LeapComp - Sales Performance Management Blog

I haven’t written in quite a long time… not because I disappeared, but rather because I was on vacation. I took 3 weeks off to travel to Thailand, and I just came back home last Sunday. I had a very good time in Thailand and saw many interesting things, but one of my trip’s highlight was to visit the Elephant Nature Park (ENP) near Chiang Mai.

ENP is a rescue centre for abused or neglected elephants (currently 31 of them!), where elephants live a happy life on 2000 acres of land. These elephants are rescued from abusive owners, and often suffer from injuries, disabilities, or old age, making them unsuitable to be used for work. The goal is to eventually be able to release some of these elephants back into the wild - into another area purchased by ENP where the elephants will be safe from poachers.

In Thailand, domesticated elephants traditionally undergo a rigorous training (read torture) called phajaan, which is designed to break the elephants’ spirit. Baby elephants are taken from their mother, are immobilized, and beaten with sticks, nails and heated irons, for days at a time. That’s how elephants are usually trained to carry people on their back, to create nice paintings for tourists or to play music. At the ENP, some elephants are rescued early enough to be saved from this training. If you don’t believe me about how cruel elephant training is, I found these videos showing how it is done in Thailand.

Using the “stick” approach, it is no surprise that many of the young elephants die or go mad following the training. The Elephant Nature Park not only takes care of the abused elephants, it also tries to demonstrate that phajaan is a cruel method from the past, and that the “carrot” approach can work better.

If you can’t tell, I was really impressed by the ENP, and with this post I want to help getting the word out to potential tourists, that many places with elephants doing tricks and tours is bad for elephants and shouldn’t be encouraged.

In our everyday lives, people often stick to a certain motivation method, just because it’s the ‘culture’ of the company, it’s the ‘only way that employees get it’, it’s ‘the way it has always been done’, etc. But in most cases, the stick approach can be replaced by the carrot approach and yield even better results, and much happier employees.