A group of women rose to the challenge when Thailand’s elephant shows closed after Covid-19 killed the tourist trade Lakkana Karn-in will never forget the scorching heat in the summer of 2021 when she, her partner and their two elephants set out on a 500-kilometer journey on foot from Thailand’s seaside resort city of Pattaya to Surin, their home province on the Thai-Cambodian border. Walking long distances every day under the hot sun was almost unbearable, and the nights were not much better. They barely slept as they camped by the side of noisy roads. But there was a far bigger concern in Lakkana’s mind ― how her elephants would survive throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. “Before I set off on foot, I spent the last of my money on transport for my two children [from Pattaya] to their grandparents [in Surin],” she recalled. Once her children arrived home safely after an almost 500-kilometer trip, she and her husband set off on foot, walking with their two giants – a 36-year-old female elephant named Wallee and a 16-year-old male called Kanun. Before the trip, they were laid off by the owner of an elephant show in Pattaya, one of Thailand’s top tourist destinations which was turned into a ghost town by the pandemic. With empty pockets, they could not afford to pay for trucks to take their elephants, which weigh about three tons each, back to Surin. Walking them home was their only option. They were joined in their long walk home by other mahouts – or elephant handlers – who had suffered similar fates when the tourists stopped coming to Thailand, and their elephant shows. The group’s plight grabbed the national media’s attention and suddenly they were front page news. The media attention also attracted kind people who arranged free trucking services for the laid-off mahouts and their elephants. One mahout wept at the scene, knowing his elephant would arrive home with him safely. Lakkana wanted to cry too. But exhaustion made her numb. Their epic trek happened in the midst of the third wave of Covid-19, when the highly-contagious Delta variant swept across Thailand. The Thai government shut its borders and enforced strict lockdowns to limit people’s movement, measures that had been put in place since the first coronavirus case was detected in January 2020. While helping the country contain the virus, these measures devastated Thailand’s economy, especially the tourism sector that contributed nearly 22% of the country’s GDP in the pre-pandemic era. Hundreds of tourist venues offering elephant shows were forced to close. Thousands of elephants and their keepers then needed to find their way home, at the same time feeding the beasts, each of which needs more than 100 kilograms of food per day. Some could not leave and had no choice but to leave their elephants to starve – a painful decision. But Lakkana would not let that happen to Wallee and Kanun. She and some other women who worked in animal tourism took the lead in caring for the elephants during the crisis, and managed to raise funds to feed the gentle giants. They struggled, but kept many elephants alive during the past two years of the pandemic while they waited for the borders to reopen and for the tourists to return. Coming from a poor family, Lakkana’s husband inherited the two elephants from his grandfather, whose family had been traditional mahouts for generations. Previous generations of mahouts often used captive elephants for work, especially in the logging industry that was booming throughout the first half of the 20 century. In 1989, the Thai government started banning commercial forestry, so elephant owners turned to entertainment and tourism, which was growing rapidly at the same time. Thailand is home to about three-quarters of the nearly 3,000 elephants used in the entertainment industry, a number assessed by World Animal Protection (WAP), a nonprofit animal rights organization which has exposed captive elephants’ poor living conditions in the tourism industry. In Thai culture, the son of a mahout is introduced to elephants from childhood to help establish a strong human-animal relationship. He is expected to be a life-long mahout when he reaches adulthood ― a unique tradition observed particularly in Surin province, which is dubbed the “elephant kingdom.” This tradition also emphasizes patriarchy, in which the mahout’s job is preserved for men who are allowed to ride and train the elephants as well as perform rituals with them. Women had mainly been excluded from fully participating in the elephants’ lives. Traditionally, a woman’s assigned role was to take care of household work while ensuring food was available for their husbands.