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Today marks the 20^th anniversary of the establishment of Bring the Elephant Home (BTEH), an organization dedicated to the well-being and survival of African and Asian elephants.

Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden is proud to support BTEH’s work and recently sent an employee cohort to work alongside their researchers, including two Cincinnati Zoo-sponsored fellows, and community members in Thailand.  As a member of that group, I was able to witness the impact that BTEH is making with its initiatives to promote human-elephant coexistence in Ruam Thai Village.

This village sits right on the edge of Kuiburi National Park, and the elephants that live in the park don’t always respect the (invisible) boundaries between farmland and forests.   Despite nightwatch programs and alert systems in place to warn farmers when elephants are close by, crops do get damaged.

Coexistence

To combat this reality, BTEH has been working with farmers on a variety of programs designed to mitigate damage, detour elephants, and provide alternative sources of income for the community.

The Tom Yum Project is one of the programs that the community has embraced.  The project gets its name from the popular Tom Yum Soup, which contains many ingredients, like lemongrass and chilis, that elephants don’t like.  BTEH researchers have found that planting these alternative crops around crops that are more attractive to elephants, like pineapple, helps to keep them away. These elephant-deterring crops are not only easy to grow and economically viable but also help to diversifying local livelihoods and create employment.

The Cincinnati Zoo cohort was fortunate to work with the BTEH team and some of the community members that are growing alternative crops and finding ways to use the yield in products that can be sold.  Current products on the Tom Yum Project shelves and in various consignment shops across Thailand include soaps, candles, lip balm, honey, and Tom Yum soup mix! All are sold in eco-friendly packaging. A future section of the Zoo’s newest and biggest habitat, Elephant Trek, will tell the story of the Tom Yum Project, and we hope to be able to sell some of these products.

Other Projects and Research

Other BTEH coexistence initiatives include planting trees for elephants, placing bee fences in Thailand and South Africa, studying elephant behavior and developing an ID system, and creating opportunities for students and researchers.

BTEH researchers shared the elephant ID program that they’ve been working on with our group, and we got to participate in an exercise where we looked through camera trap footage and photos to determine sex, age, and other categories of identification for individual elephants.

Then we went into Kuiburi National Park with the researchers and saw some of the individuals that we had identified!  One that wasn’t yet in their database was a two-week old calf.  Another was a female that they saw for the first time while we were there.

It was truly exciting so see the reaction from our animal excellence scientist and one of the BTEH team members, who is working on their doctorate, when a motorcycle in the distance made a loud noise and the elephants we were observing exhibited behaviors that they could interpret!  The adults touched trunks, which I learned is their way of reassuring each other that everything is okay.  They also repositioned themselves so that all of the younger ones were under them.

Cincinnati Zoo is excited to continue to support BTEH with this research for many years to come.

Happy Anniversary BTEH, and thanks for the awesome Instagram post about our collaboration (see below).

 

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A post shared by Bring The Elephant Home (@btehasiaafrica)