Elephant Kindergarten

When Simon and I were wandering around “downtown” Luang Prabang before our last adventure day, we stopped into the many tour companies trying to figure out what we wanted to do.  To be honest, we maybe had one-too-many-days in LP, at least for people who don’t like group tours and don’t want to ride elephants, and we weren’t sure how to spend our time.  We talked to a few companies about options and weren’t impressed with any of them.  I think we were about ready to go back to the B&B and figure it out in the morning when we walked by this beautiful storefront with giant pictures of elephants, beautiful wood furnishings, and one employee talking to another English-speaking couple about their trip.  Their sign outside talked about an “elephant sanctuary”, and I was intrigued.

Simon saw the look that was growing on my face and asked if I wanted to go see elephants.  I told him “we already did that in Thailand”.  He said “I know, but we can do it again if you want to.  Would it make you happy to do that again?”  My eyes lit up, I giggled mischievously, and a smile came on to my face and kept growing and growing.  I think I even started jumping up and down I was so excited about the possibility.  (Even as I write this, I get tears in my eyes because I loved it so much.)

We sat down inside the store and waited (impatiently) for the other couple to finish their conversation. I heard the employee mention something about a baby elephant and a tour group of four people or less.  When the couple paid for the tour and the employee was free to talk to us, he came over and started talking about what a wonderful tour they had.  He told us there were three options – a half-day with 3 elephants, a half day with 2 elephants and a baby, or a full-day.  Even though it was more money then we planned to spend, and we had already spent a day with elephants, Simon encouraged me to say yes and I did.  We figured we hadn’t seen a baby elephant yet, so we picked that one.  At this point I was so so overwhelmed with excitement that we were going to get to see the elephants again.  That night I could barely sleep.

Can you spot the elephants next to the shed?

The next morning, a tour van picked us up and drove us ~45 minutes to the elephant sanctuary.  On the way, we met our tour guide (whose name I don’t remember) and also Mr. Prasop, the founder of the company, who happened to be riding in the van with us.  It turned out that Mr. Prasop has worked with the founder of Elephant Nature Park, so he knew what we were talking about when we mentioned our elephant experience from a few days earlier.  We asked lots of questions about how he started working with elephants and what their philosophy is for the sanctuary, but got the impression there was more to the story.

 When we arrived at the sanctuary, we were surrounded by glorious green mountains.  We sat down for breakfast with the founder and the two other tourists on our trip, and Mr. Prasop began telling us about himself and MandaLao.  Mr. Prasop has worked with elephants for decades and only recently began focusing on conservation tourism rather than riding/circus act-type tourism.  He told us he used to be harsh on the elephants, using violence to “teach” them.  The most profound part of his story was when he mentioned Dr. Joyce Poole, who is a guru-like figure in his story.  When he worked with Dr. Poole, she asked him if he talks to elephants.  He said “of course I talk to them.”  She asked him if he knew what they were saying back to him, and he was stumped by that.  She taught him how to read elephants’ body language and understand what they mean by the way they carry their ears, move their trunk, or stomp their feet.  He said it made him realize how smart elephants were and think differently about how to work with elephants.  This exposure to Dr. Poole’s way of thinking changed the course of his career, and he opened an elephant conservation center in Thailand to start carrying for and protecting this amazing species.  He also helped bring a new way of elephant training to Southeast Asia, replacing hooks, hammers, and other weapons with positive reinforcement.   It was amazing that he was so open about the “bad” part of his career but it made him even more credible.

Throughout his whole talk, he had some pieces of paper in front of him of different colors and sizes and seemed like he was playing with them idly.  When he began talking about his new venture at MandaLao, though, I realized they weren’t random pieces of paper.  He told us that he was visiting Laos when he learned what a terrible state the elephant population is.  We learned that the original name for Laos was “Lan Xang,” which means “land of a million elephants”, but due to decades of war (and landmines) and ongoing deforestation, the elephant population has dwindled to a very small number of wild elephants.  He said there is one elephant population in a national park that is about to hit the point of no return and biologists told him they need at least 40 more elephants in order to keep the population alive.

