Phuket Elephant Sanctuary Village — Local services in Kathu

Kind of a joyless experience due to ever present ethical concerns. When they perform their little tricks you can see the mahout pulling on their ears. You have to wonder how they learned this, especially the young one who apparently was taken from the wild after their parents were killed and had never been in a circus, so they are the ones making it blow kisses and bow to tourists. How ethical was the training process that taught them these tricks and lets you touch these animals as much as you want with basically no restriction? No way to know. There were no whips or hooks in sight but there were little cuts and knicks on the elephants. Ones tail was docked. Was this inflicted before or after it got to the “sanctuary”?

Asking the guide doesn’t help as they are definitely lying to you and saying what you want to hear. Several times our guide said they were preparing to return them to the wild, which was an incredibly bold lie as we were hand feeding these creatures bushels of food as the mahouts were getting them to do poses for the cameras, I don’t need a doctorate in zoology to know that is no way to prepare an animal to return to the wild.

The only reason I gave it two stars is that the elephants don’t seem that unhappy . Clearly they don’t love having their ears pulled on but that wasn’t very hard as they fell into line almost as soon as this started. Seems unlikely for such a huge creature to just submit to an ear tug without having experienced a harsher punishment that it remembers but again you just don’t know. However they did genuinely seem to enjoy being fed and once their tricks were over they were allowed to just eat and they looked to be behaving naturally.

Also you learn that bathing is a trick just as much as the hugs and blowing water at tourists. One of the elephants knows how to bathe and it is repeatedly done throughout the day, instead of them switching out elephants based on who needs a bath like I imagined.

If you want to visit elephants in Phuket make sure there is no riding or bathing because then you will have a clear conscience as you do the only good part of it anyway, which is...

I am only giving one star because how friendly staff was. But other than that sanctuary is not ethical at all. There were 6 animals staying in together in a small area on the concrete. And whenever a new group comes, staff takes one of the elephants, lets group feed it, only gives elephant a short walk, than put group in a mudy place with elephant ( its not a mud shower or pool at all, just a small mudy area), you pet it etc, then you give him shower with hose and thats all. So there are not much activities for these animals there, they forced to follow same routines everday. And also all these activities takes only 2 hours so you can take that as these elephants leaving that little small closure only couple of hours. Yes its cheaper than other sanctuaries but you should definitely avoid this sanctuary. You should go to phuket elephant sanctuary (without village) which is very ETHICAL. I know how elephants important in Thailand so I never thought this place would be such a place, I am really shocked. Please avoid places like this, thats the best for...

This is not the genuine elephant sanctuary in Phuket. I was saddened to realise this after completing the visit. The real one is located in Paklok and limits tourist contact with the elephants. This one did not do so and allowed bathing. I felt we were lied to throughout the visit, in regards to how they were intending to bring these elephants back to the wild, but there is no evidence of them doing so. Upon asking to see where they lived (the elephants were being taken elsewhere) we were told that we had to leave soon (despite a walk with the elephants being promised in the experience). We were also told (in person) there were 15 elephants however in reality there are only 4 (confirmed by website) and thus those 4 are continually used as entertainment for tourists despite what we were originally lead to believe.

At the time I really enjoyed my visit and getting the chance to feed the elephants was fantastic. However my perception has been clouded by this realisation. Please do your research (unlike myself) before undertaking...