TRAVEL NEWS

New Elephant Park

18 August 2006, A group of local residents in the Tambol Mae Hia and local activists have voiced disapprovals of the government’s planned Elephant Park. A group of local residents from three Tambon - Mae Hia, Nong Kwai and Ban Pong - where parts of the Elephant Park will be located, were informed that the park will occupy a total area of 2,600 rai and house 40 homeless elephants. It will sit on an adjacent property to the Chiang Mai Night Safari and be administrated by Night Safari’s management team. It will sit within the Doi Suthep-Pui National Park.

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A resident in Tambon Mae Hia, Prayad Jatupornpitakkul said that “the Night Safari management team attempted to distort the fact that all village headmen in the related areas have agreed with the upcoming Elephant Park.” Local people and even village headmen were now confused with the upcoming project and divided into two groups, he added. He continued that the project would encroach on their community forest where they have for generations hunted and gathered their food and from which they earn their living.

Besides, local Chiang Mai activists have started to question the whereabouts of incoming 40 elephants which will be reared in park. They fear that the elephants, which are a national symbol, will be taken advantage of by capitalists and can be seen in the recent uproar over the high profile case of the exchange of Thai elephants for Australian koalas.

“There is an indication that some groups of elephant merchants – those who ply the streets begging for the elephants - have supplied a number of elephants to the park already even though an environmental impact assessment has not been conducted,” said Nikom Puttha from the Wildlife Fund of Thailand. Chaiyapan Praphasawat, a director of Community Rights Institute assumed that a numbers of homeless elephants wandering in a search for money with their mahouts in the city within these last few months might be a leading step to ground a reason for its whereabouts.

Source: http://www.chiangmainews.com

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