A Sunday at an Elephant Sanctuary

October 13, 2024

For our second day in Chiang Rai, we booked a visit to an elephant sanctuary. I was very proud of myself for making the reservation, as I had gleaned from the sanctuary’s website that its owner was a Frenchwoman and managed to make the phone call entirely in French. We were picked up promptly at half past eight in the morning and began our forty-minute ride at the back of an open-air truck after picking up two other tourists and buying some insect repellent at 7-Eleven.

The sanctuary, we found out upon our arrival, is home to three female elephants, over forty rescue dogs, a donkey, a horse, some goats, geese, and chicken. The day’s programme consisted of the following. First, we fed the elephants corn, bananas, and sugar cane. Although these foods were specifically arranged from the elephants’ least favourite to the most, they appeared to be generally unfussy eaters, consuming the corn with the cobs, the bananas with the peels, and the sugar cane stalks with the bark. Next, we walked the elephants for about two hours through the jungle in the company of at least a dozen shelter dogs. We had to take much care not to slip on the muddy paths, which appeared quite menacing despite our being provided with wellington boots. After a leisurely lunch and some lazing about, we took the elephants home again and made a stop at a pond where they bathed.

I learned quite a few things about Asian elephants as well as the operations required to keep them content in captivity. They only have four teeth, but each is about as long as a human foot, and their mastication sounds like the churning of a washing machine or the flushing of an aeroplane toilet. Since they require at least 100 kilogrammes of food per day, they only sleep four hours and spend most of their waking hours eating. At many centres, each elephant has its own keeper, referred to as a mahout. These men often come from families of mahouts, though in the case of this centre all three mahouts received full training after immigrating from Myanmar. To keep the elephants from wandering off and destroying crops, the mahouts have to sleep close to their quarters and be on the alert at all times. People are naturally scared of the animals, who can be quite belligerent when they catch a whiff of fresh fruit from faraway farms.

Based on what the tour guide said, at least one of the elephants was rescued from a logging camp, which prompted another ethical reflection to add to the one from yesterday. The line I always heard while growing up was that the use of elephants in the logging industry amounts to animal cruelty. This, certainly, is the account on which many elephant rescues in Thailand stand. However, while I am sure some elephants are treated poorly in logging camps, I fail to see how the practice is any more inherently abusive than having horses pull carriages or using oxen to plough fields. Perhaps we feel more sympathy for elephants because they are smarter and more long-lived. I suspect, however, that the real reason for our incongruous – and dare I say hypocritical – Western discomfort with using elephant labour is that we have been desensitised to the “animal abuse” we perpetrate at home.