5-Month Old Baby Thai Elephant Gets Hydrotherapy To Heal Injured Leg (Video)
While Thailand does not always have a good reputation for the way the country’s elephants are treated, there are actually many Thai organizations that work to protect Thailand’s wild elephants from land mines, traps, poachers and the like. And, when an elephant in Thailand gets injured, one of these organizations will often go to work to try to get it back to full health.
After all, with less than 3,700 wild elephants left in Thailand, and extinction worries always present, Thais need to protect every single one they have.
Case in point, the five-month old baby elephant that got caught in a trap villagers in Chanthaburi province had set when she was only three-months-old. The baby elephant’s leg was partially amputated by the trap, leaving it unable to walk properly.
As a full-grown elephant can weigh anything between 2.5 and 5.5 tons, having a leg that is unable to support the animal is very dangerous indeed, and can cause an elephant to die many many years before it should.
That is why Thais rushed to help this five-month old baby elephant, and to do everything they can to not only be able to completely save its injured leg, but also to get it healed properly so it can then re-learn to walk on its injured stump.
That way the elephant will not need a prosthesis as it gets older — and heavier. (Most elephants with a prosthesis really do not do very well, and end up having to be taken care of for the rest of their much shorter lives).
This five-month old baby elephant named Fah Jam, however, was luckier. She is in the hands of elephant experts at the Nong Nooch Tropical Garden just outside Pattaya. They are giving the baby daily hydrotherapy in a swimming pool to help her leg heal, and to increase the strength of her leg so she can eventually walk on it almost as normal.
Kampon Tansacha, one of the men working with Fah Jam, talked about the elephant’s overall health saying, “It is quite safe to say it is almost 100 percent (healthy), and now it is only the leg problem. And we must solve that”.
The baby elephant is still quite frightened of swimming in the pool, however, but, as elephants love water, give her a few days and she will be clamoring to get in.
Meanwhile, Fah Jam gets into the pool every day attached to a harness to keep her afloat, and with several men who pull her above the water if she starts to get tired or sink.
Watch the video below to see just how well she does. And, just how cute she is.
