World Elephant Day (August 12): Inside a small Phuket reserve with a big mission

Part of the Phuket Nature Elephant Reserve is also allocated to a school for children. (Photo by Preeti Verma Lal)

Content warning: This article contains mentions of cruelty to animals.

Imagine a holiday where you gladly mush pumpkin, rice, fruit into grenade-sized vitamin balls. Or pick up a cleaver to chop sugarcane into tiny pieces. Or scrub mud on an elephant's back and then hose it down. And also - this might sound a bit kooky - turn elephant poop into paper after hours of stirring, sieving, setting and sun-drying.

In Thailand’s Phuket Nature Elephant Reserve, I did it all. One August afternoon, I wore the apron and turned into a cook, masseuse, poop-stirrer for Lotus and Boe, two 40-somethings who'd been chained, goaded, overworked in an elephant farm where tourists would ride on their backs and the owners were unkind.

Healthy adult elephants have no natural predators, except humans. For decades, Lotus and Boe lived in appalling conditions. Until one day, Phuket Nature Elephant Reserve founder and director Cam McLean rescued them from the elephant camp and brought them to the nearly 12-acre reserve.

Sadly, Lotus and Boe are not the only elephants in Thailand to have suffered thus. The country’s elephant entertainment tourism industry before the Covid-19 pandemic was worth a whopping $500 million per year. Such was the lure of the elephants that wild animals were poached and painfully trained to entertain eager tourists. Now, half of Thailand's nearly 4,000 elephants have been domesticated and nearly 300 suffer under appalling conditions in Bangkok, according to elephantnaturepark.org.

In 2019, McLean founded Phuket Nature Elephant Reserve as a safe haven for seven rescued elephants complete with a mud spa, a hydro pool, and enough green protection as a natural habitat.

But with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the reserve was financially strapped and low on cash to feed the elephants. An elephant can eat up to 16-18 hours per day, and consume 5-10 percent of its body weight daily. For a big cow (female elephant) weighing 3,000kg, this means around 150kg of food daily! The average food cost for one adult elephant is nearly INR 44,000 a month. With no other option, McLean had to relocate five of the rescued elephants to safer, cash-rich reserves.

Lotus and Boe were rescued from elephant camps in Thailand. (Photo by Preeti Verma Lal)

In Phuket, Lotus and Boe, one an Asian Elephant, the other a Borneo Pygmy, are being the best ecosystem engineers. They make pathways in dense forested habitat that allows passage for other animals. Their footprint enables a micro-ecosystem that, when filled with water, can provide a home for tadpoles and other organisms. Even their dung is recyclable. Because elephants have a poor digestive system and are able to digest only 40-50 percent of their daily intake, there is a lot of dung! Tonnes of it. In the reserve’s special Elephant Dung Recycling Centre, the elephant dung is turned into special recycled paper and bio-cooking gas for use at the reserve.

After a quick lesson in Thai cooking, as I cleaved the sugarcane, my heart was assured that Lotus and Boe have finally known kindness. I left the reserve thinking of the other elephants that are enslaved, chained and tortured for human entertainment. This World Elephant Day, remember, elephants are not human-entertainers. And when you sit on their back, it really hurts them.

Remember what Howard Tayler said in The Tub of Happiness:

Right now I've got just two rules to live by.

Rule one: Don't taunt elephants.

Rule two: Don't stand next to anybody who taunts elephants.

Making elephant paper at the Elephant Dung Recycling Centre.

Good to know

Address: 100/12 Moo 7, Srisoonthorn Road, Thalang, Phuket 83110

Website: www.phuketnatureelephantreserve.com

Timing: Morning program: 9 am to 1 pm; Evening program: 1 pm to 5 pm

Cost (per person): Adults: THB3,000; Children (4-10 years old): THB1,500;

Children (0-3 years old): Free. Family packages are available. Includes hotel pick/drop, lunch, activities + free stainless steel flask to keep.

If you are holidaying in Phuket, order home-style food cooked in the reserve’s kitchen to be delivered to your door. There’s a selection of frozen home-cooked meals; for freshly prepared meals, order 24 hours in advance.

How to help: Buy elephant feed. Price starts at $500 for Small Elephant Feed and goes up to $8,000 for Extra Large Small Elephant Feed.

Cooking vitamin balls for the elephants. (Photo by Preeti Verma Lal)

Elephantine problems

• African elephant habitat has declined by over 50 percent since 1979, while Asian elephants are now restricted to just 15 percent of their original range.

• In recent years, at least 20,000 elephants have been killed in Africa each year for their tusks.

• Around 90 percent of African elephants have been wiped out in the past century - largely due to the ivory trade - leaving an estimated 415,000 wild elephants alive today.

• The African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) is now listed as Critically Endangered and the African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) as Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

• Asian elephants are also under threat; their population has declined by at least 50 percent over the last three generations. There are only around 45,000 left in the wild.

• Today, the greatest threat to African elephants is wildlife crime, primarily poaching for the illegal ivory trade, while the greatest threat to Asian elephants is habitat loss, which results in human-elephant conflict.

(Source: World Wildlife Fund)

Wildlife Conservation Programs in Asia where you can volunteer

• International Animal Rescue’s Orangutan Rescue & Rehabilitation Center (Ketapang, Indonesia)

• The Gibbon Rehabilitation Project (Phuket, Thailand)

• Carnivore & Pangolin Education Centre (Ninh Binh, Vietnam)

• Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary (for Asiatic Wild Dog) (Rabam, Thailand)

• Snow Leopard Conservancy Trust (Ladakh, India)

• Dujiangyan Giant Panda Base (Shiqiao, China)

• Tatsikoki Centre (Sulawesi, Indonesia)

• Borneo Sun Bea Conservation Centre (Malah, Malaysia)

• Elephant Nature Park (Chiang Mai, Thailand)

• Hyderabad Tiger Conservation Society (for tigers)