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| Om nom nom banana rice balls |
Tong Kham and Yai Bua have each faced years of malnutrition and abuse, and came to us in a state of starvation and sickness: both needed to gain 300kgs from their arrival weight, and their health was truly critical. For these situations we prepare rice balls: sticky white rice, salt, and nutrient pellets, all mushed together with tamarind and yellow bananas to make it taste nazz. Each ellie will get a different number of servings throughout the day depending on how much weight they need to gain or how well they take to the rice balls, and their progress is monitored to see how long they'll need these yummy grubs for.
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| They think it's tasty... |
For our ellies who are are very old and their teeth have worn down too much to be able to process thick skins, we prepare a fancy ass salad to make sure they get enough nutrition without the digestion troubles. We shred corn stalks, banana branches and cucumbers and mix it all in a tamarind or watermelon dressing, which lets the ellies digest and get all the nutrients out without needing to chew and grind. Lush! Seems to go down well according to Malee - she runs so fast when she sees as salad coming that her food delivery technique is a literally drop and dash operation!
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| Yai Bua is all over that salad |
Elephants have very distinct personalities which also affects how they eat. Mae Jen Ping is ever the lady, carefully taking a trunkful of salad and placing it neatly in her mouth, chewing delicately and taking her time over the meal. Saza, on the other hand, takes as much as her trunk can grab and throws it from ground level into the open cavern! It's hilarious to watch these two side by side and you can often tell where Saza has been, as 70% of her salad ends up on the ground! Needless to say, the buffalo love Saza...! Mood swings go both ways, and some days an might just not fancy it: Tong Kham has a habit of refusing rice balls when she's out and about in the park, and then when she's in her shelter she'll break each ball open in her trunk, decide whether the yummy content is good enough for her, and then either eat it or drop it into the sand. Yai Bua, however, effectively inhales the parcels of goodness and will happily take as many as she can get despite rounding out nicely already! Yai Bua is a girl after my own stomach.
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| Yai Bua, the poster girl for the inhale |
Food can tell us a lot about how the ellies are getting on. Because of their digestion time, elephant poop typically doesn't smell like dog poop does - ideal, given how much they produce! It's typically large, round balls of dark tan grasses which holds its form and doesn't smell. Looking at poop is a really fast way of indicating internal elephant health: are there skins to indicate poor teeth, are any foods coming out as they went in to indicate lack of digestion, has anything been ingested which shouldn't have been? It's really useful. Fun fact: dried ellie poop makes great kindling for fires, but is not great for smoking. Mahout tips of the day.
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| It's the ciiiiiiiiiiiiircle of life |
Most of ENP's elephants are happy to be around other elephants and humans, but a few don't like one or either. Those guys get special care in the form of respecting that distance and giving them safe space to hang out in, but leaving the option of socialising open. Seree is a prime example. She's a really great nanny to Dok Mai, but she doesn't enjoy the company of many elephants or humans, and can get stressed and uncomfortable around both. Instead of forcing her to socialise and putting her in the middle of the constant flow of visitors, ENP have let Seree and her micro-herd choose their own patch, a nice area on the other side of the river, where they're currently being built a huge open-plan shelter for them to roam around in and call their own. Likewise there are some solitary elephants who haven't found their herd to click with yet and so chill out by themselves a bit more - these ellies get enrichments to shake up their day and are introduced to new elephants who come to the park to see if a click occurs.
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| Got melons? |
Whilst elephants are famed for being very social animals, like humans, sometimes they just don't fancy it and, like humans, that's a-okay. At ENP it's all about giving the ellies what they need. Most of these elephants would have been left to die by starvation, infected injuries, or worked to death. Being rescued into ENP is a whole new life on the baseline that it is continued life, but moreover it's a happy, healthy, safe, and loving life for them, without fear, stress, or abuse.
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| BALLERZ of the rice variety |
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