Day 1 – Elephant Nature Park (ENP)

It was a great day at the park today! We did lots of activities with elephants and learnt lots about them.

Learning about elephants on documentaries compared to being face-to-face with them is really different. When I’m listening to commentary in documentaries, I do find some facts quite awesome but it’s still hard to appreciate the elephants as living, feeling animals. Instead, I look at them almost like specimens from nature that are different from us, and hence, objects of interest. But here, hearing about each individual elephant’s characteristics then learning about their mannerisms along with the general characteristics of elephants was so much more personal.

We fed the elephants pumpkins, cucumbers and watermelon which we learnt was their supplementary food, learnt about how male elephants leave the herd when they are about 17 (and hence they are kept separately from the females and fed food that is naturally found in their natural habitat to facilitate their future assimilation into the wild, where they truly belong), bathed elephants with pails of water (sometimes I was just hurling water into the air because I was bad at it) and also of the stories of abuse they suffered before ENP rescued them. We were reminded of how education and law and enforcement really matter in our society. The caretakers of the elephants (called mahouts) who neglected or abused the elephants did not have sufficient understanding of elephants prior to taking on the job as mahouts. It’s a shame, really, that the lives of these elephants could have been quite different had the mahouts undergone professional training. Likewise, well-trained elephants could have prevented the severe attacks on some mahouts.

I was reminded of how the owners of the elephants and probably the unethical parks’ business owners had the biggest part to play in the elephants’ mishaps. They are the biggest stakeholders and are game changers in the elephants’ lives, but for reasons unknown to us (possibly money, cost-cutting measures) they fail to regulate safe and healthy treatment of the elephants.

Anyhow, I’m really looking forward to tomorrow’s activities ☺