| I would like to give you to know an update about the situation
regarding the Department of National Park Thailand (DNP) and the raids
at our park The first and second raids were due to an alleged “hot
line” anonymous call that “Suspected that we kept 70 wild elephants kept
at our park“
On 08 February, they checked and could not find any wild elephants.
All they found were our herd of 35 elephants, most of them handicapped
or in poor physical shape after years of human abuse.
All of our elephants have had microchips embedded in them by the
government, some have more than one microchip, as difference departments
has chosen to place their own. After the DNP finished their raid we
asked the official to sign the paper to declare that we did not have
these alleged wild elephants. They did with 16 signatures of the people
who came to our park that day.
At that time they required us to show paper ID and ownership papers
of all the elephants at the park.
Most elephant have these certificates at the park and we showed them
the papers that they requested. Some elephants have been donated to us,
such as Mae Jan Peng, Sri Prae and Jokia. The donators sometimes keep
the original paper and we take a copy as proof. (Please note that the
DNP has no legal jurisdiction over domestic elephants which our entire
park herd are legally classified as)
The DPP were not satisfied and demanded the original papers. It will
take time to get all the documents together as some elephants are from
provinces far from Chiang Mai and some are from very remote areas.
We asked them to give us 30 days to find all relevant papers.
On the 27 February we received a warning by local officials that the
DNP were coming to confiscated our elephant and that the DNP were also
looking to make other trouble. I doubted this but later we find out it
was true.
This time the officials told us that the order from the director of
DNP was to check the park about the land paper and ownership.
I would like to confirm to all of you to know that these are in order
and please do not worry about this case. We have complete land
registered by government and we pay tax every year. We have our lawyer
team working on this already.
The most thing that we worry now are : What will happen next?
Note : Every time of the raid we have very obvious questions that
their official kept asking our staff “Did Lek do something to make
someone hate her? or do you know why we are here you must make someone
hate you?
We await the next raid and wonder what will be demanded next.
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