Mammoth job of elephant saviour

THAILAND - Lek flings slices of sweet bread into the maw of a frisky 5-year-old male elephant she calls Hope, whom she has hand-reared from babyhood. Hope kisses her cheeks with his trunk.

In the afternoon, she will romp with the whole herd as they take their river-baths. A while back, Lek had broken ribs after a training session with Hope got unruly and he stabbed her with his tusks. But all is forgiven.

A flimsy bamboo hut sways alarmingly as two dozen elephants, their hides scarred by years of abuse, jostle for Lek's food.

Lek, also known as Sangduen Chailert, is a diminutive Hill Tribe woman with mammoth plans to look after Thailand's declining population of domesticated elephants. Her forthright challenges to elephant owners have resulted in death threats.

Lek is up against centuries of rural Asian tradition because she insists elephants should no longer be subjected to "phajaan". This procedure involves jabbing heated irons and sharpened metal spikes into roped juvenile elephants to break their spirit and mould them into beasts of burden.

Lek has documented scores of these sessions, during which half of the animals die. "Of the survivors, about half go mad," she says. "This brutality can make them aggressive and dangerous. Elephants do not need to taste pain to learn how to listen." About 100 elephant trainers are killed every year by their charges.

Lek's dream is to release working elephants back to the forest, and she has assembled 25 abused or neglected creatures, ranging from six months to 85 years old, to test her theories of rehabilitation. She has been vilified for her decade of conservation work that has disclosed widespread cruelty to elephants, the animal Thais hold most sacred.

She took the brunt of backlash after the radical animal rights group Peta used some of her footage of savage training sessions to call for international sanctions against Thailand.

Lek was branded a traitor and a crank, and had to go into hiding. Even her family disowned her. Raiders killed her favourite baby elephant with an arsenic injection.

"I won't tell people to boycott elephant safaris, as long as the animals are well treated," she says. Lek points at infected pressure sores along the spines of two elderly elephants who used to have to wear metal chairs to give tourists rides. The massive neck muscles are better suited to bearing weight.

Now 44, Lek has won world renown for her gentle training methods and was selected by Time magazine as a "hero of Asia".

Her two sanctuaries north of Chang Mai cover 3.8sq km and are an unlikely mix of jungle retirement home, rehab centre, herbal clinic and orphanage for mistreated jumbos.

The domestic Asian elephant is classified as livestock in Thailand, and does not merit much protection. Historically, 100,000 elephants roamed Siam; today, only 1600 domestic elephants remain in Thailand, with 500 wild ones in national forests.

Thailand's official ban on logging in 1989 put most timber-hauling elephants out of jobs overnight. Owners sent their animals into cities to attract the tourist dollar.

A healthy elephant can cost 500,000 baht (about $20,000) but on a typical night cadging handouts in Bangkok, an elephant can clear 3500 baht for its owner despite an law banning the animals from the cities.

Baby elephants attract the most admirers and are nimble at splashing through sewage culverts to dodge the law enforcers.

The largest animal recovering at Lek's Elephant Nature Park is Max, who measures 3.3m tall at the shoulder. The former logging elephant was the victim of a freak traffic accident which left him looking "like some kind of Frankenstein," Lek recalls.

Lilly, another recovering elephant, was fed amphetamines and put to work hauling illegally felled logs before she came to Lek.

Dozens of eco-tourists and volunteers are drawn to Lek's Elephant Nature Park.

Now that harassment by officials has begun to level off after international recognition, Lek is keen to educate Thais. A local abbot left her park in tears, ashamed he had once enjoyed elephant shows where the creatures play harmonicas, pose in bikinis and paint murals.

- INDEPENDENT