If you love elephants and would like to know them while respecting them, here is the post for you. Thailand awaits you!
One of the most beautiful things I did in Thailand and that I will always remember was the excursion toElephant jungle sanctuary not far from the center of Chiang Mai.
Before leaving for my last trip to Thailand this was one of the fundamental things to do and therefore I informed myself well on which association to rely on.
Elephant Jungle Sanctuary: what to expect
The Elephant Jungle Sanctuary is among the best and one of the few structures that do not allow tourists to ride the elephant, together with the Elephant Nature Park, also very famous.
Why don't you have to ride elephants in Thailand?
First of all, the elephant is a wild animal, and like all wild animals it should be able to live in its natural environment without the conditioning of the human being.
Imposing him a life of work at the service of man instead means taming him, a term we are perhaps used to, but which in reality indicates a series of very violent actions aimed at bending the spirit of a living being until it becomes docile.
The elephant is used for excursions in the jungle or for small circus shows, for the sole purpose of entertaining tourists.
Thus new problems arise: even if they appear to us as such imposing animals, the back of an elephant can hold a maximum of 100-150 kg depending on the tonnage, in 2 people on a wooden sedan chair it is already beyond this limit.
It should also be known that an elephant to stay healthy, due to its physical conformation, needs to eat a lot and continuously (about 250kg a day), which is impossible in the fields that make them work up to 8-9 hours every day.
It is also useless to underline that like any animal used by a circus, an elephant that in front of tourists puts on a show in which he paints and plays football has obviously been subjected to "training" which includes corporal punishment.
In all this, the Thais and the Asian populations in general are not to blame (or not only). Elephants are very expensive animals to keep, and when their use for heavy work such as timber transport was banned, the question of how to survive arose.
I do not even blame the first tourists who a few decades ago began to take advantage of this unusual and apparently fun experience, like riding an elephant. Much of the information on animal health and welfare was probably not known to elephant owners or Western tourists.
But today we have all the information that allows us to evaluate the choices we are going to make. So, even before leaving for my trip, I had decided to exclude a priori all the structures that allowed this thing.
A purer contact with the elephant
The association to which I contacted allows the tourist to come into contact with the animal in other ways, by feeding it, bathing it and even swimming with it in the river.
It is defined as "Elephant sanctuary"Because there are rather old specimens or mothers with puppies, therefore specimens more in need of care.
I found the organization of the excursion excellent, the boys from the Sanctuary came to pick me up with a jeep in the early morning and brought me back to the hotel in the evening.
The Mud Spa
As soon as I arrived at the camp with the rest of the group I changed, they made me wear a tunic over the costume and then they presented me with the various pieces so that we could immediately get in tune with them; we fed them and then took them to the "Mud Spa", literally "Mud spa”, We washed the animals and then took them to the river to swim together.
At the river we all went into the water together, a truly unique experience that everyone should try during their trip to Thailand!
