Elephant cruelty Cruelty in Thailand
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40501667
South east Asia is an amazing place, it has incredible temples and food. But if you look closer you can see there is a huge problem in Asia. This is the animal cruelty problem. I have only spent 5 nights in Bangkok and there were elephants in plays and tigers in cages.
In Thailand there are two sides of this story. The first is the tourist’s perspective, over 30 million people come to Thailand every year. Mostly tourists will go to animal shows and ride elephants and take pictures and then go home. What they don't understand is that they didn't have a special connection with that wild animal, they didn't see the scars under that elephant's ear, and they most certainly did not understand that elephants in the wild will travel as far as 50 kilometers while the average zoo space in Thailand keeps them in chains. Of the 45,000 elephants in the world 3,000-4,000 of them are kept in captivity in Thailand!
Most of the elephants in captivity were captured from Myanmar where they lure baby elephants into trap pits and if necessary shoot the mother. When the elephants are in the hands of the Thai, they go through a process called phajaan. Phajaan is a horrible process that basically will break the baby elephant, the poachers will beat them and poke them with long nails or bullhooks and deny them food and water (some don’t survive.) A wild elephant calf will stay with its mothers pack for at least 16 years but now they are ripped away at 6 months. After this process, the elephants are forced to work all day with not much food. Elephant’s skin is prone to sun burns, so a wild elephant will coat itself with mud for a natural sunscreen, but if captured, elephants have no work breaks, and will be riding around with a sun burn and 10 tourists on its back. In Thailand more than 13 million people took cruel elephant rides in 2017.
That cruelty is definitely happening, but what was not taken into account was what were the workers thinking. We should not treat the workers with disgust. I believe it is horrible to treat an elephant like that, but we westerners don't know what's it like to be living in Thailand in a small village. What if you don't have a choice, either be starving or be cruel to an animal to survive. In America we don't have as many jobs as we should have but in small villages in Thailand they make money off of tourists. A small village in Thailand doesn't need one million doctors like the USA does, there are less job opportunities. So if you want to help this cause, don't just donate to the Elephants. Also donate to the people of Thailand because if all the elephants are taken away, the people will be left with nothing and they will starve just like the elephants.
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Thanks for your piece about this important social issue!
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