Ellies are renowned for being intensely intelligent animals. Their social intelligence enables them to remember intricate social ties between herds, recall exact locations of the burials of their relatives, and to recognise the faces of elephants they once bonded with and then were separated from for huge stretches of time. Their physical intelligence matches this, with exceptional fine motor skills which enable them to use their trunks with such dexterity that they can peel an ear of corn one leaf at a time! The very tip of their trunk has so many nerves it's hyper sensitive to touch, allowing elephants to pick up a single thin twig, break it down to ideal size, and then use it to scratch their eyelids with pin point precision and total control. Medo was an absolute boss at this - I'm pretty sure if that stick were an eyeliner pencil she'd put us all to cateye shame. For such a huge animal, it was such a shock to me to see such delicate movements!
I have such admiration for elephant intelligence that I jumped at the opportunity to try to challenge them with enrichment activities. Enrichments are meant to encourage the elephants to use their natural skills and intelligence in a fun way, to entertain them whilst they are in their shelters, and generally break up their 18 hours of eating every day. Enrichments try to involve all the senses (taste, sound, smell, sight, and touch), but each enrichment will be specifically tailored to the elephant it's intended for. There's no point in giving hidden play balls to a blind elephant, but by smearing tamarind juice over the top of the play balls so it's a smelly hide and seek she can have a great time!
Enrichments are generally a combination of food and destruction. My favourite is a re-purposed fire hose which has been bolted into a basket, which I'll stuff with corn stalks and then hide a melon and some cucumbers inside it before wrapping it all up in bamboo ties to make it super secure. I mean, that's pretty attractive already right?! Essentially the elephant equivalent of going at a vending machine with a hammer. I-diddly-deal! So we'll make that a little more challenging and string it up from the rafters to make sure the elephant has to stretch their trunk, grab the strings, pull it all around a bit and even climb up the sides of their enclosures a bit sometimes to give them maximum challenge and then satisfaction with their super awesome prize.
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| Genuinely more proud of this than a lot of my degree work |
Another great idea was to use woven baskets, line them with corn and some goodies, then tie up the tops really tightly with bamboo strips and again hang them at various heights. For this, the Ellie would need to use balance, trunk dexterity, height, weight, and trajectory judgements for a successful bashing and, of course, smelling out whether the goodies are worth it.
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| Gyoze for ellies |
Bell balls are an ellie favourite - huge round balls with holes and bells in them which the ellies can kick around, pick up, throw, stamp on, and generally just have a whale of a time with them! Quite often big tractor tyres are used for the same purpose, but they're usually more popular outside in the park where there's more space to run after them when they bounce away etc. Inside the enclosures, tyres are a great source of search and destroy fun. We fill a tyre with yummy fruits and vegetables, then cover them all and pack out the inside of the tyre with corn to make a tough barrier. We then tie bamboo ties all around the tyre to make it even harder to get the goodies within, ensuring the elephant has to use the very top of their trunk to rip apart the ties and release the food. To escalate it further, we strap the loaded tyre securely to the back wall of their enclosure so they have to measure how much force to use to get the tyre at all - charging at it would knock it over the edge and that's no fun, so they'll need to hook their trunk around the back of the tyre and fiddle with the ties without being able to directly see what's going on! From this one toy they get a mental puzzle, yummy noms, stretching and dexterity challenges, and then a tyre to play with! Talk about multipurpose, eh!
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| Primed and ready |
We use the same kind of idea with cardboard boxes, making parcels of happy noms for the Ellies and then tying them like a bamboo Fort Knox before strapping them to a wall! This way the Ellies need to get them off the wall and then thrash them around a bit to loosen the ties, and then use their trunks to finally get inside and grab the goods. Alternatively, if you're Thai Koon, you'll rip it off the back wall, stamp on it, and then fish the squished bananas out of the newly split sides of the box. Good job, Thai Koon.
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| Pinata practice prep |
One of the more adventurous hide and seek games we prepared involved a lot of corn and bamboo! The first stage was hanging cobs of corn from the bars of the enclosure, providing an easy level of foodie fun. We then took individual cobs and strapped them to the side bars of the enclosure at different heights, making sure to tie them down with multiple ties to make it harder for the Ellies to break them off. The hardest level was strapping cobs down to poles outside the enclosure with loads of bamboo ties, meaning the Ellies would have to stretch out of their enclosure and work to release the cobs without a direct eyeline to watch what they're doing. Such fun! We also tied rings of corn around the central pillars and covered them up with corn stalks which we dug into the ground, making a bit of corn forestry in there too. Finally we added a load of sticks for breaking and scratching, and generally just for them to make a bit more noise with and break!
In the park itself there's a lot of enrichment. Man made scratching posts with lots of different textures, huge mud pits for the ellies to play around in as well as providing vital sunblock, and podiums for them to test their balance and flexibility. The most popular with the babies, however, is undeniably the tyre wall.
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| The food and fun cart of dreams |
Tyres are hung, strapped, counterweighted and balanced along this magnificently huge tree trunk, providing an awesome playground for little and big ellies alike! Every morning you're likely to find either Navaan or Yindee charging towards the wall to plunge headfirst into one of the suspended tyres, with nannies and mothers racing along behind them trying to catch up! They absolutely love the tyre wall. Bouncing, pinging, throwing, kicking, tusking, head butting, rolling, chasing - everything! A lot of zoos will have similar walls with things like chains hanging too for noise stimulation, but that'll never happen here. The sound of chains is traumatic for many of our ellies as the vast majority of them have backgrounds involving abuse, starvation and loneliness associated with chains, on top of their use inside the pajaan. Chains are a no go for fun in ENP, and learning these specific likes and dislikes is essential to making an enrichment programme which suits the needs and desires of our ellies.
It's so much fun to watch the ellies playing around with enrichments and learning what they like and don't like. The main challenge is keeping the water buffalo away from our creations long enough for the elephants to have first crack! We're always on the look out for new ideas for them, so if you have any please let me know!
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