The chang in Chiang Mai
Chang in Thai means elephant, and with that singular vocabularly lesson, I'll start this post. A retrospective now on my time with the elephants Tuesday.
The day began at about 8:30 a.m. when I was picked up by a small minivan. I popped my bag in the back because I'd be dropped off at the airport on the way back for my flight to Bangkok, and then I hopped into a seat. The door clanged onto my bag and as we drove on, I opened it unsteadily making a very loud sound, startling the driver, our guide and everyone else. Then I dropped all the snacks I'd brought with me on the floor. A big entrance indeed. But, after a few more stops to pick people up, we were on our way: 10 of us, plus one tour guide. Our 25-year-old Thai guide's name was "Earn, like earn money" she explained. But in Thai the word, probably spelled quite differently, means serendipitous. She spoke decent accented English and was very brusque. I learned her age later on in the day and when I told her my own age was the same, we both shared a moment of wondering what our lives could be like in another body, another culture and another world.
Our group was made up of a young Dutch couple, a young American couple, an older European couple(either German, Swiss or Dutch, and their three kids (two girls and one boy, who were all teens or adolescents). The family was quite strange as two of the kids, and the younger ones at that, likely shared the same Asian mother--who was, evidently, not present. Stranger still, the kids all attended a French-German school in Shanghai. Figure that one out. So that was our group, plus me.
The drive to the "Elephant Nature Park" took about 1.5 hours, up into the hills and multiple commercial tourist locations. As a warning, this post isn't being fact checked. I'm way too tired, and didn't take notes. This is just by memory, so I apologize for any inaccuracies...The park was started by a woman nicknamed Lek, which means "small" in Thai in 1995 with only a handful of elephants, all of them rescued from terrible conditions off the streets of Chiang Mai, Bangkok or the border with Myanmar. A century ago there were 500,000 elephants in Thailand, a decade ago 25,000, and now about 5,000. When Thailand outlawed logging (still legal in Myanmar), thousnads of these elephants found themselves jobless. While a good portion of elephants remain wild and are protected as an endangered species, a large number of elephants are domesticated and fall under livestock provisions and protections that basically provide them little to no protections. Fines for killing livestock, for example, are minimal and rarely enforced.
Mahouts are the traditional elephant keepers/trainers. When the elephants went jobless, these mahouts turned to tourism to try and earn a living. Elephants were forced to work the streets for their owners, bringing in big money and receiving little sustenance or care by their often abusive owners. Abuse is used constantly to assert power, force the elephant to submit and for pure mercenary gain. Mahouts who cannot earn a living with their elephants abandon them so they die in the wild or may sell them via the blackmarket to loggers near the Myanmar border. Lek, whose father was a shaman in her local village learned about elephants when her father was given one as a gift. She grew up with it and took care of the creature who became a part of her family.
[Sorry, very tired as I write this...]
Anyway, on the ride over to the park we learned a bit about the elephants. They are about 1/3 smaller than their African cousins, have one less toe, one point on their trunk instead of two (and so seem to be a bit less dexterous at picking things up), and they are awfully cute. The irony in Thailand is that the chang is a sacred, often worshipped animal in temples, a key part of Thai culture and history. The people often say that the country was built by elephants who physically helped build the country by dragging materials, etc, and by fighting for the country during times of war. The park currently has 34 elephants, two of which are babies (one boy and a girl, I believe seven and 10 months, respectively). Most of the elephants are female. And each has its own terrible tale about life before the sanctuary. Jokiyo is a female elephant who worked for a logger. She was pregnant when she was acquired by her owner and was forced to haul logs up a hill during her pregnancy. Elephants gestate for about 22 months and can only have about four to six babies in their lifetimes. They begin to have them at about age 12 (elephants live to about 60 or so, on average). Anyway, she worked through her pregnancy, going into labor at some point while on the hill hauling. Her baby fell out in its birth bag, rolling down the hill and she could not rescue it. The baby died. The next day Jokiyo, heartbroken, refused to work. Her mahout proded her with sticks, and used a slingshot to throw stones into her eyes, blinding her eye. When she would still not work, he jabbed a sharp stick into her other eye, blinding her. Lek saw her one day working and bought Jokiyo off her owner for $250,000 USD (this was a ways into her work). The stories are endless and tragic. At the park a female elephant was in her 22nd month of pregnancy and walked painfully and heavily not only very pregnant but only able to amble on three of her four legs, her right back leg was permanently cripped when she was walked onto a mine near the Myanmar border while working as a logger. The stories are endless, hair raising and using the word sad is a euphemism most of the time.