That’s where MandaLao and the elephant kindergarten comes in.  Mr. Prasop opened up a large piece of paper that covered the table.  “This is the wild,” he said.  He then placed a small piece of paper on the corner of the large piece.  “This is the elephant college, where elephants go to learn to become wild.  And these (the bookmark-sized pieces) are the elephants."  He said you can’t just take domestic elephants and put them in the national park and hope they’ll survive.  You have to teach them to be wild, to fend for themselves.  The “college” is a space where the elephants don’t interact directly with humans anymore, but human caretakers do enhance the environment to help the elephants make the transition.  The elephant “students” can freely enter the national park, but can also find food in the college if they can’t find it on their own.  The hope is that the college students will eventually join the existing herd, breed, and bring new DNA to the dwindling population.  MandaLao has also set up an “elephant kindergarten,” which is what we visited, where they begin the education by not ever riding the elephants or asking them to do tricks.  They hope Kip, the baby elephant, and his mother can be some of the first elephants released into the national park in 5-10 years.

Being a system dynamics nerd, I loved the holistic way Mr. Prasop approached this idea.  He talked about how to reduce “HEC” – human elephant conflict – by giving the villagers around the national park jobs that involve tourism, so that they celebrate the (hopefully) growing elephant population rather than try to kill them.  The national park will also take out crop insurance for the farmers, so that if the elephants trample or eat the crops, the farmers will be paid back.  But regardless of how compelling Mr. Prasop was (and he was fascinating to listen to), I could see the elephants across the river and was glad when we finally got to get up and head down to the water.

Crossing the river, walking up the shore, and waiting for the elephants to arrive was just as amazing as it was in Thailand.  Except this time there was a baby elephant along with his mother and “auntie”!  Kip was hard to see because the women were protecting him a little bit, but when he finally got to us we were overwhelmed by his cuteness.  When the elephants reached the feeding area and reached out their trunks, the two other tourists were a little shy but Simon and I knew exactly what to do.  We reached into the baskets of food, carried as much as we could, and quickly fed bananas and cucumbers to the waiting elephants.   Kip was definitely making trouble, trying to get over the barrier and get closer to the food, but it seemed like the older elephants were showing him that he should stay on the other side.

Here he was halfway over the barrier

After feeding, we went down to the river and helped the elephants bathe.  This part Kip definitely didn’t like, and he walked away from us so we couldn’t reach him.  The other elephants seemed to enjoy it, and participated by using their trunks to give themselves a shower as well.  The mahouts (elephant trainers) loved “accidentally” sending their buckets of water on the tourists rather than the elephants, but it was a hot day so we didn’t mind.

After the river, we spent about an hour walking through the forest with the elephants.  There was a path for the elephants to go on, and a path for us to go on so it felt like an adventure because we were constantly meeting up with the elephants then losing them for a second then meeting up with them again.  At one point a mahout pulled out a musical instrument and played a song while he was walking that was very pretty.  Kip kept pretty close to his mother but also liked playing around.  He spent five minutes wrapping himself around a strong vine and trying to break it, it looked like. 

The guide told us that when it’s a cloudy day and Kip isn’t as hot, he can be a real big troublemaker because he has more energy.  Thankfully he is small enough that it’s OK, but I think they will be glad when he is released to the wild because I think he will always be less well-behaved than the elephants who still have a memory of pain from not following instructions.  Kip has never known real captivity, so he’s the closest thing I’ll ever know to a “wild” elephant.

Our time with the elephants was much shorter than I would have liked, but they can only do half-day tours with Kip and his mother because his mother is still eating massive amounts of food to provide for both of them.  Kip is also going through the positive reinforcement training I mentioned earlier so they need to leave time for the training as part of his day.  It was hard to say goodbye to the elephants but I was so glad that we were able to spend another few hours with these majestic creatures.  Mr. Prasop told us we could come back and volunteer in the national park, tracking the wild elephant populations to learn about their behaviors and the members in their herd.  I hope we can go back some day and maybe visit Kip at the elephant ‘college” or even in the “real world” once he’s graduated.  Until then, we have dozens of pictures and memories to last a lifetime of our morning at MandaLao.