By Jonathan HeadAs he ambles in for his annual health check, Kwanmueang's size takes your breath away.
Lek and Kwanmueang have come back to Lek's home village in Surin province - a region whose people are famed for their skill in keeping, training, and in the past capturing, elephants.Lek is not alone. Hundreds of other elephants have returned to Surin from tourist hot spots like Phuket and Chiang Mai, where they made money by performing tricks or giving rides to foreign visitors.
Joy says she thought about selling her baby elephant to raise funds - they can fetch as much as a luxury car - but worried about how well he would be looked after. Joy has lived with his mother, who is 39 years old, nearly all of her life, and inherited her from her grandparents.Elephants are expensive animals to care for - needing vast amounts of food and water each day
Their diet should mainly be different kinds of leaves and grass, but with so many elephants coming back to the area it is hard to find enough for them. In the earliest shows, they demonstrated their skill with logs. But these expanded, as Thailand's tourism boomed, to offering rides, or antics such as having the animals paint or play football. The campaigning group World Animal Protection estimates that before Covid elephants generated up to $770m a year for Thailand.
"I checked in Koh Samui - before there were so many camps doing elephant riding. Now there are only two players left. In Phuket, only a few places are left, and in Chiang Mai, just two places." Some in the industry say this is all right; that there needs to be a more balanced approach between the abuses which used to characterise the industry and the demand of animal rights groups that all elephant entertainment should end.
There are two debates now hanging over the future of Thailand's captive elephants. One is over what humans should and should not be allowed to do with them. The other, larger question is over what practical options there are for supporting such a massive population of large and long-lived animals. "I'm afraid that the majority of elephants, three-quarters of them at least, will still need to find alternative income. And that means there will still be a lot of places where elephant rides, elephant bathing and feeding by tourists will be part of daily routine."