Thailand

There’s a right way to do elephant tourism, writes KATY HALL

IT’S only 10am, but already the air is thick with pollution from burning-off season, and techno music relentlessly pumps through speakers spread across a tourist park in the northern Thai city of Chiang

Rai.

Its sole purpose seems to be to distract you from realising just how abnormal and unnatural what you’re seeing really is.

Throughout the park, elephants of varying age and size are chained up in concrete pens, being readied for their next performance, where busloads of international tourists pay the equivalent of just a few Australian dollars to see these once wild animals dance, shoot basketballs and paint pictures with their trunks.

For $20 you can bathe with them. An extra $30 will buy you a ride.

The scene, which leaves many of the group I’m travelling with in tears, feels a world away from a rival elephant tourism company but, in fact, it’s just 15 minutes down the same road.

For decades, elephant tourism has been prolific throughout South-East Asia, but perhaps nowhere more so than in Thailand, where it’s now a multimillion-dollar tourism industry.

For the right amount of money, you can essentially choose your own adventure with these once wild animals that, through years of abuse and neglect, have been broken and trained like house pets.

When you’re high on the deep relaxation that comes from being on holiday and surrounded by smells, sights and sounds foreign to your everyday life, it’s easy to see how tourists might forget that elephants are wild animals that were never meant for the life so many of them are now forced to live.

“A lot of people don’t consider it all that much before buying an experience, but think about it this way: Would you ride a panda?” asks Jack Highwood, the founder of Elephant Valley, a sanctuary in Chiang Rai that specialises in rehabilitating elephants who have spent their lives in the logging and entertainment industries.

“There’s nothing natural about 12 people getting into a tub with an elephant and washing it. Wild animals know how to wash and feed themselves. For them to be comfortable with people doing that requires a lot of training, and the only thing that stops them from behaving naturally and fighting those instincts is fear,” Jack explains.

Spread across 16ha of shady farmland, Elephant Valley is the first sanctuary of its kind in Chiang Rai.

Home to five elephants and with a staff of more than 30, the manic pace and rush so often associated with the major cities of Thailand is replaced by a laid-back energy, extended grassland, and the slow pace of life that is ideal for elephants to thrive.

“It’s about letting elephants be elephants,” says Jack, who has been operating a similar facility in Cambodia for the past 13 years.

“They’re wild animals, and a lot of people seem to have forgotten that. But being an animal shouldn’t be a job, and it shouldn’t be fearful.”

Here, all elephants are at various stages of rehabilitation, with each day offering a new chance to come closer to the animal they’re naturally meant to be.

When the elephants first arrive, they’re buddied up with another elephant already fully rehabilitated so they can relearn — or in some instances learn for the first time – how to behave naturally, and what their lives are meant to be like.

The model at Elephant Valley is markedly different to the traditional version of elephant tourism within Thailand, but it’s one Jack and the World Animal Protection agency say works and is slowly reaping rewards.

Instead of bathing or riding, visitors are led through sections of the farm on guided tours where it’s possible to watch elephants behaving naturally and without fear of negative repercussions.

At lunch, a traditional Thai feast is served at an outdoor dining room that looks directly on to the farmland and ever-curious and hungry elephants.

With 6000 visitors last year and a further 10,000 projected for 2019, it’s clear Jack’s is a business model that works, and one that more of the country is keen to transition to.

“Tourists like to blame operators or handlers of the low-welfare parks for the problem, but the reality is they’re just servicing demand. If people want it to stop and to see elephants treated properly, they need to stop paying for it and to tell their friends not to go there. It’s that simple,” says Jack.

Three hours southwest, high up in the hills outside the bustling city of Chiang Mai, Elephant Valley’s method is being adopted by another park, Chang Chill, which began its transition to a more humane business model in 2017.

Here, six resident female elephants roam freely across hilly terrain, with visitors able to watch bathing, feeding and grazing from elevated observation decks.

A full-day visit at Chang Chill includes learning about the elephants, a cooking class, a lesson in traditional herbology, and a chat with elephant handlers, known as mahouts.

“We want people to come here and learn about the elephants, our culture, and how those two things come together,” says Dee Kenyon, an elephant project manager with World Animal Protection who is helping oversee Chang Chill’s transformation.

On a grander scale, that marriage between elephants and culture is one that Thailand is now being forced to wrestle with more broadly. But surely nothing is worth an elephant being forced to live its 60 years on Earth as a pet wheeled out for travel selfies.