Elephants are very loyal, travel and live in herds (at the park they are different adopted families), and will protect their young 24/7, vigilantly. While we were there the baby boy went into the river in bathtime with another two older elephants from a different herd. The mother, with the rest of the family about 100 meters away suddenly noticed this and made a blare of panic, running (and they can go up to 25 mph) to her baby boy. When one elephant in the herd runs to the rescue, ALL of them go. The entire family stampeded out to the baby, surrounding him in a big safety net. They are like that for each and every member of the herd. Babies often stay within trunk's reach of their mothers for years as younglings.
The park was beautiful, and very low key. Lots of space and little infrastructure, which was great. Elephants spend about 13 hours a day chewing because they must eat something like 20% of their body mass, or maybe more--and they are vegetarians. Food and snacks consist of plants, bananas, watermelon, corn, and probably a lot of other different vegetables. The elephants go to bed at about 10 p.m., but only sleep roughly four hours a night. So they are otherwise up and grazing or bathing, or covering themselves in mud and dirt--a natural sunblock.
We got in and got briefed, then went over to feed the elephant family and their babies. While we could give the adults whole bananas, even bunches of them, and entire halves of watermelons (about the size of cantaloupe), we had to peel the bananas and take off the rinds of the melons for the babies. It was very sweet. Their little trunks would come out and grab onto the food, then plop them into their mouths. Sometimes they would play with the food, swinging it back and forth before popping it in. Other times, they would drop the food, unable as of yet to pick it up like their parents. The bigger elephants were great too, but far more skilled at eating, grabbing up the food, and sometimes sneaking directly into their baskets (with their names tagged on it). If the food dropped we were warned not to pick it up because they might think we're trying to steal it from them. They picked the food up themselves.
I got really into feeding them, and my arms were covered with fruit juice and dirt afterward, we washed up (again). Hygiene is a big deal there and we washed constantly so that we wouldn't introduce bacteria to the elephants, especially the babies. After their snack, we got our own lunch buffet. I made my plate so heavy that I had to use both hands to hold it up. Then right after lunch it was bathtime for the elephants. We went into the river with them splashing them with water from our buckets, and scrubbing them with small scrub brushes. It was a lot of fun, and I took photos, trying to make sure the camera didn't drop in. I quickly ran out of memory and had to continuously delete other photos to make more room.
The elephants made their way in and out of the water, pissing or crapping as they liked, at their own pace once they were cleaned off. I tried to stay upstream from all that stuff, and in the moving water. Once they got out of the water, they started to throw dust or mud on themselves, really lathering up. A couple of them rubbed up against wood or stone trying to itch their butts...it was all too cute. Up in the background were the beautiful green hills of Chiang Mai, covered in a bit of humid haze, and the sun was hot. I could understand why there were lathering up the natural sunblock. The family of elephants started over to the river for a bath last, and everyone had to go up to a platform so we wouldn't be in the way if the mother felt her babies threatened (as she did), and thundered over to them with the rest of the herd. After they washed up the babies played with each other in the mud and the dirt, crawling over each other's bodies and heads, falling over themselves and under their family members in the mud, trying to crawl in and out of the slime.
The park has about 30 visitors a day, and sometimes more in high season (it was high season Tuesday). They also take in volunteers who can stay and help a week at a time. It looks like an awesome experience, and while I helped bathe the pregnant/crippled elephant during her afternoon bath under a dying bright sun, I felt like I could live there and do that work, perfectly content. In the afternoon we watched a documentary filmed about the sanctuary, Lek and the Thai domestic elephant. The 45-minute film was heartbreaking as it described and showed us the traditional, centuries-old Thai training for baby elephants being prepared for work with their mahouts. Their spirits are broken in a contraption that encloses them entirely, like some medieval torture, amid bamboo sticks, then they are repeatedly jabbed by multiple people with sharpened bamboo sticks with nails at their ends in as many sensitive parts as necessary like their inner ears, often drawing blood, until whatever is asked of them is done. They are not fed, forced to stay awake and enclosed for days at a time until they are entirely submissive. When they are taken out, the elephants are often covered in blood. I watched the video feeling chilled and feverish at the same time.
After the film there was another feeding and another quick bathtime for some of the elephants. That was when I washed up the pregnant mother. I was so happy to spend time with these majestic creatures with such a dark and sad past. One of them had been taught (I presume) to give us kisses with the end of her trunk, puckering up to my cheek a few times...I wished I could stay, but at 5 p.m. we had to go. I was dropped off at the Chiang Mai airport at 6:30 p.m. with plenty of time to spare before my 8:15 p.m. flight out to Bangkok, and plenty to think about.
