Christmas and Thailand's love of elephants combined Wednesday when four of the giant creatures dressed as Santa turned up at a school just outside Bangkok, complete with huge coronavirus masks.Excited children from Jirasat Wittaya School in Ayutthaya, an hour's drive from the capital, sang Christmas carols and lined up to have their photos taken with the animals in the annual tradition.The elephants, Sri Mongkon, 14, Sri Raya, 6, Peter, 15, and King Kaew, 18, used their trunks to ca

Human-elephant interaction has a rich history dating back centuries which carries cultural symbolism in some places. However, throughout the years that relationship has been altered and the results have been fatal. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), elephant-human conflict is a result of habitat loss and fragmentation.

The elephant is a cultural symbol in Lao probably due to the fact that at one period in time, the country was known to have a large number of these mighty mammals roaming its lands free.

Separated from their mothers, jabbed with metal hooks, and sometimes deprived of food - many Thai elephants are tamed by force before being sold to lucrative tourism sites increasingly advertised as 'sanctuaries' to cruelty-conscious travellers.Balanced precariously on hind legs, two-year-old Ploy holds a ball in her trunk and flings it towards a hoop, one of many tricks she is learning in Ban Ta Klang, a traditional training village in the east.Here young elephants are "broken

The elephant is a cultural symbol in Lao. This is probably due to the fact that at one period in time, the country was known to have a large number of these mighty mammals roaming its lands free, so much so that before it was ever known as Lao, people used to call parts of the country Lan Xang (Land of a Million Elephants).