Elephant Day Care

Who does not love them some elephant? (And, no, I most emphatically do not mean, like, with wasabi?)

There is something so gentle, so serene, so zen, about these creatures, despite their enormous size. And, Elephant Day Care achieved a previous unheard of four votes in the End of Holiday Favorite Poll; right there, that is saying something. I am not sure in all of our years of travel, that we have all ever all agreed on a "best" anything. Except maybe bacon.

In Which We Ride Bareback, with No Helmets. Ha! Elephants! We ride elephants with no helmets! Ha! I think I am so clever.

And, I must say, as a former marketing professional, that Elephant Day Care is a stroke of total marketing genius from a group of folks who seem to be doing quite nice things with Elephants.

Elephants, of course, are a bit of sticky wicket for human kind. As we have already agreed, everybody loves elephants. Everybody, that is, except the guy who wants to keep his garden next to one. Elephants have had a long history in Thailand as a work animal, mostly involved in logging. But in the 1990s, logging was banned across the country, thereby tossing some thousands of elephants out on their smaller-than-African-elephant ears.(1)

First, the meet and greet. With treats. Tom and Hope each got a baby elephant around 2 years old.

 But, it's not like you can just release a few thousand elephants into the wild to live out the next fifty years of their natural lives. As even Animal Planet admits, there just isn't any room for them. And, as a pet? Well, they are an expensive proposition. So the remaining Thai elephants have become tourist attractions.

The scenarios range from the very cushy to tragic. A few lucky elephants near Chiang Mai get rescued and land at the Elephant Nature Park where they are cooed over by tourists who are allowed to feed them, stroke them and bathe them, but not clamber up on their backs. For abused and damaged elephants, there are several Elephant Rescue Camps across Thailand, which rely on tourist and donation dollars for maintenance.

Worst case, there are some seriously seedy elephant operations where the elephants are treated not terribly well, babies perform in Baby Elephant Shows, and, tragically, there are an estimated 300 elephant mahouts (trainers) who live in hiding just outside of Bangkok, who drag their elephants through the streets of the city at night doing whatever they can for money.

Hope was reluctant to stick her hand in the elephants mouth to jam that banana in.

So, with a little research, we decided to take the middle road. The Patara Elephant Farm has a pretty simple philosophy, and they are straight forward about it: "There should be elephants in Thailand, we are going to focus our resources on breeding quality animals for the future versus rescuing animals in distress, and we are going to get the tourists to pay for it." There is something very down to earth and practical about this philosophy that I quite admire. The Pantara folk also don't waste any time putting down the "other guys," be they Blind Elephant Rescuers or Baby Elephant Tortu ... er, Trainers, which is also rather nice. They are focused on their goals and making a difference their way; good on them, I say.

The Pantara program we had actually registered for was Own Your Own Elephant For a Day. In our case, each child would be paired with an adult and we would spend the day with one, special elephant, who would become our Friend For Life. We would feed the elephant, do an elephant health check, bath the elephant, and then take a long leisurely ride to a local waterfall where we would swim with the elephant, enjoy a nice picnic lunch and the take a long leisurely  ride back to the starting place.

Then the obligatory Elephant Health Check, which includes a Poo Check. You can tell a lot by elephant poo. Really interesting stuff!

"Long," by the way, translates to about 3 hours on elephant back - bareback. I was a little concerned that the program would be too much for the wee ones, but friends of ours had already Experienced Having Their Own Elephant For A Day, and had raved about it, so we decided to go for it. However, as things turned out, the nice Patara folks lost our reservation, Owning Your Own Elephant proved to be quite the trendy Holiday Gift this year, and there were no Elephants left to be had.

 Then the dusting off. Since we were going to be riding these elephants (although, not actually these specific elephants because they were pregnant and infirm), we need to clean them properly so that we would not grind dirt and gravel into their backs.

Elephant Day Care was our Plan B. It is the same sort of program, ie, spend quality time with elephant, ride elephant, Bond With Elephant For Life, Send Elephant Birthday cards with a small Cheque for the next fifty years, but you only get half a day bonding time, and the ride is short, symbolic, with a higher focus on video production quality than covering distance.

Are you wondering what is so brilliant about all of this? Well, while all of the healthy, working elephants are off on their day long sojourn to the waterfall, bonding with their Owners For The Day, the Elephant Day Care-ers are spending their time with the young, the infirm, and the pregnant! Brilliant! There is one quite pregnant female, two young ones who were not up for the waterfall trek yet, and one elephant working through a new set of teeth (elephants have six sets, did you know?). These are our new Friends for Life.

Hope and I lead our New Friend For Life down to the water hole for a little bath.

I promise you, by the way, that I am not being sarcastic At. All. I really do think it is a total win-win for both tourist and elephant. Elephants can only work with tourists in Thailand. Elephants are expensive! Sick, pregnant elephants shouldn't work, but they still need to eat! So, these elephants are helping to keep the whole herd fed (and growing), while not exerting much in the way of effort. Really, how hard it is to get fed treats, bathed and brushed twice a day by a group of energetic tourists? 

And scrub 'em clean! Now if only I could get the kid to scrub the tub down post-bath.

And then, we went riding! The All Day group came back, so Jeff and I were handed a couple of healthy elephants who were still up for another kilometer stroll in the jungle.

It took two men to heave me up there. Awkward.

The children actually rode the young elephants. I'm still vaguely uncomfortable about this. I don't know enough about elephants to know how young is too young to be ridden. At the end of the day, I liked the farm, the elephants seemed to be getting quite good care, the mahouts were a really great lot, and I agree with the general philosophy of the Farm, so I'm going to believe that they made an appropriate choice for their elephants.

Look, Ma! No hands!

And what's it like to ride an elephant bareback through the jungle? Cool. Really cool.

My one question when it was all over was "So, how many people fall off?" I asked this because despite the fact that I am pretty balanced, and have been riding all my life, there were moments when I felt quite unstable. When the elephant shook her head, for example, or slipped. The answer was, about 5 a year, and apparently mostly because the elephant slips and the tourist gets jogged off.

Elephants, the mahouts assured us, don't usually fall down. If you are that big and you fall, you are likely to get injured, so Evolution has engineered elephants to be pretty stable critters.

So, it was a grand day; and all agreed that we would LOVE to go back and do it again. And again. And maybe even again.

Here's a recently aired NPR piece on Elephants in Thailand. Personally, I think it is rather poorly researched, but it touches on some of the key issues that elephant's face:  Thai Elephants

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(1) I would like to point out that in the interests of good taste that I have not stooped to a "Pack your trucks, boys!" joke. It was close, though.

Comments

[Marnie]

Very cool!

[Anne]

what a great experience... much better than the sad baby elephant I saw in the zoo on Oahu a number of years ago.

[Jennie]

You should definitely use that last pic for your next Christmas card! ;-)

[Debbie Hanson]

You certainly are lacking in the 'graceful' department in your attempt to get on that elephant. Perhaps you should have told them you are use to getting on from the correct (other) side. :)