Baby Elephant Smuggling Exposed

July 23, 2012 from Earth Focus

Thailand's tourist industry is driving a brutal trade in baby elephants. Illegal and brutal cross-border trade in endangered wild Asian elephants continues. On the Thai-Myanmar border at least 50-100 calves and young females are removed from their forest homes every year and are traded illegally every year to supply tourist camps. Countless elephants die in the process threatening the remaining populations of this endangered species. Capturing elephants from the wild for this trade often involves killing of mothers and other protective family members with automatic weapons. Captured calves are subjected to an extremely brutal breaking-in process where they are tied up, confined, starved, beaten and tortured in order to break their spirits. It is estimated that only one in three survive this inhumane "domestication" process. This original investigative report by The Ecologist Film Unit in association with Earth Focus/Link TV and Elephant Family exposes this practice.

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Asian elephant

The Asian or Asiatic elephant is the only living species of the genus Elephas and is distributed in Southeast Asia from India in the west to Borneo in the east. Three subspecies are recognized — Elephas maximus maximus from Sri Lanka, the Indian elephant or E. m. indicus from ... Explore this topic

Smuggling

Smuggling is the illegal transportation of goods or persons, such as out of a building, into a prison, or across an international border, in violation of applicable laws or other regulations. There are various motivations to smuggle. These include the participation in illegal ... Explore this topic

Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India, west of New Guinea and north of Australia. The region lies on the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic and volcanic a... Explore this topic

Thailand

Ang Kaharian ng Thailand ay isang bansa sa Timog-silangang Asya, napapaligiran ng Laos at Cambodia sa silangan, the Golpo ng Thailand at Malaysia sa timog, at Dagat Andaman at Myanmar sa kanluran. Nakilala ang Thailand bilang Siam, na naging opisyal na pangalan hanggang Mayo 1... Explore this topic

Border trade

Border trade, in general, refers to the flow of goods and services across the international borders between jurisdictions. In this sense, it is a part of normal legal trade that flows through standard export/import frameworks of nations. However border trade specifically refer... Explore this topic

Myanmar

Burma, also known as Myanmar, is a sovereign state in Southeast Asia bordered by China, Thailand, India, Laos and Bangladesh. One-third of Burma's total perimeter of 1,930 kilometres forms an uninterrupted coastline along the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. Its population o... Explore this topic

Endangered species

An endangered species is a species of organisms facing a very high risk of extinction. The phrase is used vaguely in common parlance for any species fitting this description, but its use by conservation biologists typically refers to those designated Endangered in the IUCN Red... Explore this topic

Tourism

Tourism is travel for recreational, leisure, or business purposes. The World Tourism Organization defines tourists as people "traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes". To... Explore this topic

Elephant Family

Elephant Family is a conservation movement registered in 2002 which exists to save the endangered Asian elephant from extinction in the wild, along with tigers, orangutans and all the other animals who share their habitat. Explore this topic

Elephant

Elephants are large land mammals in two extant genera of the family Elephantidae: Elephas and Loxodonta, with the third genus Mammuthus extinct. Three species of elephant are recognized: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant and the Indian or Asian elephant] a... Explore this topic

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Asian elephant

Smuggling

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