Over the last few days, we have been at an elephant sanctuary where mistreated elephants are taken in and looked after. All of the elephants have different stories to tell, the most depressing story that I have heard was that an elephant was unfortunately in the logging industry and was chained to a tree in the jungle for a year. She miraculously survived and was fortunately taken in to the sanctuary here where she is looked after and treated with respect by the volunteers, handlers and guides.

Although this is very sad, there are many more stories for example when an elephant was on the border of Thailand and Burma it stepped on a landmine and had part of its foot blown off. The reason why the landmine was there in the first place was because it was left over from the Burmese war. At the moment you will probably be thinking that this sanctuary is just for elephants but actually there are: Water Buffalo, dogs and cats too.

Most of the dogs were rescued and taken into the sanctuary when the 2011 Bangkok floods happened and the dogs were made homeless. Not all of the 400 dogs were found in the Bangkok floods and some were rescued from the streets.

Despite there being a vast amount of dogs and elephants( there are 66 elephants), there is still space for 80 water buffalo who were rescued from being slaughtered and taken into the safe haven of the sanctuary.

On top of all of this, there are about 100 cats there that were on their way to Vietnam to be slaughtered.

Despite all of these sad stories, I loved the experience of all the animals living together. My favourite part of being a volunteer there was when we threw buckets of water at the elephants to help them bathe whilst they ate lots of food in the river. DID YOU KNOW that the heaviest elephant there weighed a whopping 4.5 tonnes and that elephants eat 10% of their body weight daily! Our room was situated about a 5 minute walk south of the main building next to where the elephants slept at night. At night, we could here the elephants passing wind and trumpeting in the night as well as the insects flapping their wings making a racket! We also helped make the elephant's food, which was tamarind, salt and sugar. To make it we pulled a bit of tamarind off of the main chunk, made into a ball before rolling it in salt and sugar. It did feel really weird at first but I did get used to it. After that, we fed the elephants by putting a bit of food in the front of its trunk and flicking it into its mouth. They also loved watermelon, cucumber and pumpkins! It was quite funny when a baby elephant tried to put a whole watermelon in its mouth and eat it but it looked like a goblin fish. Although you may not think this, elephants are very intelligent animals and when something is too big to fit in its mouth they step on it and crush their food up so that they can eat it.

At the end of our stay we were all sad to leave the elephants and hope to visit there again in the future.