Annie Hennessey of St. John’s recently had the unique experience of working with rescued elephants.
Annie Hennessey, originally from St. John’s, sought exotic locale to help animals
Annie Hennessey’s vacation companions each have had their share of difficulties and downright abuse. Many have scars; others have been left with permanent disabilities. Quite a few have mangled feet from stepping on landmines in Burma, and most have tears and holes in their ears, where a finger was inserted to lead them around.
Then there’s Jokia, age 79 and blind: her former employer had stabbed her in both eyes when she was reluctant to go to work.
Hennessey is on vacation in Thailand, where she just finished a week of volunteering with rescued elephants at the Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai.
A St. John’s native who has been living in Toronto since 2006 — and an actress, having recently starred in the Donnie Dumphy movie “How to be Deadly” — Hennessey says she’s a lover of all animals, and was looking for an exotic location that would get her out of the cold and allow her to contribute to an animal-related cause.
An animal-rights activist friend of hers had posted about the Elephant Nature Park on Facebook, and Hennessey made the decision to volunteer there, not knowing much about elephants.
“I knew they were super gentle and highly intelligent creatures,” she said in an interview from her accommodations in a small hut at the park.
Hennessey’s days at the park started at 7 a.m. and her work ranged from shovelling elephant poo and cleaning out their sleeping stalls, to preparing their food, feeding them and bathing them in the river.
The nature park also hosts a small-animal clinic which houses about 400 dogs and 200 cats as well as rabbits, and Hennessey would help out there, too. Nighttime consisted of lessons in Thai culture, elephant information sessions and other activities.
There are 44 elephants at the park from all over Thailand and Burma, Hennessey said, and, with the exception of some babies and some wild elephants, they had been working in circuses, carrying tourists on tours, doing logging work or begging in the street. They are generally too old or injured to work anymore.
“Lek, the founder, is very wellknown here, and usually people will tell her they suspect an elephant is being abused, or people who own them and know they can’t work anymore contact her because they know she’ll buy it from them,” Hennessey said.
“The sad thing is she knows that most of those people want her to buy their weak elephants so they can use that money to buy a new, young one to put to work again. It’s a vicious cycle, but there’s really no other way to acquire them.”
Last Friday, Hennessey got to participate in an elephant rescue mission: a family contacted the nature park to sell an old female elephant they were using to take tourists on trekking tours. It had gotten too weak to work.
Fourteen people from the park drove two hours to the village and stayed there overnight, with the intention of walking the elephant back to the park, but their mission wasn’t successful. They discovered the elephant wasn’t legally owned and taking her would have put the park at risk of prosecution.
“People either capture the elephants from the jungle and claim them as their own, or bring them from Burma illegally. Both cases mean whoever owns them is at risk of (prosecution under) Thai law,” Hennessey said. “We had to leave without her, which was horrific to do, after seeing the condition she was in.
“The (elephants) here at the park were really sad to see when I arrived … but now I see that they are the lucky ones. They’ve won the elephant lottery. When we went to the village and saw the old lady we had come for, I felt sick to my stomach and I still do, seeing her with that heavy chain around her neck, and so hungry — she was picking up and eating garbage on the ground. I think leaving her there will be one of the saddest moments of my life, knowing we get to go on in our free, luxurious human lives and she just has nothing and no one to let her be happy. I bawled most of the ride back.”
Hennessey plans to return to the Elephant Nature Park next year, and in the meantime will urge travellers to reconsider when they come across an animal circus, elephant ride or elephant painting show.
“Not enough people question how they get these elephants to do these things that are so obviously unnatural to them,” she said. “They do it with extremely cruel human overpowering. Everyone needs to think about who’s paying the real price of our idle entertainment when animals are involved.”