The Elephant Rescue Park is located in a lush green valley on the outskirts of Chang Mai. The park's primary objective is to rescue elephants abused from circuses and logging camps. This Rescue Park provides the elephants with a safe, loving, and secure environment. The goal is to keep these elephants healthy and happy by providing a natural habitat within which they can enjoy the rest of their lives.
In case you're wondering, the purchase price to rescue an abused elephant is between $60,000 to $80,000 US dollars. By Thai standards, this is an enormous amount that few can afford.
Currently, 4,000 captive elephants are in the 223 elephant camps. There are less than 1,000 wild elephants left in Thailand!
Throughout our day at the Elephant Rescue Park Chiang Mai, we felt the elephants were treated with kindness, respect, and love.
Throughout our day at the Elephant Rescue Park Chiang Mai, we felt the elephants were treated with kindness, respect, and love.
We were with one elephant who had arthritis in her back legs. For 20 years, this elephant worked in a teak logging elephant labor camp pulling one-ton teak logs an average of 20 times a day. That's 20 logs of 2,000 pounds each. This elephant had been pulling 40,000 pounds each and every day.
To help ease her arthritic pain, this elephant received glucosamine in her daily vitamin balls. Glucosamine is unavailable in Thailand. So these glucosamine tablets are imported in huge shipments from the United States. The brand? Why it's the Kirkland brand from COSTCO!
During our time at the Elephant Rescue Park, we learned many fascinating facts about elephants. Did you know that elephants are herbivores and that eating ripe bananas, leaves, bamboo and fruit consumes 18 hours of the elephant's day! A female Asian elephant, called a cow, weighs over 6,000 lbs. She can consume 336 pounds of food a day!
A male, or bull elephant, is around 8,800 pounds. He eats 422 lbs of food per day!
Because elephants also do not eat in unclean surroundings tainted by dung, their instinct is to roam to a new area to eat.
Another interesting tidbit about elephant dung is that elephants can only digest 40% of their daily food which results in 60% elephant poop. For a female Asian elephant poops 202 pounds of poop daily and a male poops 253 pounds per day!! That's a lot of poop!
As part of the experience, we had to change into our "uniform" complete with a straw hat which was a welcome addition to create a bit of shade from the 98 degree heat of the day.
We learned how to make our homemade elephant vitamin balls.
Then we met our elephants!
They came walking down to meet us.
It was love at first sight!
They are enormous and it is easy to see why they are the world's largest land animal.
One of these magnificent pachyderms had had years of abuse before being rescued and was blind in her left eye. Although she was a gentle giant, we were cautioned to only be on her right side.
We were also instructed to touch the elephant's hide by petting it as hard as one would pat the head of a dog. If one pats the elephant with a very gentle touch, the elephant will think you are an insect and swat at you with its massive trunk.
We had an amazing time feeding these gentle giants.
Amazingly, while not having a bone, the elephant's trunk does have a staggering 40,000 muscles and 150,000 individual units. Our human body only has 639 muscles. You can see how intricate the elephant's trunk is.
The trunk is used for smelling, touching, grasping objects and food, producing sound and of course, breathing.
Elephants are the only animal that can snorkel without artificial aid. By holding the tips of their trunks above the water's edge, elephants can traverse a river being totally submerged. They simply walk across the riverbed.
And believe it or not, elephants can suck up 10 gallons of water per minute!
Then we met our elephants!
They came walking down to meet us.
They are enormous and it is easy to see why they are the world's largest land animal.
We were also instructed to touch the elephant's hide by petting it as hard as one would pat the head of a dog. If one pats the elephant with a very gentle touch, the elephant will think you are an insect and swat at you with its massive trunk.
We had an amazing time feeding these gentle giants.
If you were to look at an elephant's skeleton you would clearly see the tusks, which can grow up to 10 feet; however, you would not see the trunk because there is not one bone in an elephant's trunk.
Amazingly, while not having a bone, the elephant's trunk does have a staggering 40,000 muscles and 150,000 individual units. Our human body only has 639 muscles. You can see how intricate the elephant's trunk is.
The trunk is used for smelling, touching, grasping objects and food, producing sound and of course, breathing.
Elephants are the only animal that can snorkel without artificial aid. By holding the tips of their trunks above the water's edge, elephants can traverse a river being totally submerged. They simply walk across the riverbed.
And believe it or not, elephants can suck up 10 gallons of water per minute!
It's pretty amazing what all we learned. One question asked was "Why do elephants cry?"
Well, the scientific answer is that they don't. Unlike most mammals, elephants do not possess any tear ducts. What they do possess is an evolutionary sweat gland! This sweat gland is at the inner corner of its eye. With nowhere to go, this fluid spills out and runs down the face. There is actually a diagonal groove in the skin next to the inner corner of the eye that serves to draw the liquid away from the eye and down the elephant's face where it can evaporate.
We learned that elephant trunks are like our fingers. The Asian elephant's trunk has one "finger". That's why it must wrap its trunk around objects like a boa constrictor.
The elephant wraps its trunk tightly around it, then pulls it into his mouth. They are voracious eaters!
Asian elephants have 5 toes on their front legs and 4 on their back.
However, the elephants' toes are hidden.
We only see their massive toenails.
The elephant's toenail was hard as a rock! It was a lengthy process to file the elephant's toenail.
But my elephant seemed to think I did a good job.
The distance around the elephant's foot is actually half the height of the elephant to its shoulder!
Then we were off for a long hike to the water for a bath.
We headed out into the jungle to the river.
The afternoon temperature was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Along the way, our elephants stopped to grab huge chunks of dried dirt from the ground, and with their massive trunks, they heaved the clay dirt and powerfully threw it onto their backs. Suddenly plumes of dust exploded all around us. All of the elephants did this to cool down from the oppressive heat and soon we were surrounded by enormous clouds of dust.
When the dust settled, the elephants were covered with bits of grass and dirt. Time for a bath!
After the long hike,
we were out of the jungle and at the river's edge.
Then it was off to take a bath in the river!
What an amazing experience to wash these magnificent animals. It's a day that we'll never forget.
After all the scrubbing, washing, and rinsing, our elephants were all clean! Time to head back home.
I had made a friend for life!
Here's Jumbo who's showing off with his blaring trumpeting!
What an incredible day!
We hated to say, "good-bye" but as we left, we took with us a memory of a lifetime.
