Back to the forest

Tourism has had a devastating impact on Thailand’s captive elephants, but a new project in a northerfis Karen village suggests it might also be-their saviour

- Mark Stratton a

A mid tangled vines and stepping-stone crossings where the cool stream  lapped my feet, I paused. The sound of snapping bamboo heralded the arrival of a herd of five Asian elephants. Their wrinkled hides were sticky with red riverbank mud and they browsed heartily, tugging up trunkfuls of greenery amid the cloyingly humid jungle. Two of these animals had a particularly sad story that I'd been following online. At just a year old, baby Par-Gae-Mae lost his mother after she ingested agricultural crops that had been sprayed with pesticide; the calf was found crying beside her body. He was now being cared for by a soulmate in grief, Mo-Go-Nar, who had lost her own baby to herpes EEHV) and had adopted him.

We followed the herd upstream to a waterfall. The young elephant slipped on a rock and blew a squeaky trumpet of dismay. Yet these captive animals are generally finding peace in the Om Koi jungles of northern Thailand; they are free, for now, from the cruelty that the country’s elephant-tourism industry metes out upon them.

There are 59 elephants at the new Evolution Om Koi Project, a collaboration between the American non-profit Gentle Giants and the Karen hilltribe people, the owners of these animals. The aim is to find a more compassionate form of elephant tourism; one that delivers income to the community so that they can avoid sending these creatures to barbarous riding camps.

Any visitor to Thailand cannot fail to notice that elephants are an enduring and omnipresent national symbol, whether taking the form of jade statuettes in Buddhist temples, embellishing the labels of beer bottles, or as batik fabric patterns sold in tourist markets. When Tarrived at Chiang Mai railway station, on my way to Om Koi, I even stepped outside onto a little plaza and was surrounded by four stone elephants.