Baby elephant

On Saturday Mindy, Jeff, Megan and I hopped on our motorbikes and cruised up to MaeSa elephant camp. O.k... so there are moral issues with some of the elephant camps, and I haven't quite figured out what is considered a good elephant camp and what is considered bad, but I feel like I need to see some different ones in order to form an opinion. The main jist of elephant camps is that elephants used to be used for logging in thailand. Now they aren't so much. However elephants live to be 60-70 years old and eat 250 kilos of food a day. Therefore, once they became obsolete in the logging industry, people had to figure out how to afford to feed them. Thus the elephant camp was born. Some elephant camps have the elephants doing tricks and taking people on rides (the MaeSa elephant camp is like this) while others just provide a nice home and rely on fundraising to pay for the elephants (we will visit this type later). Either way, the elephants (and their "controllers"- elephants and controllers generally work together for life) are taken care of.
So we watched the show along with 200 other tourists (mostly thai tourists). Elephants picked up logs, painted pictures, plated soccer, danced to their own harmonica music, threw darts, and massaged a guy. You can also buy a bunch of bananas and sugar cane to feed to the elephants which is pretty fun because they gently take the food out of your hand with their trunks and then somehow manage feed themselves one banana at a time while keeping the others in their trunk. While you are focussed on the elephants in front of you, another elephant may sneak up behind you (you can't at all hear or feel them coming), tap you on the shoulder and either walk by you or give a snuggle. It feels weird to submit to such a large creature, but when are surrounded by about 5 of them, you kind of just let go.

After sipping some coconut juice, we were preparing to leave (along with the other 196 tourists), when I saw a small sign for elephant nursery. We decided to follow the sign around the corner and up a road and across a field and through the jungle until we found a pen with a mother and a baby. A sign said that the baby was born in March and that was about it. No sign saying don't play with elephant. Nothing about baby elephants are dangerous. Nothing about playing with the elephant is encouraged. There really wasn't much information at all. Being americans, we obviously assume that if something is dangerous, then there will be multiple indications all around to stay away, because if something goes wrong, we can sue the property owners. Therefore, lack of signage means everything is safe. We though about this for a moment, decided to slowly approach the baby (we had just been hugged by 10,000 pound elephants so a mere 1000 pound creature couldn't possibly hurt us) and with time we became a little more brave.
This elephant (its name is BoomSerm) was truly magical. We stayed there for about an hour playing the little guy. Here is a movie of the playing:

I have to run off to thai class, but I'll put some photos up soon.
Marshall