At least 50 to 100 elephant calves are still being taken from the forests of Burma every year to supply the tourist camps.
Even worse, it is estimated that for every calf smuggled across the country’s 1,200-mile border with Thailand, up to five adult female and adolescent elephants from the calf’s immediate family group are gunned down in cold blood.
The forests of Burma are one of the last strongholds for Asian elephants and second only to India.
But such is the scale of the trade, it is thought that the endangered wild elephant population there – estimated at up to 5,000 individuals – could be wiped out or damaged beyond repair within ten years or so.
While African elephants and ivory have dominated discussions on conservation, very little attention has been given to the Asian elephant.
The Asian elephant is facing extinction and is listed as ‘endangered’ on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, the world’s most comprehensive inventory of the conservation status of species.
With an estimated 25,000 to 35,000 left in the wild, there is roughly one Asian elephant to every 20 African elephants.
While ivory poaching has recently escalated to alarming levels again, threatening many African elephant populations, the crisis facing their Asian relatives is still being overlooked – something we’ve set out to change.
Despite what some are claiming, Elephant Family has recently received disturbing reports that the illegal and brutal cross-border trade in endangered wild Asian elephants continues to thrive.
And now we have collaborated with The Ecologist Film Unit and Link TV on a shocking new documentary film that lays the trade bare.
Working with undercover operatives, the film includes interviews with elephant experts, undercover researchers and representatives of the Thai government.
It also includes harrowing clandestine footage of elephant calves being mistreated and tortured along the Thai-Burma border.
Many of the people who were interviewed for the film and provided the undercover footage did so at great risk, and continue to put their lives on the line to fight this trade.
The film tells the story of the trade – illegal in both Burma and Thailand – in elephants from the remote and mountainous forests that straddle the Thai border.
Entire families of elephants are routinely being rounded up and the adults shot dead so that babies can be dragged back to Thailand illegally.
Undercover cameras filmed the elephants as they endured the dreaded phajaan, a cruel, spirit-breaking ritual where the baby calves will be tied up, with no food and water, and beaten relentlessly for days on end. It is pure torture and according to experts we spoke to, very often the calves will die from their injuries or from stress, starvation or the sheer heartbreak of seeing their family killed in front of their eyes.
After they have been taught to be afraid of humans, the calves that do survive are smuggled across Thailand. When they reach the tourist elephant parks, many of them will be chained to a surrogate mother in an attempt to suggest they have been bred in captivity.
Telltale signs can be a complete lack of bonding between ‘mother’ and calf, the inability of a calf to suckle (because the ‘mother’ is not actually producing milk), as well as the scars from their horrific training.
Some camps even try to present unrelated calves as elephant twins alongside their bogus mother. This is almost always a double deception as elephant twins are incredibly rare.
The current market price for a healthy broken-in baby elephant is £14,000 to £20,000 and with the rapid growth of tourism and demand for elephants in entertainment – we calculate the tourism industry in Thailand employs up to 2,000 elephants – there are strong incentives for the trade.
As Burma increasingly opens up to the rest of the world, there are fears that the growth of the tourist industry there could be disastrous for the country’s remaining wild elephants.
One thing is for sure, though: if Thailand’s brutal baby elephant trade is not ended soon, Asia’s last remaining populations of wild elephants in Burma may be lost for ever.
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