Tenley's Green Tree

I recently visited an elephant rescue park called Elephant Nature Park in Thailand. From the drive there to drive back I had a whole different perspective on elephants 🐘 . I was astonished by how poorly they were treated before they were rescued. They are much happier now at the center and have over 300 acres to roam around. Most of the elephants, before they came to the center, were either used as riding elephants, logging elephants, circus elephants or city elephants. Yes, riding an elephant sounds so fun and I bet you’re thinking right now “what’s the harm in that?” Well turns out there’s lots of harm in it. Asian Elephants’s spine have an upward curve so when the saddle goes on it’s back it actually flattens over time and causes problems to the spine, and they’re typically not kept in great environments so next time you and your family want to ride elephants think about the impact it has on the elephants and that you are supporting unethical animal treatment . Logging is another example of an unethical elephant job. Chains are tied around the elephants and used to drag logs out of forests. Many of the elephants we saw were rescued from the logging industry. One elephant has a very sad story, she had given birth to a baby elephant but the owner would not let the mother take time off of work to care for her baby and since the baby needed to be with its mother at all times too nurse, the owner forced the baby to walk alongside his mother during work, unfortunately during the walk the baby tripped and rolled down the hill and sadly died. Like humans, elephants actually grieve and are such social animals and look after one another like a family. Another sad story is (and this unfortunately happens to a lot of elephants) an elephant was logging and it stepped on a left over land mine and 💣it blew up her foot. It took her two days to walk back out of the forest 🌳. Next are circus 🎪 elephants and if you’ve seen Pets Two you know how badly the tiger was treated that actually happens in real life to some elephants where they torture the elephants so badly and eventually the elephants lose their spirits and the owners want to do this on purpose. The last type of elephant is a city elephant these elephants are really just born in the city, treated terribly and are used as pets. Eventually the elephants hit maturity and they have to send it away. Some bad things that also happen to the elephants is when the elephants get in trouble they get shoved in between two trees and the owner wants to punish the elephant and make it so that the elephant is afraid of him so what they do is they take a bamboo spear and shove it in their eye 👁️ and then throw rocks 🪨 at their eye that’s why most of the elephants we saw were blind in one eye or even both. Another thing that I noticed was that some of the elephants had large holes or chunks taken out of their ears, so I asked our tour guide named Deng and he said that it was because when the former owners wanted to lead them around they hooked the rope through their ear and the hole starts out small but the owners are constantly pulling and tugging the elephants around that the hole grows and grows. Now I am going to tell you some differences between Asian Elephants and African Elephants. Asian Elephants have smaller ears while African Elephants have large ears that kind of look like Africa another difference that I find quite interesting is that all genders of African Elephants have tusks while only the male Asian Elephants have tusks and sometimes even the males don’t have tusks. The population of Asian Elephants is fewer than 52,000 and their status is endangered so if you are in love with these big hearts than start with the little things because the little things can make a huge impact.To find out how to help just click in to the section in my website.So we’ve reached the end of our journey, so for now don’t forget to recycle ♻️!