When the tourists who rode them disappeared from resort destinations, Thailand’s captive elephants, and their owners, went back to their birth villages, where finding enough food has been a struggle.
BAAN TA KLANG, Thailand — Lucky was busy munching on some freshly cut grass when she spotted a special treat a tourist was holding out. She dropped her next mouthful of greens and extended her trunk, asking for the banana.
For the first time in nine years, Lucky, 32, was back in her home village in rural Surin Province in eastern Thailand, where tourists are much rarer than on the resort island where she used to work.
“She loves bananas the most, also sugarcane or watermelon,” said Lucky’s caretaker, Aon Salangam. His magnificently intimidating elephant may weigh almost four tons and stand nearly 10 feet tall, but “she is a sweetheart,” assured Mr. Aon.
Lucky, along with her stepsister, Kaewmani, used to carry tourists around an elephant park on the island of Phuket in the southern part of the country. But like thousands of other pachyderms around Thailand — and 200 in Surin Province alone — they had to return home with their owners when the pandemic devastated the country’s tourist industry, which has yet to fully recover.
