Elephant Nature Park

One of the things I'd planned to do when I came to Southeast Asia was to ride an elephant. I'm now in the area where there's lots of elephants so I thought I'd get my chance here, but most of the elephant riding is part of a day long trek which I didn't really feel like doing especially with all the rain and only having flip flops. A girl in my room at my hostel was planning to go to an elephant sanctuary that she'd heard was somewhere you definitely had to go, so I decided to go with her for the day. It turned out to be a really good day, but it crushed my dream of riding an elephant after seeing and hearing about what they go through. The Elephant Nature Park is a reserve started by a Thai woman (Lek) who was against the mistreatment of elephants, Thailand's national symbol and an important part of their religion. She takes in elephants that have been injured from the work they're made to do, either logging or performing for tourists, and babies that have lost their mothers. Some of the elephants had really sad stories: there was one with only part of a foot because the rest was lost when she stepped on a land mine, one male with only half of one tusk because people had chainsawed off the other one, one that could hardly walk because she was made to pull logs down hills with nothing protecting her legs from the logs bashing into them, and many more for a total of 32 elephants. In the morning we heard about the elephants and then got to feed them, then we had lunch ourselves. After, we followed them to the river where we could help wash them off and watch the babies play. Then we watched a National Geographic documentary about the elephant reserve that showed how elephants are trained in Thailand, which involves putting them in a cage just big enough for them and beating them for days straight, mostly with wooden poles but also with sharp tools. The documentary was supposed to be released overseas first to get international attention before Thais could disapprove of how their country was portrayed, but some group was shown it beforehand and was so upset that they had a huge protest in Bangkok with international media present and called for a boycott of tourism in Thailand. This made a lot of people here upset, and someone was hired to kill Lek, but she was told ahead of time and is okay. Since they were unable to get her, they resorted to poisoning one of the baby elephants featured in the documentary instead. So it was really a sad day in some ways, and now I don't feel like it would be right to ride an elephant somewhere they might have beaten the elephant to train it to carry people. But it's good that at least one person here cares about how they're treated.