Friends of the Asian Elephant

The second organization benefiting from our performances is FAE: Friends of the Asian Elephant which opened the first ever Elephant hospital 15 years ago. We spent a day visiting them and getting to meet their founder: Soraida Salwala- an absolutely amazing woman! Soraida's patients are injured and sick elephants- the hospital holds the Guiness world record for most veterinarians doing an operation in which 30 vets worked on one elephant: I think it was one that was injured by a land mine.That's right, a land mine blew her leg off. Mootolah, she's very old and they are working to get her a prostetic replacement made of fiber glass but given the weight of the elephant, will have to be replaced every two years. In the picture the baby elephant behind me is also a land mine victim. Elephants need care for everything we need but what blew me away was that many of them need care for amphetamine addiction! They are fed speed so that they will work longer hours, sometimes days at a time without breaking or eating or sleeping. The addiction destroys their liver, their nervous system, they have withdrawls without it, and panic- imagine a 2 ton animal losing it's mind because it can't get it's "fix". When Soraida started FAE 15 years ago there were 40,000 Asian Elephants left in Thailand, today there are about 2,600. She fights for the Elephants against exportation, disease, unfair work environment… the thing is, for all that elephants seem ginormous and sturdy- they are fragile animals, their skin is particularly sensitive, the pachyderm (thick skin) title a complete misnomer, they are emotional animals also- able to paint and make music and weep. The lives they are often forced to live- logging, trudging through town, working as tourist attractions, all of this is hard on them and is killing them. Soraida went so far as to stand in front of trucks loaded with elephants for exportation to Australia- a common event for me growing up in Oregon where people routinely chain themselves to trees to protest logging, deforestation, and the demise of the wooded owl; but such a thing had never been done in Thailand. Ever. And certainly not by a woman! She angers a lot of people- Thai powers, government policy makers, she is outspoken and opinionated and she won’t stop. Even though threats against her life are a daily occurrence, even though she often finds king cobras have been let loose on her property, even though she is battling a debilitating disease, even though a man came to her and told her he had been hired to kill her, that he was an assassin, but he refused because he won’t kill women or children, but he warned her, there will be other assassins who aren’t as scrupulous! I imagine that meeting Soraida is a bit like what it would have been like to meet Diane Fosse. I can only hope that her story ends happier.