Save and Rescue an Asian Elephant Today

Dear Supporter,

I'm sure you all remember the very sad incident that occured just over a year ago now in which we lost our beloved young Songkran due to a pesticide being left out by a local farmer. A key factor in this scenario was that due to our remote location, it took too long to get Songkran the medical attention he needed.

As such, over the past year we have been raising funds to build an elephant clinic in the community for which we can bring in a vet to treat the elephants; a much quickly process than transporting an elephant out of the village. We are thus exciting to announce that we now have enough funds for stage one of the clinic! 

The elephant clinic will be built by the villagers. THB 35,000 of donations have helped us to purchase the necessary wood and supplies we need in order to build this small clinic.

Currently there is one mahout who has a proper knowledge in administering elephant first aid. He was sent to attend Mahout and Elephant First Aid Training last year at Thai Elephant Conservation Centre (TECC) along with myself. Since then we both have treated our elephant on occasionally, mainly minor eye issue, crack toenails and bug bites. By having a proper elephant clinic, it will allow us opportunities to treat and give elephants treatment in an improved and better control environment. After building the clinic, with the help and support from TECC vet team, we aim to run such a mahout training with our eight mahouts in order to help equip them with modern knowledge since the villagers have quite a poor understanding in regard to hygiene, elephant treatment and care as we firmly believe by help educating locals about simple care, treatment and proper training, thereby reducing cases of cruelty. This will no doubt be beneficial for our project and hopefully contributing to a successful and smooth operation of our project in the long run.

Thank you for supporting this project, we still need more donations in order to progress with the clinic but we look forward to bringing you more news in the future!

All the best

Dee Drinya Totrakool

GVI Thailand Country Director

Links:

• http://www.gvi.org

Dear Supporter, 

This month began the new Biodiversity Assessment Surveys. The purpose of these surveys is to gain a better understanding of what wildlife exists in our forest, especially as the surrounding area hasn’t yet been studied. The forests in Northern Thailand were once rich in biodiversity; unfortunately, due to the human impact on the environment, this has decreased mainly due to settlement, agriculture and hunting. Northern Thailand is still very much an under researched region, giving us an ideal opportunity to perhaps either discover new and rare species, or animal behaviors. A long-term aim is to educate the villagers and volunteers on the area’s biodiversity in order to help preserve forest ecosystems.

In December this initially involved selecting two different habitats for assessment. The first habitat selected is situated along side a river that flows through multiple habitats including secondary forest, bog land and a corn field. The second habitat is situated behind the village temple and travels uphill through a dry forest.

Our 6 surveys completed throughout January collected 14,622 observations comprising of 36 species across both trails including 17 species of bird, 17 species of insect and 2 species of mammal. The large majority of observations being that of Harvestmen, a species of arachnid belonging to the order Opiliones that are commonly mistaken for spiders. Only 6 of these observations occurred on the temple trail, the remaining 14,454 observations all being observed at the river. These arachnids are often found congregating in large groups hundreds to thousands strong, interestingly, harvestmen were recorded in all areas of the river trail except between 600 and 800 meters which makes up the open bog land section of the transect indicating that these insects may not thrive in such an environment perhaps due to exposure to the environment or predators.

Further surveys of both trails hope to identify many more species in the coming months. In addition we hope to mark further trails in the near future, including a trail along a road to measure the effects of disturbed areas compared to those not disturbed and an area of the dense forest in close proximity to a large cave.

Thank you for continuing to support this project.

All the best

GVI Thailand

Links:

• http://www.gvi.org