Day 8 at ENP – 1.19.15 Monday | million indentations of happiness

Had an enjoyable breakfast and a little play time with Lucky.

Today the next set of week volunteers will be arriving by 11 a.m. Sabine and I will find things to occupy our ‘free’ time for today.

Here are the usual lovely morning ladies that have come by for some bananas and have their blankets put on them. I love having breakfast with them every morning.

Coincidentally, their is another Ling (like Sabine’s Ling) who resembles her Ling. ENP Ling ate out egg yolks this morning and her tail is constantly wagging.

An Australian volunteer ( I think he is referred to as Pedro on Facebook) for the dog park said that we could bring Ling home. Sabine reminds him that this is a dilemma because we have so many dogs in the U.S. that need to be adopted as well (and just as she has adopted her Ling from Alabama). We got into a friendly discussion of the ease or difficulty of bringing a Thai dog back home. Canada and the U.S. have no restrictions, we have the easiest aside from proof of vaccinations. The U.K. has no quarantine period (nor do many of the European counties) but the costs are a bit expensive. Australia/New Zealand are the most difficult with a 6 month quarantine period and heavy fees; option 2 which is preferred but more expensive, the animal is sent to the United States where no quarantine is required and then sent to Australia/New Zealand. Apparently the reason Australia/New Zealand adoptions are much difficult because they do not have rabies.

Since we are by ourselves until the next set of volunteers arive, we have for three hours in the elephant kitchen. We have no common language except hello, ‘swa dee ka’ and thank you, ‘khab kun ka’, but somehow we are all able to communicate just fine with gestures and smiles. 🙂 We spent most of the time peeling the rinds from the watermelon since the older elephants have difficulty chewing through the rinds. We also washed a lot of pumpkins.

Sabine

The lady who was giving us the work had us a take a break at one point and gave us half a steamed corn on the cob each – delicious!

At 1 p.m. Jodi gave her talk on the sky-walk gazebo area to all the new volunteers. Some interesting highlights aside from her comical yet very informative talk:

Elephants are pheromone oriented. They get most of their information through smell. Their eyesight is the worst of all their sense even though I think their eyes are one of their most beautiful physical features.
They have 8 major muscles on each side of their trunk
Broken down, elephant’s trunk contains over 40,000 muscles, divided into as many as 150,000 individual units
Elephants have very good aim – they can throw rocks (example, at a human) with excellent accuracy.

After Jodi’s talk, Sabine and I went to visit Steel and her friends and then to the dog park. I remembered to take my phone (which has been taking better pictures than my stand alone camera!)so that I could take pictures of all the dogs I will dedicate my next blog to.

One note on a touching observation. This is the 8th time we have gone to the visit the dog park (run). There are over 500 dogs here split in various enclosures. Unfortunately, there is no way to visit all the dogs. We are only able to get to one enclosure and it is the same one every time. The first day there was a full on greeting — about 30 dogs. They were timid but very happy to see us and little by little they would approach. By day 8 there is still the full on greeting with the playful high pitched barks. There is pushiness; licks; dogs on hind legs with paws on our waists; possessive growling to other dogs that is short-lived with the human’s ‘ah-ah’. They crowd in for loves. They become extra playful and show off a bit for you. They lean into you and climb your back when you are sitting down. And I will miss them.

Quick elephant moment: This lovely lady has a broken right hip which often occurs from forced breeding. She stopped to scratch an itch while working her way to the river. ♡