The day began at about 8:30 a.m. when I was picked up by a small minivan. I popped my bag in the back because I'd be dropped off at the airport on the way back for my flight to Bangkok, and then I hopped into a seat. The door clanged onto my bag and as we drove on, I opened it unsteadily making a very loud sound, startling the driver, our guide and everyone else. Then I dropped all the snacks I'd brought with me on the floor. A big entrance indeed. But, after a few more stops to pick people up, we were on our way: 10 of us, plus one tour guide. Our 25-year-old Thai guide's name was "Earn, like earn money" she explained. But in Thai the word, probably spelled quite differently, means serendipitous. She spoke decent accented English and was very brusque. I learned her age later on in the day and when I told her my own age was the same, we both shared a moment of wondering what our lives could be like in another body, another culture and another world.
Our group was made up of a young Dutch couple, a young American couple, an older European couple(either German, Swiss or Dutch, and their three kids (two girls and one boy, who were all teens or adolescents). The family was quite strange as two of the kids, and the younger ones at that, likely shared the same Asian mother--who was, evidently, not present. Stranger still, the kids all attended a French-German school in Shanghai. Figure that one out. So that was our group, plus me.
The drive to the "Elephant Nature Park" took about 1.5 hours, up into the hills and multiple commercial tourist locations. As a warning, this post isn't being fact checked. I'm way too tired, and didn't take notes. This is just by memory, so I apologize for any inaccuracies...The park was started by a woman nicknamed Lek, which means "small" in Thai in 1995 with only a handful of elephants, all of them rescued from terrible conditions off the streets of Chiang Mai, Bangkok or the border with Myanmar. A century ago there were 500,000 elephants in Thailand, a decade ago 25,000, and now about 5,000. When Thailand outlawed logging (still legal in Myanmar), thousnads of these elephants found themselves jobless. While a good portion of elephants remain wild and are protected as an endangered species, a large number of elephants are domesticated and fall under livestock provisions and protections that basically provide them little to no protections. Fines for killing livestock, for example, are minimal and rarely enforced.
Mahouts are the traditional elephant keepers/trainers. When the elephants went jobless, these mahouts turned to tourism to try and earn a living. Elephants were forced to work the streets for their owners, bringing in big money and receiving little sustenance or care by their often abusive owners. Abuse is used constantly to assert power, force the elephant to submit and for pure mercenary gain. Mahouts who cannot earn a living with their elephants abandon them so they die in the wild or may sell them via the blackmarket to loggers near the Myanmar border. Lek, whose father was a shaman in her local village learned about elephants when her father was given one as a gift. She grew up with it and took care of the creature who became a part of her family.
[Sorry, very tired as I write this...]
Anyway, on the ride over to the park we learned a bit about the elephants. They are about 1/3 smaller than their African cousins, have one less toe, one point on their trunk instead of two (and so seem to be a bit less dexterous at picking things up), and they are awfully cute. The irony in Thailand is that the chang is a sacred, often worshipped animal in temples, a key part of Thai culture and history. The people often say that the country was built by elephants who physically helped build the country by dragging materials, etc, and by fighting for the country during times of war. The park currently has 34 elephants, two of which are babies (one boy and a girl, I believe seven and 10 months, respectively). Most of the elephants are female. And each has its own terrible tale about life before the sanctuary. Jokiyo is a female elephant who worked for a logger. She was pregnant when she was acquired by her owner and was forced to haul logs up a hill during her pregnancy. Elephants gestate for about 22 months and can only have about four to six babies in their lifetimes. They begin to have them at about age 12 (elephants live to about 60 or so, on average). Anyway, she worked through her pregnancy, going into labor at some point while on the hill hauling. Her baby fell out in its birth bag, rolling down the hill and she could not rescue it. The baby died. The next day Jokiyo, heartbroken, refused to work. Her mahout proded her with sticks, and used a slingshot to throw stones into her eyes, blinding her eye. When she would still not work, he jabbed a sharp stick into her other eye, blinding her. Lek saw her one day working and bought Jokiyo off her owner for $250,000 USD (this was a ways into her work). The stories are endless and tragic. At the park a female elephant was in her 22nd month of pregnancy and walked painfully and heavily not only very pregnant but only able to amble on three of her four legs, her right back leg was permanently cripped when she was walked onto a mine near the Myanmar border while working as a logger. The stories are endless, hair raising and using the word sad is a euphemism most of the time.
