Save and Rescue an Asian Elephant Today

Here at GVI Chiang Mai we are continuing to collect behavioural data on our 8 magnificent and beautiful elephants. We have also started collecting elephant welfare data over the past 6 months by performing regular health checks and scoring our elephants’ body fat content. These welfare checks allow us to gain a robust understanding of our elephants’ physical, mental and emotional health. Eventually, we hope to compare our data to that of elephants in working tourist camps in order to provide evidence that living and foraging freely in the forest is ultimately beneficial to elephant welfare.

On the biodiversity side, we have increased the number of times per month that we set up camera traps out in the forest. We have been setting them in different locations each time in hopes of discovering what different vegetation types attract different species. Recently, we successfully captured footage of a large Assamese Macaques (Monkeys) troop in the Conservation Forest location. This is the first Macaque sighting by GVI staff and volunteers in the area, although villagers often mention that they have seen them in the forest throughout the year. We are also working with a partner to identify a potentially rare subspecies of pit-viper discovered in the same location. All in all, exciting things are happening with bio in Huay Pakoot!

The month-long summer holiday recently started for our local village school. In response, our staff and long-term interns have created an exciting and hands-on Summer School program that encourages community children to learn English while regular school is not in session. The program started this week with a scavenger hunt throughout the village, featuring photos taken by our interns. We hope to have a lot of fun with the kids over the next month.

Our most recent fundraising event was a great deal of fun! Volunteers, Interns and Staff members spent 24 hours living like Elephants in a tourist camp. We faced many challenges, like performing tricks for entertainment, running obstacle-courses while eating bananas and dry biscuits and being bathed in mud and washed down whilst tied together on short ropes. Everyone then spent the night camped out on our outdoor base playing games, watching movies and bonding over the day’s festivities. Ultimately, we had designed our tasks and activities to mirror the way elephants in camps are treated so we could better understand what elephants go through on a daily basis. Granted we did make the activities enjoyable, we all agreed that being forced to do these things on a daily basis with no other options would lead to a miserable existence. It gave us a much greater appreciation for the freedom we have, and an extra motivation to do what we can for our elephants and others. All in all, despite the mud and the tight schedule, everyone had a really good time and even asked if we could do it again!

The last few months have also seen an increase in community interactions. For example, this year we celebrated GVI’s 10 year anniversary in Thailand by cooking for all the villagers at base hut. For World Elephant Day, we helped our Mahouts cut additional grass from the fields in order to feed our elephants. Then, we marked the end of the planting season with a village-wide Geeju (blessing) ceremony. We are all very glad to have spent so much time with the village this year, and hope to do so even more in the future.

If you'd like to help us keep our magnificent elephants in their natural habitat, please do not hesitate to support our cause. Every donation goes a long way for the elephants, their mahouts, their families and the program as a whole. Thank you for your continued support, from all of us at GVI Chiang Mai and Huay Pakoot.

Internship Coordinator, Phoebe van Doorn and Base Manager, Anne Goodman

Dear Supporters, 

Equally as important as working with the elephants is our involvement with the local community. We have been working on increasing the time that we spend with the community and one of the ways that we do this is through English classes at the school. 

Each week now we now teach at the school for a total of three hours, one hour each day from Tuesday to Thursday. At GVI Chiang Mai we have only ever previously taught one hour of English per week at the local school, so we hope to see some huge improvements with regards to the students’ level of English.

The children have been not only receiving their regular lessons, based on the government syllabus but we have also been implementing ‘Jolly Phonics’, which aims at giving the children an in-depth understanding of the sounds used in the English language. Jolly phonics allows the children to associate each letter of the alphabet with its sound and an image that reflects that.

The children from grades one to six, enjoy the sounds and actions that accompany each of the letters and thoroughly enjoy watching volunteers and staff do the actions and sounds with them.

Our hope is that with the increase in weekly hours at the school, that we will soon see an equal increase in the children’s ability to understand the English language. We would also like to say a huge thank you to the GVI Laos team for all of their resources, as well as their advice on furthering our English programme here in Huay Pakoot. Da blu pardoh!

With Gratitude, 
GVI Thailand