by The Elephant Was Unable To Get Up Off The Ground After Being Flung From Truck Hich Overturned
The jumbo elephant, called Plai Pu Kham, fell on the road when the truck toppled over at 9am local time in Chiang Mai, Thailand, on September 5. After the incident, Plai Pu Kham was unable to get up off the ground and could be heard trumpeting out because he was in so much ᴘᴀɪɴ. Wichian Thongkhanasub, 33, Plai Pu Kham’s owner said he was cutting corners and had rented out a six-wheeler instead of a sturdier but costlier ten-wheeler.
Wichian had to call the Thai Elephant Alliance for help and a team of vets later arrived to find the elephant on the grass and trumpeting out in ᴘᴀɪɴ. The elephant sᴜFFᴇʀᴇᴅ a sprain on his right hind leg, along with multiple ᴀʙʀᴀsɪᴏɴs and bruises all over his body.
He will now have an x-ray to check for internal injuries. Demand to see elephants has risen among tourists since the end of the ᴘᴀɴᴅᴇᴍɪᴄ, so more of the wild animals are being transported between cities. Teeraphat Tranprakan, Thai elephant alliance association director said: ‘Elephant agencies are now bringing their elephants back into business and transporting them back to the city, where tourists are, due to the momentum of tourism.’
An estimated 2,000 Asian elephants live in the wild in Thailand and can often be found wandering around wild woodland. Elephants can come into conflict if they come across humans out in the wild. A number of elephants are also held in captivity and work in the tourist industry or get hired out for religious festivals and weddings, while a small number still work in commercial logging.
The capture and taming people have continued to capture, train and work them since that time. Captive Asian elephants are often referred to as domesticated, but this is an erroneous use of the term. Captive elephants are tamed, not domesticated. True domestication requires many, many generations of selective breeding, isolated from wild populations, and results in genetic adaptation to living in the company and service of people.
Captive elephants are transported around in small trailers and boxcars for the travelling circus, confined in small enclosures in zoos, used as gimmicks in promotions and marketing, used to carry tourists on safari or to entertain them by playing football or polo, paraded in the streets for ceremony and begging purposes, and chained in the sun at Temples. Many of them have been “tamed” through the use of unbelievable brutality, and kept under life-long human control with continued abuse.
