Our motivated volunteers design creative enrichments everyday, sometimes several times per day for elephants such as Thong Phoon to further encourage natural behavior.
Each team always alternate different designs to be sure the elephants don’t get too used to a particular puzzle and still have to work for the extra delicious snack.
Today, Thong Phoon’s morning enrichment was a Fruit Wrap Starfish Shell; Juicy fruits wrapped in banana tree ‘bark’ attached by banana tree homemade strings, placed in tire and stuck by some hay, then packed by other banana tree peels and finally closed by a net sewn up with ropes. Getting inside the precious heart of this enrichment is as much a challenge as it is a game.
What a pleasure to see how our new resident at Project 4 is enjoying this way of getting her snacks.
Keeping the elephants as close as possible to a natural way of living in order to give them back some dignity and instincts is a very important mission for all WFFT Elephant Refuge staff and volunteers.