On a trip to Thailand 14 years ago, I did a little tour organised trek around the hills in Chiang Mai. The standard trip then involved a bit of hiking, some kayaking and an elephant ride. My lack of awareness of animal rights, and the distress elephants feel when carrying loads on there backs, meant I had a wicked time without really thinking about what harm I was causing.
Things have changed. This week, on my first return to Chiang Mai, the hotel lobby had a whole wall of tours to elephant sanctuaries. Riding has become somewhat taboo (although my guide told me that Chinese tourists still like to do it). The Elephant Nature Park was one of the first rescue centres for elephants that had been abandoned or perhaps deemed to weak to be of use for the tourist/logging businesses. In the past few years, there seems to have been an explosion of companies offering trips to elephant sanctuaries. Now, I’m a little less naive than I used to be (Chiang Mai was my first solo trip after hanging out with Paras, Khilna and Kavita in the islands, learning diving on Ko Tao and partying in Ko Phangan) and perhaps also a bit more cynical. Clearly, all those logging and riding elephants were owned by people who now need to find a source of revenue to replace the cruelly earned Bahts. People need to make money and changed, or rebranded, their businesses to sanctuaries.
While I would have preferred to go a proper place set up by the Elephant Rescue Foundation, arriving in December in Chiang Mai meant little hope for a next day booking (indeed the whole month is fully booked!). They allowed less interaction with the animals and you followed the herd rather than the elephants being led to the tourists. After a bit of research, it seemed most of the other sanctuaries are fairly similar to each other: you turn up, learn a little about elephants and elephant care, feed them some bananas, make some elephant medicine, have a mud bath with them and then a bit of a play in the river. You get to spend a day very close to a small number of giant, well behaved (tamed?) creatures and take some awesome photos. Several other reputable places also had very little availability, so eventually went for one which had a few recs online and was fairly new that was set up by a local social enterprise.
Arriving, its clear this is not a sanctuary in the traditional sense of the word; there is not much information about the history of the animals. Indeed they have paid to have an elephant impregnated, so they can get a baby elephant in the herd (baby elephants being cute and playful means more tourist money is likely to come their way), so there is little likelihood of the industry of keeping elephants stopping.
As the car stops after an hour and half’s journey, we step out into a picturesque, small farm surround by lush hills. There are already eleven tourists there on a half day tour and four of us joined them on a full day tour, which turned out to be little more than a slow half day tour!
A previous close up brush with a wild elephant was terrifying! In Addo, South Africa, a herd of humongous African elephants stopped on the road. We waited patiently for them to be on their way when one of them turned to face us, and started walking, then running towards our car. I’m pretty sure the elephant actually brushed past our hire car. Heart-stopping.
These elephants here were calm and happy to be close to humans. Clearly they have been trained by their mahouts, and they are domesticated animals. They seem to be content enough to take bananas, have an enforced mud bath and wash at the times which are convenient for tourists. A toddler elephant had some bad cuts due to an encounter with a barbed wire fence designed to protect trees from the foraging elephants, but apart from that there was little sign of mistreatment.
I enjoyed my time watching these creatures close up (especially once the obnoxious loud tourists left!) and had a long conversation with the guide about the sanctuary. They still need to keep elephants in chains overnight to stop them wandering into neighbours farms or national parks, but overall she thought that there had been a massive improvement in the conditions and quality of life for the elephants in so-called sanctuaries. I found this Guardian article a little too late but reading it after the fact still makes me think there is a long way to go.
So, is going to a ‘sanctuary’ ethical? Am I just paying for another generation of elephant keeping? Maybe I’ll come back in 14 years time, and there will be even more awareness of animal cruelty and I’ll feel naive yet again? An idealistic view is that they should set up national parks for releasing the elephants in the wild, but there is very little chance this will happen; domesticated animals probably would not adapt and there is not enough land. There are around 20,000 Asian elephants in captivity, many of them living in miserable conditions. There are a further 30,000 to 40,000 in the wild. That’s it. Maybe for the survival of the species, we need them to be bred by Thai Sanctuaries or their equivalent. The farmed elephants in Chiang Mai definitely have better lives than they used to fourteen years ago. While they do need to be trained to be safe around humans and they are not ‘free’ to do as they like, the elephants are protected.
The street art is generally interesting a provocative and I have more time for that. I also completed my very own first piece of graffiti style art (not graffiti, as Kurtis would insist) in an abandoned margarine factory/ art studio. Judge for yourself!
The Travelling ShahMan 