Elephants, Long Endangered by Crowds in Thailand, Reclaim a National Park

By Hannah Beech and Muktita Suhartono, The New York Times

05 June 20

Tourist trails helped push elephants to their deaths in Thailand’s oldest nature preserve. The coronavirus lockdown is allowing them to roam freely again.

or as long as the elephants could remember — and that is a long time — the path to the river snaked down the hillside through jungle so dense a troop of pachyderms could simply vanish.

But about three decades ago, humans decided they, too, wanted to get to the river, to gaze at the waterfalls that cascaded into the Khao Yai National Park in central Thailand. The humans paved over part of the elephants’ trail with cement. They built toilets and snack kiosks.

The elephants, though, still needed to reach the river. They hewed close to the old route, the one imprinted on generations of pachyderm brains, but not so close that the day-trippers, with their picnics of sticky rice and grilled pork, would see them.

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