Of all the experiences we encounter in our time on Earth, there are some experiences that rouse inexplicable emotions deep within our soul, that we can never quite articulate the essence of to others who were not present, that we know with confidence we will carry every moment in pristine detail in our memory for the rest of our lives. I had an experience like this, and when someone asks me what the best day of my life was, I know it instantly and without hesitation, only struggling with how I can possibly summarize it into words brief enough to not drag a conversation into the ground. It was the day that I got to observe and participate in the rescue of a forty five year old Asian Elephant from a lifetime of unthinkable suffering, and watch as she arrived and settled into the refuge that she will call home for the rest of her life.
The journey began when I met Lek Chailert at a fundraiser in Long Beach, California. Lek is the founder of Save Elephant Foundation, the world’s largest elephant advocacy organization and home to a network of sanctuaries throughout Asia for elephants rescued from cruel tourist attractions, illegal logging camps, roadside zoos and more, in addition to serving as a voice for threatened Asian Elephants, who are facing a “soft extinction” as their large and charismatic counterparts, African Elephants, are widely included in public conversation about species loss. As a Thai woman who grew up in the country’s rural Northern hills, Lek has witnessed mistreatment of elephants firsthand and seeks to reform her country’s animal care standards and help existing elephant camps transition into more humane models. Lek is a widely respected figure in the conservation and animal welfare world, so when I heard she would attend an event close to my home, I jumped at the opportunity and quickly bought a ticket.
To make a very long story as short as possible, I ended up striking up a conversation with Lek by pure luck, and she invited me to come and stay at any of Save Elephant Foundation’s projects. Some months later, I got a call from an old friend out of the blue, telling me she had quit her job and was desperate to travel before she went off to grad school. We bought the cheapest flights to Bangkok that night, and I reached out to Lek to tell her I would be in Thailand by the end of the week.
Fast forward and we were in Chiang Mai planning to stay there for a few days until our scheduled dates at Elephant Nature Park, SEF’s largest and most widely known sanctuary. I was surprised to see an incoming call from Lek while eating breakfast at a hostel; I answered immediately, and she informed me that SEF had the rare opportunity to rescue an elephant being surrendered by a tourist camp, with room for one or two people to ride along on the rescue. I was absolutely dumbfounded, and was still in shock when we were picked up the next morning to head out. We met with Lek and her husband Darrick on the way and headed to Pai, a small mountain town about three hours North, known for its winding, treacherous road consisting of 762 turns, most of them hairpin switchbacks. Another driver met us with an open-top semi truck specially fitted to transport an elephant, and we were off to the camp where Kanjana was being held.
My stomach was in knots as we neared the camp- I had heard and read so much over the years about Thai elephant riding attractions and I had seen captive elephants being ridden from a distance, but nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to witness.
For context, elephants, being wild animals by nature regardless of being born in captivity, require extremely harsh forms of training in order to submit to performing for their handlers. Elephants have rounded spines, so unlike horses, carrying weight on their backs causes long-term physical damage. Because fencing and reinforcement is incredibly difficult and expensive to construct for such a large animal, it is typical for tourist camp elephants to be kept in chains when not performing or giving rides.
My heart absolutely sank as we stepped out of the van. Three elephants- monolithic in size, deeply intelligent, strikingly beautiful beings- stood in the dirt under a small shade structure, restrained by chains no longer than six feet tightly attached to each animal’s ankle. They displayed stereotypical symptoms of zoochosis, a sign of chronic stress in improperly managed captive wildlife, by swaying back and forth rhythmically. This is an attempt to self-soothe out of boredom, frustration and anxiety, and watching them sway was maddening.
Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth was all they knew.
As some of the most intelligent and emotionally complex creatures in the animal kingdom, wild Asian Elephants can walk up to fifty miles in a day foraging for food and form lifelong bonds and intricate social hierarchies with their herdmates. Wild elephants enjoy swimming, bathing in mud, socializing and foraging; but aside from their daily interaction with pushy tourists, these elephants’ lives were summarized by two painfully boring movements: back and forth. I am used to seeing animals in deplorable conditions and keeping my composure in witnessing unthinkable cruelty, but I had to turn away and breathe deep to stop the tears that were welling up in my throat within minutes of setting foot in that place.
As we waited for paperwork and technicalities to be sorted out over the course of several hours, Lek pointed out Kanjana and told me her story. She was the largest of the three by far, with a uniquely beautiful shape to her head and face (hence the name, which means “beautiful girl” in Thai). She was ripped from her mother as a calf and spent the first twenty years of her life in backbreaking labor at the hands of an illegal logging camp. At a young age she fell into a pit after being startled, and her back ankle was mangled. Still, she continued to be worked.
At around twenty years old she was sold to this tourist camp, which had kept her in this very spot- on the same six foot chain- for twenty additional years. Her only escape was her daily tourist ride, in which she would carry several tourists in the hot sun on a ride through the jungle under threat of the bullhook (a sharp tool which resembles a fire poker, used to hook and drag disobedient elephants in sensitive places such as behind the ear or under the foreleg). Now, after a lifetime of shackles, beatings, and intensive labor, the camp that owned her had fallen on financial hardships and chose her out of the three to surrender, because her mangled ankle and slight limp made her the slowest and most difficult.
