Thai elephant gets new prosthetic limb
Mosha was injured after she stepped on a landmine when she was 7 months old
BANGKOK— Mosha was seven months old when she stepped on a landmine near Thailand’s border with Burma and lost a front leg. That was a decade ago.
This week, she received her ninth artificial leg, thanks to the Friends of the Asian Elephant Foundation hospital in northern Thailand.
Mosha is one of more than a dozen elephants that have been wounded by landmines in the border region.
There, rebels have been fighting the Burma government for decades.
She was the first elephant to be fitted with a prosthetic limb at the hospital near Lampang.
Mosha weighed about 590 kilograms when she was wounded.
Today, she weighs more than 1,814 kilograms, and her growth has necessitated frequent upgrades of her artificial leg.
Motala, another resident of the hospital, lost a front leg to a landmine in the same border area in 1999.
She is now more than 50 years old. The Eyes of Thailand, a 2012 documentary, featured her being fitted with an artificial limb.
Dr. Therdchai Jivacate, a Thai orthopedist who helped design prosthetic limbs for the elephants, said they could not survive without them.
“When she cannot walk, she is going to die,” he told the Daily Telegraph in Britain in 2009, when Mosha was fitted with a new prosthesis.
When Mosha received her newest artificial limb last week, he told Reut- ers: “The way she walked was unbalanced.”
He explained that her spine was going to bend.
“That means she would have hurt her cartilages badly and eventually stopped walking. And she would have died because of that.”
The Thai Elephant Conservation Center estimates that there are 2,000 to 3,000 elephants living in the wild in Thailand and about 2,700 domesticated ones.
In the past, many elephants in Thailand worked in the logging industry.