The FAE has had some recent difficulty with the government of Thailand’s Forestry Industry Organization, with fires being started and damages to the signs leading to the hospital (read in their website). We wanted to bring attention to this great work being done on behalf of the animals who can’t speak for themselves. Bravo to the FAE! Below is an excerpt from their newsletter.

“Hey, little one, come to mama,” chirps Soraida Salwala. The “little one” is a female elephant calf named Mosha, and she knows that Soraida never visits her empty-handed. She approaches Soraida to find a treat of bananas.

Soraida has cared for the calf for the past 18 months after Mosha tripped on a landmine in the jungle near Thailand’s border with Myanmar. The explosion almost severed her right foreleg, and she was brought to Soraida’s elephant clinic when she was seven months old. Soraida, 52, has earned herself the nickname “elephant mum of the nation” since she started the country’s first clinic dedicated to pachyderms in 1993 in Lampang in northern Thailand. She founded the Friends of the Asian Elephant foundation, which runs the clinic on donations.

Her patient Mosha was in great pain after her accident, but she has made a remarkable recovery. Soraida’s team of helpers constructed a prosthetic leg from a thick-walled, blue plastic sack tightly packed with sawdust at the bottom and a cushion on top. The device is slipped over Mosha’s stump and fastened with leather belts around her belly. This elephant has learned to walk with her new leg almost like it was her own and is only cautious when she has to negotiate a small step on the way to her favorite meadow playground. The clinic has the capacity for 25 animals, and everything is oversized: syringes, ointment jars – just as the patients themselves.

Elephants traditionally are revered in Thailand. When the kingdom was known as Siam, its national flag displayed the image of a white elephant, and kings measured their power and how much divine providence they had earned on the number of white elephants discovered during their reigns.

One of the most famous patients at Soraida’s clinic is Motala, age 47. She stepped on a mine seven years ago and lost much of her left front leg. Veterinarians pioneered the pachyderm amputation on her. Motala’s severed leg still needs attention every day, and unlike Mosha, she never has gotten used to wearing her prosthetic leg.

“Motala and Mosha will, of course, never be able to return to the wild again, but we try to make our elephants’ lives as comfortable as we can,” Soraida says.