As the day progressed, we watched several groups of tourists arrive by van and rush excitedly to meet the elephants. The dynamic between the tourists and the animals was intriguing yet chilling. Nearly all of them were dressed-to-the-nines and came with go pros, selfie sticks, and cameras; it seemed that documenting this experience for social media was more important than connecting with the animals themselves.
Here was this majestic and deeply intelligent animal whose badly mangled foot wasn’t half as broken as her spirit, swaying back and forth in iron shackles; unlike many elephant camps, this one didn’t attempt to hide their harsh methods of training and openly struck her with the bullhook to pose her for photos. The tourists stood in line for Kanjana to perform the exact same pose over and over again, rarely stopping to look into her sunken and tired eyes for long enough than it took to “click” the photo and move on. This had been her life, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, year after year.
I have too much faith in humanity to believe that these tourists didn’t recognize that something was wrong here, but it was clear that the dopamine spike that resulted from social media affirmation was simply too tempting to resist. Maybe that’s why none of the tourists had the courage to look deep into her eyes; they didn’t want to come to terms with the fact that maybe, just maybe, their instagram post wasn’t worth it. “What an amount of suffering and cruel punishment the poor creatures have to endure in order to give pleasure to men devoid of thought,” the philosopher Albert Schweitzer once said. I couldn’t help but agree as I watched these shameful interactions unfold.
There is the saying that “elephants never forget,” but humans should only hope that elephants can forgive.
It seemed a lifetime had passed by the time the tourist camp owners were ready to allow Kanjana to be loaded into our truck. My friend and I had to wait in place as they walked her down the road to a dirt ramp where she could load- Darrick accompanied them as Lek stayed behind with us and completed the last of the paperwork. When another hour passed we began to feel more nervous. Lek told us that Darrick would try to encourage Kanjana’s handlers to use positive reinforcement to convince her to load, but offending them could push our luck and cause them to change their minds. It was very much possible that Kanjana was being beaten and coerced into entering the truck.
Time seemed to slow to a stop as it began to rain, and it was now that I realized we would have to travel down the mountain using the same treacherous road, in the pouring rain, as the sun moved lower and lower in the sky. We were sitting in near silence when Lek’s phone rang: Kanjana had loaded successfully, and she had broken a small reinforcement barrier, but staff were working quickly to replace it. We took one last look at the elephants we had to leave behind, jumped in the van and raced down the road just as the time had come for the journey home to begin.
For the first hour of the transport, Lek, Darrick, and a few SEF staff members rode with Kanjana as we followed closely in the van. Every turn was stomach churning to watch as the massive truck, weighed down with a massive animal, slowly worked its way down the mountain. It was an extraordinary sight and caused quite the pileup of cars. Eventually, the truck pulled over for a rest, and Lek ran to our van to invite us to ride with Kanjana. I was beside myself, and climbed into the truck in a combination of excitement, fear, and healthy respect. To even see an elephant is to be struck by their daunting size, but to sit down before an elephant and look up at her is a humbling experience difficult to put into words. Everything about her, from her towering height to her delicate ears to the dozens of lines and indentations on her face, was awe-inspiring. She was so beautiful. It was in this moment that the gravity of the day’s experiences hit me in full, and I began to cry in the presence of this incredible animal, who, despite her deadly strength and enormous size was entirely at our mercy. My role on this mission was to hand Kanjana an endless supply of bananas to keep her busy and calm, and I happily obliged.
As the truck inched forward Kanjana’s trunk began to dance and sway in the air, trailing and following scents that wafted deep from the rainy jungle we were moving through. For the majority of the drive, as Darrick informed us, Kanjana’s body language was surprisingly relaxed and content as she enjoyed drinking in the thousands of scents around her. She would only bring her trunk down every few minutes to grab a banana from my hand before resuming.
Every once in a while, her face would harden with tension at certain smells and she would begin to suck her trunk; this, Darrick told us, was a form of self-pacification, a sign of anxiety. We will never know what it was that her powerful trunk detected in those mountains, but perhaps they were smells reminiscent of the painful life she had led, the decades of trauma she had endured at the hands of humans.
At times the truck would slow to a near stop attempting to navigate a dangerous hairpin turn, and I, who was facing backwards towards Kanjana, could only hope for the best. Somehow, in this exposed truck bed with an unpredictable five tonne animal travelling down blind turns on a freshly wet mountain road, I felt incredibly safe. With a single strike of her trunk she could have broken every bone in our bodies, yet her presence was somehow comforting. We talked and talked about elephants, tourists, deforestation, poaching and more as the hours passed, but my eyes never left Kanjana, who had us all in a trance with her dancing trunk, sentient eyes and indescribable beauty.
