Prospects low for Thailand elephants

Her rescue by Anantara’s “director of elephants,” John Roberts, meant that she’d be riding tourists around instead. Not the perfect solution, former elephant conservationist Roberts acknowledged, but a big improvement for this 17-year-old tusker, who would no longer have to face down cars, drunks and other dangers of the concrete jungle.

Long revered for their intelligence and sensitivity, elephants are Thailand’s national animal. Elephant Day is celebrated on March 13. A white elephant appeared on the country’s flag since 1917. The animals once paraded members of the royal family, served as super-weapons in Southeast Asian armies and worked in the forests, hauling logs for the Thai lumber trade.

But encroaching civilization and a 1989 ban on logging sent the pachyderm population into a tailspin. From about 100,000 at the turn of the 20th century, its numbers have steadily dwindled to a meager head count, as of last June, of 3,456 domesticated animals and another 1,000 or so in the wild. These latter face an increasingly bleak future, hunted both by vengeful farmers whose crops they sometimes ruin and by ivory hunters who covet their tusks.

Though about 300 elephants still live on the streets of Thai cities, Boon Rot and the more fortunate of her peers have found a way station at trekking camps such as Anantara. These camps are highly popular with tourists, but many are notorious among animal rights groups, which say that they are maltreating the creatures. This was something I didn’t learn until after my camp experience, but it left me with a decidedly mixed feeling about the whole thing.

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