A 50-year-old elephant named Baan Yen is undoubtedly plagued by her traumatic background.
She spent the last 20 years at an elephant riding camp until being rescued earlier this month, yet she still struggled to get any sleep.
She’d been awake for about a week straight when rescuers brought her to her new home, Phuket Elephant Sanctuary in southern Thailand.
She was so weak, people had to give her fluids to help her gain strength.
Her rescuers believe that the source of some of Baan Yen’s pain is the memory of being forced to breed with a bull elephant years ago, when she sustained injuries. This could be why she was shy of the other elephants at the sanctuary at first – she has dark memories not only of interacting with people, but of interacting even with her own kind.
The sanctuary said that “we were told she had stopped lying down to sleep and was terribly exhausted.” We are spending a lot of time comforting her and talking to her in addition to providing for her medical needs since she appears to be quite distressed, if not sad.
But soon Baan Yen started to meet the other rescued elephants at the sanctuary. Despite her troubled past, she seemed to realize she was among friends.
“Baan Yen has both physical and mental trauma and we are surrounding her with everything she needs so she can slowly begin to understand that she is going to have a beautiful life with us,” the sanctuary wrote.
Dok Gaew, another elderly and exhausted elephant at the sanctuary, recently decided to approach Baan Yen, to help her. She reached her trunk over a fence to touch Baan Yen.
The sanctuary stated, “What is so sweet about these photographs is that our most worn-out elephant Dok Gaew is consoling a genuinely sad Baan Yen. We were observing this really precious moment in silence and were confident that Dok Gaew was indicating everything will be well.
Baan Yen appeared to be considerably more at ease by the time Christmas rolled around.
“We couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas present than to see Baan Yen starting to feel a little bit better,” the sanctuary wrote. “She is spending her days out on the top area of our forest land along with Gaew Ta, our blind elephant.”
“Elephants may feel a variety of emotions, such as melancholy, despair, and intense grief. They have a profound knowledge of one another and are kind, joyful, and caring people “the temple noted. They are the most amazing creatures, and we can learn so much from them.
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