Day 1: Loving An Elephant

I spent this day learning to love another being.

Before I arrived at the Elephant Nature Park (ENP), I did not care as much as I did for the elephants. During the prior months of anticipation for the trip, I always saw the elephant plight in Chiang Mai from a very emotionally detached light. My thoughts were

“Unethical practices are going on right now, elephants are suffering as a species, and they need to be saved.”

I did not empathize fully with the situation. The closest I could empathize was my reactions of pity and disgust when watching the videos of elephant abuse. On Monday at the park, my view changed because of Jen, our tour guide. He spoke of each elephant as though they were a friend. Their name, their personality, their relationships with their mahout (keeper) and other elephants, and their history. All these gave a human quality to the elephants which made it easy to relate to them. I remember Jen, our guide, shared this story:

“That elephant name is Lucky. Lucky was in a circus, and the master was not good to her. The lights of the circus caused her to go blind, and she also has trust issues because the master stabbed her with a knife. Now she is afraid of other elephants, and only trusts her mahout.”

 

I learned to not look at the elephant plight as a species that needed help as a whole, but that each elephant was an individual on their own, and they all had a soul that could love and have feelings like we do. I finally understood what it really meant to love another animal that day, and it made me really guilty about how apathetic I felt prior to the trip; how much care I lacked for the elephants until I saw one up close. I resented the fact that I had to fly all that way from Singapore, and go to an elephant sanctuary to finally feel something for them; I was selfish. I resent my lack of empathy. I now understood the ignorance of tourists from other countries who know little about unethical practices on animals for tourism.

Love: Its not the feeling you get when you see how adorable an animal is. It is to connect with them; to feel the pain and suffering they and their species had to endure at the hands of human beings. All this for done for the sake of entertainment and money. I glimpsed the suffering the elephants went through, and felt deeply saddened at what we’ve come to.