![]() Parents of young children can benefit from having a printable elephant outline. Send the message that you are willing to let baby elephants be tortured so you can get a great selfie, and that service will no doubt be provided.Printable Elephant Outline for Parents of Young Children Even after sitting on this for almost two months I’m struggling to put my finger on anything more insightful than the old adage: “Buyer Be Aware.” The flow of a consumer’s money is one of the most powerful forces on Earth. This is my current theory I do not know if I am right.Īt the beginning of this two part series, I stated there must be a deeper life lesson embedded in our elephant experience. If I am so selfish as to make that decision for my fun and entertainment, what chance do these elephants have against a poor farmer who is having to decide between defending the crops that feed his family and preserving a wild elephant running roughshod over his land? Good sanctuaries that help educate people and care well for the elephants and their Mahouts seem like a reasonable bridge between the tyrannical abuses this animal population currently experiences and the ideal future when humanity shifts their entire ecological perspective and elephants can return to the wild to enjoy their life free of human interaction. I am willing to consider the possibility that all of this hemming and hawing is only a puppet show used to soothe my cognitive dissonance between my self image as an environmentally aware person who wouldn’t want to abuse animals for my entertainment and the fact that I went to visit an elephant in Thailand. If we are being honest as we can be, the bottom line is I wanted to see elephants. With tourism, there is motivation to save this species. I hate to be this pessimistic, but follow the money. There isn’t adequate space in the wild for these animals to exist separated from humans (at least not in Thailand), and without tourism, what sanctuary or preserve can afford to support that many elephants? It would be nice to imagine setting these elephants free to roam wild in their natural habitat with no trouble from humans, but it seems to me to be an unrealistic goal at this point in our human/global/elephant reality. Furthermore, as of the last count made in 2007, there were 3,456 elephants in captivity in Thailand alone. They are hunted, and they have very few places to go. When an elephant must compete with a human for space, who wins? Add to this problem the market for elephant skin and tusks for both Chinese medicine and other baubles, and you have a difficult space for the elephant to thrive in the wild. The highest contributor to this problem is loss, degradation, fragmentation of habitat as a result of human built farming, cities, and industry. The fact is, wild Asian Elephants are endangered. ![]() "Elephant conservation in India – an overview" (PDF). “Elephants either make money for the Thai people or they are giant crop eating pests.” Andrew argues. In India alone, wild elephants are known to destroy crops worth up to $2-$3 million US annually. Here is the additional fact that turned my thinking on this question. “Now, don’t you roll over on me.” I say, feeling uneasy as I think about myself as a Leslie Mud-Pancake. Even with Lady Boy plopped down in the mud and me standing at full height, he is taller than me. “Excellent for your pores!” I tell him, rubbing in circles to make sure I exfoliate properly. The skin feels exactly as I imagined: thick and leathery with wrinkles that rumple under my hand as I apply the mud-mask. “Oooh, those are some bristly hairs you have atop your head, Mr. My elephant, (introduced to us by his Mahout as “Lady Boy” because of his less than fully developed tusks*) waited patiently, flapping his ears, while I scooped up mud, smeared it on the top of his head and down his neck. Once they were settled, we were instructed to scoop up some mud-goop (and doubtedly POO!) from the bottom of the mud puddle and use our hands to smear and scrub the elephant from top to bottom. The elephants were lead into a mud puddle and instructed by their Mahouts to sit down. After a while, we give the elephants some alone time while we humans eat a nice lunch.
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