<div style="text-align: justify; "><span style="font-size: 1rem;">As he ambles in for his annual health check, Kwanmueang's size takes your breath away.</span><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; "><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Nearly three metres high at the shoulder, weighing at least four tonnes, and with spectacular tusks that curve together until they almost touch, the 18-year-old Thai bull elephant is an imposing sight.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Yet he and his keeper, or mahout, Sornsiri "Lek" Sapmak, are in trouble.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">They used to make a living by having Kwanmueang take part in ceremonies to ordain new monks, or dress up as a war elephant for re-enacting historic battles. All that stopped during the Covid lockdowns.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">More elephants are used for tourism in Thailand - over 3,000 - than anywhere else. Unlike other countries with captive populations, those in Thailand are nearly all privately owned. So the collapse of tourism during the pandemic has had a devastating impact on the elephants and their owners, who no longer earn enough to look after them.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Even as tourism starts to recover, another threat hangs over this unique industry. Ethical concerns over how captive animals are kept and trained are prompting many foreign visitors to boycott the elephant shows, which were once a staple of tour groups, raising questions over whether elephant tourism can ever go back to what it was before Covid.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Lek and Kwanmueang have come back to Lek's home village in Surin province - a region whose people are famed for their skill in keeping, training, and in the past capturing, elephants.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Lek is not alone. Hundreds of other elephants have returned to Surin from tourist hot spots like Phuket and Chiang Mai, where they made money by performing tricks or giving rides to foreign visitors.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Walking through these villages is a disarming experience. Nearly every house has one or more elephants chained up in their front yards, or resting under trees. You get used to seeing the huge animals plodding along the road, their mahouts straddling their broad necks, and when driving you learn to take care to move around them.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Boonyarat "Joy" Salangam owns four elephants, which she and her partner brought back from Phuket when tourism dried up in 2020. One is a playful baby, penned in with its mother in an enclosure Joy built in front of her house.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"Covid stopped everything," she says. "The mahouts, owners and elephants have all been unemployed. In the tourist camps the females are kept apart from the bulls, but here we have all been hanging out together, and the elephants have been having sex. We don't force them. They do it in their own time. So the population is increasing."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Joy says she thought about selling her baby elephant to raise funds - they can fetch as much as a luxury car - but worried about how well he would be looked after. Joy has lived with his mother, who is 39 years old, nearly all of her life, and inherited her from her grandparents.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The mahouts too may live for decades with the same elephant from when they are both young, sometimes choosing to sleep with them, taking them to lakes or rivers to bathe in the evening, and keeping a close eye on their health. That has been a challenge under Covid.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Elephants are expensive. An adult needs to eat 100-200kg (220-440lb) of food a day, and drinks up to 100 litres (22 gallons) of water. Without any other income, owners like Joy have been livestreaming their animals on social media, while appealing for donations.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Sometimes this is done at home, as the elephants play or bathe, or they get a friend to ride a motorbike alongside them to film them on their evening walks. Viewers can pay online for the elephants to earn baskets of bananas by performing tricks, but this is not ideal for their health.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Their diet should mainly be different kinds of leaves and grass, but with so many elephants coming back to the area it is hard to find enough for them.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"We are finding they have digestive problems, because of the change in diet," says Nuttapon Bangkaew, a vet giving free check-ups offered by Elephant Kingdom, a project started seven years ago to improve the welfare of elephants in Surin.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"When the mahouts or elephant owners come back home, they don't have any income. So, they don't have money to buy grass or food for them. They have to do these social media livestreams to make money, but this causes health problems." BBC</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">bnbd24/kh</div>