I’ve come
back to check
on a baby.
Just after dusk I’m in a car lumbering down a
muddy road in the rain, past rows of shackled
elephants, their trunks swaying. I was here five
hours before, when the sun was high and hot and
tourists were on elephants’ backs.
Walking now, I can barely see the path in
the glow of my phone’s flashlight. When the
wooden fence post of the stall stops me short, I
point my light down and follow a current of rain-
water across the concrete floor until it washes
up against three large, gray feet. A fourth foot
hovers above the surface, tethered tightly by a
short chain and choked by a ring of metal spikes.
When the elephant tires and puts her foot down,
the spikes press deeper into her ankle.
Meena is four years and two months old, still
a toddler as elephants go. Khammon Kongkhaw,
her mahout, or caretaker, told me earlier that
Meena wears the spiked chain because she tends
to kick. Kongkhaw has been responsible for
Meena here at Maetaman Elephant Adventure,
near Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, since she
was 11 months old. He said he keeps her on the
spiked shackle only during the day and takes it
off at night. But it’s night now.
I ask Jin Laoshen, the Maetaman staffer
accompanying me on this nighttime visit, why
her chain is still on. He says he doesn’t know.
Maetaman is one of many animal attractions
in and around tourist-swarmed Chiang Mai.Tourists pose with
elephants at Maetaman
Elephant Adventure,
near Chiang Mai, Thai-
land. Young elephants
often perform tricks;
older ones give rides.
To make elephants
compliant for human
interactions, juveniles
are “broken”—trained
with painful jabs from
a metal hook.WILDLIFE WATCH
54 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC