Help Find the Elephants' Pumpkins! - Gentle Giants Elephants

Can you help us find the Elephants' pumpkins!!

We are raising "TREAT" funds for our gentle giants in Surin Province. Find a pumpkin and donate it to a elephant!!

All of these elephants are x-street begging elephants who have been under the Gentle Giants Stay Home Project since 2020; when COVID shut down Thailand's tourism. We have been able to keep them off the streets for over 4 years now.

They have all suffered the trauma that is tourism. So we try to provide as much supplemental nutrition and enrichment, in addition to daily food and care, that we can. Please consider "finding a pumpkin" and donating it to one of our gentle ones.

In Thailand begging elephants are a common sight in the country’s major towns and cities including Bangkok, although the practice is illegal.

Street elephants, beginning as just babies, are forced by their owners to live and work in an urban environment. The owner or handler makes money by forcing the elephants to perform tricks for people’s entertainment. They also sell over priced bananas or other fruit to passers by so they may feed the animals.

During the day most city elephants are hidden in places where there is no shade and inadequate water. They suffer from severe dehydration and horrible sunburns; skin peeling from their backs.

These elephants are paraded around and used by the owners as begging tools. A mundane routine of forcefully walking on blazing hot concrete roads which are completely unnatural for an elephant’s feet was the only constant thing in their lives.

Most of the diet of a street elephant is contaminated by pollution, pesticides or both. The air the elephants breathe is choked by pollution and exhaust fumes. Motor vehicles, sewage drains, and more are also tremendously dangerous to these elephants.

Disorientated by a myriad of health problems and forced into the noisy entertainment areas with booming music and confusing neon lights, the elephants can be difficult to control. To keep them in line, the mahouts are often brutal with their discipline and many elephants endure shocking physical abuse.

The elephants suffer from extreme fatigue and to combat the tiredness it is commonplace for mahouts to drug the elephants with amphetamines to keep them on the move.