Amid tangled vines and stepping-stone crossings where the cool stream lapped my feet, I paused. The sound of snapping bamboo heralded the arrival of a herd of five Asian elephants. Their wrinkled hides were sticky with red riverbank mud and they browsed heartily, tugging up trunkfuls of greenery amid the cloyingly humid jungle. Two of these animals had a particularly sad story that I'd been following online. At just a year old, baby Par-Gae-Mae lost his mother after she ingested agricultural crops that had been sprayed with pesticide; the calf was found crying beside her body. He was now being cared for by a soulmate in grief, Mo-Go-Nar, who had lost her own baby to herpes (EEHV) and had adopted him.
We followed the herd upstream to a waterfall. The young elephant slipped on a rock and blew a squeaky trumpet of dismay. Yet these captive animals are generally finding peace in the Om Koi jungles of northern Thailand; they are free, for now, from the cruelty that the country's elephant-tourism industry metes out upon them.
There are
