VACATIONS FROM HOME: ELEPHANT ECO VALLEY

A DAY TO NEVER FORGET IN THE LAND OF SMILES
poo paper pic frame

One of the day trips we took out of Chiang Mai, Thailand with Overseas Adventure Travels (OAT) was to interact with elephants at what they termed an “elephant care center”.

Ever since we saw the Oscar winning documentary “Elephant Whisperers” about an Indian couple who cared for an orphaned baby elephant we were enamored with the possibility of getting up close to them ourselves.

Our subsequent day of meeting them at the Elephant Eco Valley Zoo was perhaps our most fascinating day in our travels to Thailand.

Once we arrived at the zoo we were asked to put on maroon smocks and water shoes that they provided, placing the items we wanted to keep dry in lockers. The smocks made us look like we were in a cult of some sort, but they kept us dry when we went to bathe the elephants.

Our guide at the zoo spoke perfect English and told us about the care of these intelligent animals and how they could be extremely skittish. i.e. They are very frightened by bees and could get nervous with loud noises.

There was a large field sectioned off by wooden fencing and at the far end similarly dressed cult members (joke) were feeding elephants, something we would be doing soon ourselves.

He walked us around to meet an elephant and her mahout. Her name was Tata. She was 40 years old. Asian elephants are smaller than African elephants and my height reached Tata’s eyes. With the help of her mahout who will be with Tata for the rest of her life, she showed us her feet, her trunk and we each got to pose for pictures with the seemingly docile elephant.

UNETHICAL?

Now, if you read about PETA’s thoughts on these “zoos” the elephants are extremely nervous and worried. PETA claims the animals are abused and beaten by mahouts and though they seem placid they are anxious and worried they may be subjected to more abuse.

Tata and her mahout

Well, Tata posed with everyone and endured all the petting we gave her and used her trunk as an elevator to lift her mahout so he could show how one would ride her. She then fetched the flip flop he dropped and “handed” it to him with her very tactile trunk.

Riding elephants happens at many places in Thailand. It you do a quick online search you will find seemingly countless other such “elephant care centers”.

They don’t ride elephants at Eco Valley, and neither should you, but other places allow. PETA feels that elephants should only be observed and not interacted with, as we did on our visit.

While conversing with Tata a much larger bull elephant with tusks that nearly reached the ground thudded past us into the field. Several other elephants followed. It was a new group coming in for their feeding, and these elephants do eat a lot.

SO, YOU WANT TO BE A MAHOUT?

Elephants are herbivores and a bull elephant will consume nearly 500 lbs. of food per day and will excrete about 50 lbs. of dung. Undigested fiber passes right through the elephant.

What's brown and sounds
like a bell? Dung

In the wild elephants will not eat in unclean areas and need to roam for food; sometimes they stray onto farms. This obviously is a pain for the farmers, and they dissuade roaming herds with loud noises and even electrical fencing. It’s a delicate balance as the elephant is considered the royal symbol of Thailand and hurting an elephant is probably not a good thing.

Domesticated elephants like those at Elephant Eco Valley don’t have to roam vast areas of forest to avoid eating where they poop. That’s because part of the mahout’s job is to collect the dung.

(Insert joke here.)

This keeps the captive elephant’s areas clean, and the fibrous dung is used to make large sheets of paper. The mahouts process this poo and wash out all the bacteria and the fibers are dried out onto large screens in frames. The resulting paper is then fashioned into notecards, etc. The paper doesn’t smell.

Everyone in our group politely declined when given the chance to help in the process.

As a gift for our visit to Eco Valley we were given picture frames made from poo paper. Now we tell friends who visit how shit-faced we are in the picture, with Tata looking on approvingly.

HAPPY HERD

Making Elephant vitamin pills

We were then led to a large mortar and pestle to pound ingredients into a nutritional herb and fruit vitamin ball. One person would operate the hinged wooden pestle as it crushed, and another would poke at the contents with a stick to ensure everything got all mixed up well. We then molded the mash into large hand-sized balls.

Later, at the field we got to feed them. Five or so came right up to the fencing and begged for the “vitamin” pills and sugar cane and bananas that we obligingly fed them. Elephants are strong and intelligent. They understand words and if we said, “Ba” instead of reaching for the food with their trunks, they would lift them and open their mouths so we could feed them directly. None were aggressive, but you could see them watching us as we reached for more food and they wouldn’t leave until our cache of edibles was gone.

It was truly a great experience.

SONGKRAN FESTIVAL COMES EARLY

In Thailand the lunar new year is celebrated with water fights. For three days in mid-April massive water fights break out throughout the country and crowds of people will squirt water pistols and toss buckets of water at each other. Songkran is Thailand’s most important festival and it’s all about purification.

Well, part of the visit to Eco Valley was to bathe elephants. Armed with buckets and pulverized sugar cane stalks that served as brushes (and were later eaten by the elephants) some of our group waded into the water and tended to the appreciative beasts. One even lay on it side, sprouting water in the air like a fountain. (We were cautioned to stay to the back side of the elephant, not by the feet. Earlier this year at another care center a woman who on the belly side of the elephant was killed when the elephant abruptly moved.)

We were told the elephants loved the bathing and it was wonderful to caress their bristly rough skin as we scrubbed and tossed buckets of water on them. At the end they gobbled up the brushes.

Janet and I were the last ones out and the elephant who had been lying in the water stood up and started spraying us with water. Of course, his mahout was telling him to do so, and you can see the handler motion for the elephant to give us a good soaking in the attached video. The beast shrugged off my counter- attack.

We may have been “purified” in a Songkran festival at Eco Valley, but the shower was very necessary. Don’t want to have that elephant water on your body for too long!

Afterwards we were served a very large lunch and given the poo paper picture frames as parting gifts.

THE DARK SIDE

There is estimated to be 3,500 wild elephants in Thailand, and about the same number of domesticated elephants. This is down from the estimated 100,000 elephants in the country at the start of the 20^th Century. Wild elephants need space to roam and forage for food, but the habitat of wild elephants has been greatly diminished through logging and human encroachment and now there are protected areas for elephants. Their numbers dwindled enough to place them on the endangered species list.

These intelligent and strong creatures are important to Thailand as the royal symbol of the country. In many Asian cultures the elephant is considered sacred. Buddhist texts describe one of the Buddha’s past lives as an elephant.

They have been used in war, transportation and before logging was banned in 1989 used for manual labor, dragging logs through the forest. This was the elephant’s primary “occupation” but afterwards mahouts, whose skills as handlers have been passed down through generations, and their elephants turned to the entertainment industry and tourism to earn a living.

During the pandemic tourism collapsed in Thailand and caused severe hardship for elephants and mahouts, making it difficult to properly care for the animals. Now, with tourism returning, questions are growing about the ethical treatment of the elephants. Elephants are a matriarchal society and form strong social bonds within their herd that transit generations. Even grandmother elephants help with the care of their granddaughters.

After our visit to Elephant EcoValley, I read up on the industry. All the “activities” we did at the zoo, like feeding and bathing them, is unnatural. Overfeeding leads to obesity, bathing is a social activity for the elephants, and they cover their skin with mud to act as a sunscreen and insect repellent. Repeated baths throughout the day can lead to skin afflictions.

The best eco-tourist activity is to watch the elephants from afar, like at the Elephant Nature Park, down the road from Elephant EcoValley, where rescued animals are kept in spacious areas and tourists are invited to watch the elephants as they go about their lives. It would be difficult to release formerly captive elephants into the wild because they haven’t learned to cope in the wild.

There are several other similar eco-friendly elephant places to visit. Here is a list compiled by a website “Responsible Travel:

ELEPHANT SANCTUARIES

Elephant EcoValley is not on this list.

We had a great time that day, but I doubt I will ever do it again, Songkran water fight or not.

ELEPHANT ECOVALLEY THAILAND

Read more from Sustainable Travel International?

ELEPHANT ETHICS

STICKING YOUR NECK OUT

Before we went to the zoo, we first visited the Huay Pa Rai Hilltribe Village. It is a Karen tribe. The diverse ethnic groups of people known as Karen mainly reside along the Myanmar / Thailand border. Many in Thailand are refugees, fleeing the ongoing conflict in Myanmar. They are poor and rely on tourism dollars. Some say these people are being exploited, that this is unethical, like being in a zoo themselves.

All we saw of the village really was the line of ‘shops’ with Karen women selling trinkets, cloth weavings and t-shirts. The women all wore large bands of metal around their necks giving the appearance it was elongated. Some of the women were very demure and sat, their eyes downcast, while others were engaging and offered to pose for pictures and even offered to place the neck bands around some of our group. Some women were weaving cloth for sale, others were selling everything from keychains to t-shirts. I felt awkward about being there, but I knew they relied on our tourism dollars.