Taking a Bath with an Elephant!

Elephant Blessing Retreat 2017

In mid-January 2017, six adventurous souls traveled to northern Thailand to connect with Asian Elephants on my first Elephant Blessings Retreat. Our goal was to experience a deep spiritual connection with the elephants and exchange the blessings of our souls with the elephants. Our ultimate goal was to feel the openness and freedom of being one with the world and all its inhabitants through our connection with the elephants.

Elephant Nature Park

Asian elephants and humans have a long positive history together. However, the international tourist trade has changed the face of that relationship over the last couple of decades. More and more elephant owners have turned to offering elephant rides to tourists and more elephants are being born or brought into captivity to keep up with the tourists’ demands for entertainment. This has left many elephants in Thailand living in terrible conditions, even being used to beg on the streets of the cities and living their lives in chains.

After falling in love with elephants as a young girl growing up in Thailand, Lek Chailert founded Elephant Nature Park as one of the first conservation sanctuaries for rescued elephants in Thailand. Elephant Nature Park is an elephant rescue and rehabilitation center with dozens of elephants, dogs, cats, buffaloes and many other animals living in a natural environment.

Elephant Freedom Project

On the Elephant Blessing Retreat, our first stop was Elephant Nature Park’s latest program – the Elephant Freedom Project. This project encourages more humane treatment of captive animals, ensuring elephant camp owners of a reliable source of income when they stop giving tourists rides on the backs of elephants and start emphasizing the many benefits of allowing people to simply be with elephants as they live their lives as closely as possible to elephants in the wild.

Although elephants seem big, strong, and unbreakable, the tourist ride industry is actually very painful and dangerous for elephants, often resulting in broken backs, broken ankles and other debilitating injuries.

From Rides to Walks

When our group arrived at the elephant camp for our day with the elephants, our guide Jan put us right to work washing dozens and dozens of cucumbers for the elephants.

We used these treats as ice breakers with the elephants. Our first interaction with them was to feed them cucumbers and bananas while they were standing behind a wooden fence. This allowed everyone to get used to being together in a safe way and for the elephants to make a positive association with the new humans in their home. There were four elephants in our group that morning. Two adult females (one pregnant and one mom), one baby, and one juvenile female with two small tusks. (Not all Asian elephants have tusks, so in addition to her smaller size, her tusks were an easy way to identify her.)

After introductions, we followed the elephants and their mahouts (human handlers who used only voice commands and the occasional touch of a hand to guide the elephants) to their foraging grounds just up the dirt road. We descended into a narrow gorge filled with plants and trees in every direction – elephant heaven! We spent an hour or more hanging out in the middle of a foraging elephant herd, just taking it all in. The elephants were agile climbers and we were awed at the strength and agility of their trunks as they took down trees and vines to eat.

Take Me to the River

Our herd returned to the camp where the elephants continued eating in their huge, open paddock. We humans had a delicious lunch of fresh fruits, veggies and northern Thai dishes on a shady patio near the elephants.  After lunch, we suited up for an excursion to the nearby river. We hiked down the hill from the camp to the nearby river and walked along a small creek that joined the larger river where the elephants would bathe. Apparently the plants along the trail were very tasty because the elephants basically ate their way down the hill!

Wash Me in the Water

African and Asian elephants are great swimmers and really enjoy the water. An alternative to riding elephants in Thailand that is becoming very popular is giving elephants a bath in a river or pond. At the Elephant Freedom Project, the mahouts provided us with pails for splashing water on the elephants, but ‘our’ elephants seemed more interested in bathing themselves. That was fine with us! We just wanted to hang out with them as they did their thing. We didn’t feel the need to do anything for them that they didn’t seem to want or enjoy, and the afternoon we spent in and near the water with them was perfect with or without bathing.

A Step in the Right Direction

About mid-afternoon, the elephants hiked back up river and the humans hopped in the back of a pick up truck to take the road back up to the camp. On our way, we passed an elephant camp with a dozen elephants standing under a thin metal roof. Each elephant had a chair on its back and it was restrained in some way to only be able to move a few dozen feet in any direction. It was a blazingly hot day in the sun (in the nineties) and probably not much cooler in the meager shade afforded by the thin metal roof.

After spending the day with elephants who were certainly contained but definitely not restrained, it was heartbreaking to see these elephants confined to a few square feet of space with heavy contraptions on their backs. A few short years ago, the elephants we hung out with today were doing the same thing as those chained elephants. Today, they enjoyed two good walks, lots of treats, a bath in the river, and the respect and admiration of a dozen humans. In between visits with us, they were allowed to roam freely in a large open area under the watchful eyes of their gentle mahouts.

Personally, I would rather see all animals wild – or not even get to see them at all because they are wild, self-determined animals. But the Elephant Freedom Project is improving elephants lives and tourists’ connection with elephants in very real, very important ways. Elephant owners need to be able to feed their families and pay their bills just like us.

How You Can Help Thai Elephants

Tourists can vote with their dollars – by creating a new demand for more humane, more natural encounters with elephants, we can change the face of human-elephant interactions. If you find yourself in Thailand at an elephant camp that offers elephant rides, simply use your voice – ask that you be allowed to walk next to the animal instead of riding on top. If enough of us speak up, we can change the elephant tourist industry. The elephant owners are offering what they think we want – so let’s show them we want to meet healthy, natural elephants with all of our feet on the ground!

As we work our way into a paradigm that celebrates wild animals and wild places, the Elephant Freedom Project helps people and animals get to connect in deep, moving ways and that is helping raise awareness of the plight of captive and wild elephants in Thailand and awareness of how similar our two species are. I really hope more elephant riding camps join the Elephant Freedom Project so that more elephants and humans can get to know each other in a more mutually respectful way. This is an important step in the right direction and I am glad that my group and I were able to experience it on the ground floor.

Light to the success of the Elephant Freedom Project!

Now It’s Your Turn

Have you had a close encounter with an elephant? I’d love to hear about it! Please leave a note in the comments below and share your experience! Or do you dream about connecting with an elephant? What would that look like? Please share your dream below – who knows, maybe it will help your dream come true on the next Elephant Blessing Retreat!