By Sophie Birkett | Head of Operations, Charitable Trust
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:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
