A Week with Gentle Giants: Volunteering at Elephant Nature Park

Thailand has been on my bucket list for over a decade. When I originally dreamed about visiting, the picture in my mind’s eye was always of me riding an elephant. How great would that be on Instagram? But that was before I learned about the dark side behind what it takes to put a human on an elephant.

Here is what I didn’t know:

Elephants’ backs aren’t meant for carrying that much weight. Surprising, right? But it actually severely damages their backs, especially when humans ride on top of them in harnessed baskets. Elephants have incredibly sensitive skin and although they are big and strong, their spines are not built to support our weight.

And, in order to respond to commands from humans (including accepting humans on their backs), Asian elephants are subjected to the pajan, a ritual also known as the crush. Humans take a baby elephant from its mother and lock it in a cage. They starve it, beat it, and torture it into submission. After several days, the baby elephant’s spirit has been broken and it will now submit to humans’ commands. The elephant trainers, or mahouts, keep hooks by their sides, to remind the elephants that they must obey or they will get the hook again.

Any Asian elephant who allows riding on its back, or who paints, or who does tricks in a circus, has been subjected to this torture. Pretty awful, right?

So clearly I wasn’t going near any tourist riding camps. But I did hope for an elephant experience, and I found it at Elephant Nature Park.

This incredible sanctuary was founded by Lek Chailert, a tireless Thai woman who grew up in a hill tribe and has made it her life’s mission to save elephants. She rescues them from tourist camps, illegal logging operations, and circuses. I opted for a week of volunteering with these gentle giants and had an eyeopening and exhilarating time.

Each day, I would awake to the sounds of elephants trumpeting. There were three main volunteer jobs: food, which could involve unloading bananas from trucks, washing watermelons, or making giant rice balls for the eles; poop, which, you guessed it, meant shoveling giant piles of elephant poo; and corn, the toughest of the three, in which the volunteers hopped onto the back of a flat bed truck, drove an hour away to a cornfield, cut down stalks with machetes and loaded them onto the truck.

Every day we would have a morning and afternoon task, broken up by delicious vegetarian meals, and sometimes there would be evening entertainment, like local kids doing traditional dance, or the mahouts playing music.

Actual elephant interaction was limited, as it should be. Elephant Nature Park is very cautious about which elephants they allow to interact with humans. After all, these are wild animals, and some have been so abused by humans that they have mental and emotional issues regarding people. But some are still gentle, and we were able to bathe them and touch them and feed them, always with a guide.

Plus, you have plenty of free time as a volunteer, and I spent many hours relaxing on the skywalk with a book and a beer, watching elephants roam beneath me.

Working with the other volunteers turned out to be quite a happy social experience. I should have expected this: any group of people who decide to devote a week to scooping poop in the name of animal rights is probably going to be a group of top notch human beings. I met all kinds of really great folks, from dedicated elephant activists to casual animal lovers like myself. And there weren’t just elephants! I spent many relaxing afternoons in the Cat Kingdom, snuggling with adorable rescued kitties.

I left Elephant Nature Park with some great new friends and a lot of education about elephants. I highly encourage a visit if you are in northern Thailand; they offer many alternatives to the weekly volunteer program, including several different day trips if you are pressed for time. And even if you don’t go, I urge you to consider the plight of the elephant whenever you are traveling, at home or abroad. People will continue performing the pajan for as long as there are tourists who want to ride elephants or watch them do tricks, so it is up to us to cease the demand!