Day 2: Elephant Adventures Continued!

Day 2: In the morning, we woke up with chattering teeth and frozen feet. We’d forgotten to close the windows, and the cold mountain air had managed to seep in while we slept. The room was frighteningly cold!

After breakfast, we split up into our sub-groups and began to carry out our interviews and surveys with the tourists at Elephant Nature Park. I was quite surprised to find out that most of the foreigners that we met at the park were not actually tourists. Rather, they were largely there as volunteers to help out with cleaning, feeding and caring for the elephants. As volunteers, they were all well-informed animal lovers who felt strongly against the unethical practices in elephant tourism.

While their views were remarkably in line with the aims of our group’s sustainability research, my group soon realised that the volunteers at the park belong to a niche group of tourists and their views would not be entirely representative of the general tourist population in Chiang Mai. Instead, we had to settle for surveying tourists only when we got back to the city area of Chiang Mai. This proved to be a slightly disappointing setback to our project, given that we had originally intended to complete at least half of our surveys at the Elephant Nature Park.

After a busy morning of interviews, surveys (and hurriedly side-stepping cats and dogs on my end), our guide Jen, brought us to other areas of the Elephant Nature Park to visit more elephants! In particular, we visited a family of four elephants comprising of a baby elephant, his mother, his grandmother and a nanny elephant. We watched as the baby elephant trotted about playfully, with the rest of his family following close behind to keep watch on him. Despite being inherently wild animals, it was so endearing to learn how elephants are in fact capable of forming close-knit familial relationships, and how they also play an extended role in nurturing and caring for their young by feeding them and bathing them – just like humans! Perhaps humans feel so strongly for the well-being of elephants, because their resemblance to our own kind leads us to feel more empathetic towards them.

However, according to Jen, in many traditional elephant camps, baby elephants are taken away from their families at the tender age of 4 to be trained! Just like how human children are left confused and frightened without the warm support of their families, this act of separating the baby elephants from their families certainly distresses them, and many suffer from depression. It makes me really sad to hear this. As a young adult, I cannot even bear to imagine the panic that I would feel if I were to be forcibly separated from my family, much less comprehend the fear of baby elephants who are still deeply reliant on their families!

After that, we took an exciting truck ride into the jungle to visit three elephants! These elephants are part of the park’s attempts to re-introduce elephants back into the natural environment, by allowing them to gradually adapt to the harsher conditions of the wild. Although there were three elephants in the jungle, we only got to interact with one of them. The other two elephants in the jungle were uncomfortable around humans, having been put through incredibly traumatic experiences during their time at other unethical camps, so the sight of humans near them would trigger unpleasant memories within them and cause upset to them. They seemed really averse to the presence of humans, as they turned their backs against us despite the fact that we had baskets of food. This truly shows how elephant tourism can really leave a dent in the psyche of these elephants, and it saddens me to think about the extent of mistreatment that they had been subjected to in order for them to react to humans in such a way.

Wow – I really learnt a lot about the unethical side of elephant tourism through this visit. Without this trip, the unethicality of elephant tourism would probably have never crossed my mind! As someone who is usually quite indifferent to animals, I definitely wouldn’t have gone out of my way to find out more about the ethics behind elephant tourism. Just like any other ignorant tourist, I might even have wanted to ride on an elephant’s back for the sake of the experience. For that, I am really glad that I am now informed enough to avoid making such a mistake and potentially contributing to the demand for unethical elephant tourism. While I am glad to have been exposed to these new perspectives and issues, I have also realised how difficult it is for normal tourists to find out about such information. If we want to change the landscape of Chiang Mai’s elephant tourism industry to favour eco-tourism, there is definitely a need to increase public exposure to some of these cruel practices, in order to deter future generations of tourists from supporting such mistreatment of elephants!

In the late afternoon, we finally bade farewell to the Elephant Nature Park. I am thankful for this visit to the Elephant Nature Park, as it truly made me step out of my comfort zone (I mean, I touched a dog at the park for the first time!!) and heightened my awareness of the cruel nature of unethical elephant tourism. It exposed me to perspectives and issues that I would never have otherwise stopped to think about in Singapore. I am really glad to have caught a glimpse of life at the Elephant Nature Park, and this experience is definitely one that I will remember for years to come!