The overall anxiety began to drop as we finally reached flat land, the sun dipping below the mountains and the landscape beginning to darken.
We were driving fast now; or at least it seemed that way now that we were far away from the hairpin turns on the mountain road down from Pai. It was well after dark now, and without the sounds of other cars passing us, Kanjana was at her calmest. I noticed that the rain and mist was long gone, and looked to the sky to see a black, starry night with just a sliver of crescent moon above us. Looking up at Kanjana and seeing that her trunk was still drinking in the scents of the surrounding land, I suddenly had the urge to do the same. Ever so gently and slowly, I stood up and climbed to the top of the truck, my trembling hands gripping the still-wet rails; I closed my eyes and breathed deep, the breeze on my face and in my hair, the scent of jungle and rice field in my lungs, and Kanjana’s trunk slowly dancing all around me like in entity in itself as our silhouettes were illuminated by the gentle, faint moonlight. If I have ever experienced sheer, raw euphoria- ecstasy in its purest form- it was in that moment, and I wished that it could never end.
It was well into the night when we turned into Elephant Nature Park’s property, and Kanjana was unloaded into a temporary chain-free holding shelter. The shackle was removed from her leg, and she seemed afraid, uncertain, unsure of what to do with herself in this new space. We left her alone and went to enjoy a well-earned massive vegan Thai feast on the upper deck of the sanctuary’s elephant viewing platform before heading to bed, drained and exhausted.
Three days after her arrival at the sanctuary, Kanjana was led across the river to a massive enclosure where she would live until she found the courage to socialize with other elephants. It took hours for her new handlers to move her using only positive reinforcement (the temptation of delicious bananas and other fruit) but using violent force was not an option.
This time she had gained the bravery to explore her new habitat. Her gray skin turned to an earthy red as she played in the mud for the first time in her life; her eyes smiled as she enthusiastically tossed it onto her back, rolled in it, and relaxed in it. She investigated every natural object in her habitat with great curiosity, taking the time to savor her newfound freedom and express her own autonomy.
There is something incredibly profound about watching someone discover the very basic pleasures of life for the first time - for the elephants who call this sanctuary home, mud is a bare necessity and a simple form of daily enrichment, but for Kanjana, it represented the first time in her life engaging in a behavior natural to her species. Her body was now hers and hers alone, not a piece of property to be non-consensually touched and violated by the hands of clueless tourists looking to pose for that instagram-perfect moment with some unoriginal caption about “connecting with nature” and “feeling her energy”.
Enough research has been conducted about elephant behavior to know that her memory, emotional complexity and intelligence is hauntingly deep, but we will never truly know if the day will come when Kanjana realizes that the unspeakable violence and brutality she endured every single day for over forty years is only a distant memory now, maybe to visit her in the occasional bad dream from which she wakes up and remembers that no one is going to hurt her here. Everything Kanjana would do from that day on would be by her own choice, not by the pressure of a bullhook.
It was a teary goodbye when we had to leave Elephant Nature Park, knowing that our simple days of meeting Kanjana at the gate with fresh bananas every morning were over. I knew with great confidence that I would never forget her. For us, this would be the end of our interaction with this incredible creature, but for her, this was only the beginning of her long and joyous life.
Several weeks later, we received word that Kanjana had made her first friend. Fah Mui, an ancient, slow moving frail dwarf of an elephant, who had struggled to socialize with the park’s younger and more intimidating elephants, had found a kindred spirit in Kanjana. Fah Mui had spent a lifetime pulling heavy logs at an illegal logging camp, and now that the strength had left her once-young body, she had been deemed useless and surrendered.
Fah Mui’s gentle, kind nature made her approachable to Kanjana, whose lack of experience socializing with her own kind made learning to be an elephant difficult for her. The two had formed a deep connection and are often seen pressing their faces into one another, rumbling deeply and softly in the way that elephants communicate. Both of their memories had been cut deep with unspeakable trauma, and both of their pasts were hauntingly dark. United by commonality of having suffered the unimaginable, they sought comfort in one another.
It is true that they will likely never parallel the exact behaviors of wild elephants, but they will move forward together, overcoming obstacles wherever they can. For two beings who lacked the bare necessity of connection over the course of their lives, a new life full of affection and companionship would illuminate the darkness on the path ahead. Fah Mui and Kanjana became inseparable soulmates, and to this day, are rarely spotted beyond trunk’s reach of one another.
Their lives are simple now- they wait to be fed every morning, they roam the hundreds of lush, green acres that make up the sanctuary grounds, they touch and rumble to each other affectionately, they play in the mud, they may occasionally swim across the river to stroll through the forest on the other side, they may encounter water buffalo or other elephants
along the way. Every night their bodies rest, and the aches and pains that once plagued them after days of backbreaking labor are gone. Life is slow, and life is good. As the seasons change the landscape transforms, and the more distant of a memory their lifelong ordeals become. They will roam these grounds until the day they die, peacefully, at a ripe old age.
It will take so much time for them to heal. And they have all the time in the world.
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