in their presence in addition to enduring some hard labor of our own.

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The Task Force consists primarily of lay people with little to no prior expertise regarding the Earth’s largest terrestrial animal.

-Excerpt from the Final Report of the Woodland Park Zoo Elephant Task Force

Begun as a way to stem a growing public outcry after a two-part series by The Seattle Times last winter questioned not only the welfare of elephants in zoos in general but Woodland Park Zoo’s specifically, a selection of members from the zoo’s self-appointed Elephant Task Force met one last time on October 22^nd to publicly release the panel’s Final Report (PDF). Where The Times pointed out the 112 failed attempts to artificially inseminate Chai, one of the Zoo’s two female Asian elephants, and further uncovered that for every elephant born in captivity in Association of Zoos and Aquariums accredited zoos two die, the Task Force recommended “expeditious strategies to build a multi-generational herd, including the natural breeding of Chai.” And that if Chai weren’t to be bred, the Zoo should instead “consider bringing in additional cows and perhaps a bull to create a multi-generational herd.”

For those who had been following the issue this past year, the recommendation – along with two others from the Task Force based around bringing in more elephants to Woodland Park Zoo – wasn’t surprising. The panel was hand-picked by the zoo, and of its fifteen members four currently sit on the zoo’s Board of Directors. A fifth, Co-Chair Janet Hendrickson, is a former member. The panel included no one from any elephant advocacy organization, and none of its members have any background in elephant behavioral or welfare issues. As mentioned in the above quote leading off this piece, they were a group with self-admittedly “little or no prior expertise” regarding the health and welfare of elephants in captivity or in the wild.

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In April of 2012, I wrote a post about the harassment and raids at two highly respected animal sanctuaries in Thailand, Elephant Nature Park (ENP) and Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand (WFFT), which were conducted by Thailand’s Department of National Parks (DNP), a governmental agency in charge of the country’s national parks, plants, and wildlife, and led at the time by Director General Mr. Damrong Phidet. The raids resulted in the confiscation of ninety-nine rescued and endangered animals from WFFT and criminal charges against the center’s founders, Edwin Wiek and Jansaeng Sangnanork (Noi).

With less than a month to go before Craig and I embark on our adventure to Thailand, which includes a week volunteering at ENP, I wanted to write a follow-up post to unravel what has proven to be a very convoluted sequence of events, and find out whatever became of the confiscated animals and the criminal charges. I was also curious if either of the sanctuaries had experienced any further harassment from the DNP. On occasion I’ve seen snippets of news about the legal developments for WFFT, and by all accounts both sanctuaries continue to work tirelessly to rescue animals from lives of abuse while campaigning for the rights of animals both domestic and wild, but I wanted to get a clearer understanding of what has happened over the past year-and-a-half, where all the legal issues stand today, and what is in store for the future of the sanctuaries and for the animals they fight to protect. I’d like to give a big thank you to Nicole Vooijs, WFFT’s Marketing Director, and Lek Chailert, founder of ENP and Save Elephant Foundation, for responding to my questions as I tried to fill in the blanks of this complicated story.

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