As many of you will already be aware, covid-19 has had a huge impact on the elephants of Thailand. When tourism shut down, this left 1000s of elephants who relied on tourism to survive, out of work, and with no means to make an income to help their caretakers to pay for their food.

This forced many elephant projects, including ours, to close their doors, and also forced those who wished to continue to care for their elephants, to find new ways to survive. However, many of the tourist camps where unable to make this change and asked the elephant owners and caretakers to take their elephants back to their home village, where they have been struggling to survive ever since.

Sri Prai is one of these elephants. Sri Prai is a 11 year old female, who was born into the logging industry, on the border between Thailand and Burma/Myanmar, but was rescued from this life by her current owners. Due to limited options and the need to provide enough food for her to eat, as well as a salary for her caretaker, she was then taken into the tourism industry to work in an elephant camp until the pandemic hit in March 2020. This is when she was forced to return home to our area.

Since then, she has been under the care of our team, as she has been spending everyday roaming together with Dodo, Gen Thong, and sometimes our other elephants too! You may have seen some updates of her on our social media page over the last 2 years, as she never left their side.

Now that tourism is beginning to open again, the tourist camps are starting to ask for the elephants to return to their camps, since they are able to run their business again. They approached Sri Prai's owner, asking him if she can return to there and be a part of their program again, however, her owner has instead approached us, and asked if we can bring her into our project permanently, so that she no longer has to return to work. He is happy with her being under our care, and he likes having her nearby, so that his family can take care of her.

We are, of course, very excited to have this opportunity. Sri Prai has formed such a strong bond with our other elephants over the last 2 years, it would cause a lot of stress to remove her from them now. Our team has also become very fond of her, and her relaxed and gentle personality.

However, having been closed for over 2 years now, with little to no income coming through our visitor program, we need to fundraise to cover her costs.

The cost of helping us keep Sri Prai in the forest right now, is around $275usd per month. This includes food costs and a salary for her caretaker/mahout. We are hoping to raise enough funding to keep her for the next year, when we hope our visitor program will be able to provide the extra needed income.

We need YOUR help! There are several ways in which YOU can help us raise the funds we need.

1. Donate to our fundraiser using the donate button to the right.

2. Set-up your own fundraiser - please do get in touch if you are interested in setting up your own event, we can provide advice and guidance.

3. Share our fundraiser with your family and friends and help us reach more people!


Kindred Spirit Elephant Sanctuary is a registered Foundation in Thailand and has been active for nearly 6 years. We really do appreciate any support big or small that can be contributed towards our elephants.

You can find out more about us, our aims and our projects on our website and facebook below:

www.kselephantsanctuary.com

www.facebook.com/kselephantsanctuary


Thank you all so much for your support.

The Kindred Spirit Elephant Sanctuary Team xx