New Park Elephant Rescue Initiative

Elephant Nature park announces our new project to release elephants from trekking camps and bring they back home.

Since many year I have work with the Karen Tribe ( the only hill tribe who own elephants and have looked after them for hundreds of years. After the government ban logging , to take their elephant to work at the tourist business it seem to be the only chance to make money and let them to have the culture to taking care the elephant. Since 1989 Most ex-logging elephant move to work with the tourist camp. Many Karen owner or some of them in the family come to stay and look after the elephant while they work , but many year pass , many Karen learn that when they have to take the elephant to work far away from home , then they have separate from their family . Many of Karen decided to leave the elephant at the tourist camp and lease them to the camp owner and the camp will be the one who find the mahout to taking care for the elephant.

When the elephant not get look after by the real owner then they get treat less care. Some young mahout from Burma just work for money they have not relate with elephant and they just work for money. The problem about the elephant sick and died for the last few year happened too often , many elephant get abused by mahout ( not the owner ) Many mahout came to the park to ask us to help to solution for the problem , but we can't do any thing much because of some time they have to deal with the law case . After I get to know several time  of the problem I start to do the research and find out of all the root of the problem . It quite concern when I have found some of the Karen family who have the elephant from generation to generation , but this day many of them no more have the elephant. One family I has interview and find out that in 3 generation they have lost nearly 20 elephant .

Some grandfather who have so many elephant still alive , but their elephant are disappear.
I ask the young generation ,many of them lost the proud to have the elephant . Many old people are concern that one day the culture life between Karen and elephant will totally gone , so I decided to talk to the Karen family if they want to bring the elephant to stay home. Many of them are so excited and want to bring the elephant to go back to stay with them then they don't have to worry about their elephant any more.

The project will help to bring the old elephant , pregnancy elephant , mother and baby elephant back to stay in the village and release they 24 hours free. ENP will bring the volunteer to work at the village , plant the food for the elephant , plant the tree , work together to help the local community.

We already built   the facilities for the home stay and the money of the volunteer project will proceed toward to develop the elephant life and Karen family including school and helping the Karen woman to increase their income and activity.

Our first group of the elephant will start to walk back to home on 08 June  2010 . it will be mother and baby elephant , one old female elephant and one pregnancy .

The journey will take 7 days to reach home and we will have the group of volunteer , film crew and mahout will join with trip .
The elephant will walk and eat all the way , we already make the rout map and it will walk pass 6 district of Chiang Mai , and many hill tribe village.

I will update you after our 7 days trek with the elephant . If you have any question with this trip feel free to write me back