Elephants are very loyal, travel and live in herds (at the park they are different adopted families), and will protect their young 24/7, vigilantly. While we were there the baby boy went into the river in bathtime with another two older elephants from a different herd. The mother, with the rest of the family about 100 meters away suddenly noticed this and made a blare of panic, running (and they can go up to 25 mph) to her baby boy. When one elephant in the herd runs to the rescue, ALL of them go. The entire family stampeded out to the baby, surrounding him in a big safety net. They are like that for each and every member of the herd. Babies often stay within trunk's reach of their mothers for years as younglings.
The park was beautiful, and very low key. Lots of space and little infrastructure, which was great. Elephants spend about 13 hours a day chewing because they must eat something like 20% of their body mass, or maybe more--and they are vegetarians. Food and snacks consist of plants, bananas, watermelon, corn, and probably a lot of other different vegetables. The elephants go to bed at about 10 p.m., but only sleep roughly four hours a night. So they are otherwise up and grazing or bathing, or covering themselves in mud and dirt--a natural sunblock.
We got in and got briefed, then went over to feed the elephant family and their babies. While we could give the adults whole bananas, even bunches of them, and entire halves of watermelons (about the size of cantaloupe), we had to peel the bananas and take off the rinds of the melons for the babies. It was very sweet. Their little trunks would come out and grab onto the food, then plop them into their mouths. Sometimes they would play with the food, swinging it back and forth before popping it in. Other times, they would drop the food, unable as of yet to pick it up like their parents. The bigger elephants were great too, but far more skilled at eating, grabbing up the food, and sometimes sneaking directly into their baskets (with their names tagged on it). If the food dropped we were warned not to pick it up because they might think we're trying to steal it from them. They picked the food up themselves.
I got really into feeding them, and my arms were covered with fruit juice and dirt afterward, we washed up (again). Hygiene is a big deal there and we washed constantly so that we wouldn't introduce bacteria to the elephants, especially the babies. After their snack, we got our own lunch buffet. I made my plate so heavy that I had to use both hands to hold it up. Then right after lunch it was bathtime for the elephants. We went into the river with them splashing them with water from our buckets, and scrubbing them with small scrub brushes. It was a lot of fun, and I took photos, trying to make sure the camera didn't drop in. I quickly ran out of memory and had to continuously delete other photos to make more room.
The elephants made their way in and out of the water, pissing or crapping as they liked, at their own pace once they were cleaned off. I tried to stay upstream from all that stuff, and in the moving water. Once they got out of the water, they started to throw dust or mud on themselves, really lathering up. A couple of them rubbed up against wood or stone trying to itch their butts...it was all too cute. Up in the background were the beautiful green hills of Chiang Mai, covered in a bit of humid haze, and the sun was hot. I could understand why there were lathering up the natural sunblock. The family of elephants started over to the river for a bath last, and everyone had to go up to a platform so we wouldn't be in the way if the mother felt her babies threatened (as she did), and thundered over to them with the rest of the herd. After they washed up the babies played with each other in the mud and the dirt, crawling over each other's bodies and heads, falling over themselves and under their family members in the mud, trying to crawl in and out of the slime.
The park has about 30 visitors a day, and sometimes more in high season (it was high season Tuesday). They also take in volunteers who can stay and help a week at a time. It looks like an awesome experience, and while I helped bathe the pregnant/crippled elephant during her afternoon bath under a dying bright sun, I felt like I could live there and do that work, perfectly content. In the afternoon we watched a documentary filmed about the sanctuary, Lek and the Thai domestic elephant. The 45-minute film was heartbreaking as it described and showed us the traditional, centuries-old Thai training for baby elephants being prepared for work with their mahouts. Their spirits are broken in a contraption that encloses them entirely, like some medieval torture, amid bamboo sticks, then they are repeatedly jabbed by multiple people with sharpened bamboo sticks with nails at their ends in as many sensitive parts as necessary like their inner ears, often drawing blood, until whatever is asked of them is done. They are not fed, forced to stay awake and enclosed for days at a time until they are entirely submissive. When they are taken out, the elephants are often covered in blood. I watched the video feeling chilled and feverish at the same time.
After the film there was another feeding and another quick bathtime for some of the elephants. That was when I washed up the pregnant mother. I was so happy to spend time with these majestic creatures with such a dark and sad past. One of them had been taught (I presume) to give us kisses with the end of her trunk, puckering up to my cheek a few times...I wished I could stay, but at 5 p.m. we had to go. I was dropped off at the Chiang Mai airport at 6:30 p.m. with plenty of time to spare before my 8:15 p.m. flight out to Bangkok, and plenty to think about.
posted by IJW at 11:42 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home