'Losing the Elephants'
A film inspired by Lek and the Elephant Nature Park
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Their lifespan can reach well into the nineties. They recognize their own reflections in a mirror. Family values are paramount. Memories are held onto for a life time.

Why then are we letting Elephants slide towards the edge of collapse? They are big, beautiful, smart, and social, and throughout Asia they are facing their own mortality. 'Loosing the Elephants' is a film that examines an animal that is lodged deep in our psyches. As babies, elephants feature large in books we are read, we visit zoos and go to circuses, all to see the biggest land mammal alive. A century ago Thailand's eight million people outnumbered elephants eighty to one. Today sixty-three million Thais outnumber the remaining elephants twenty-one thousand to one. It is estimated that nearly eighty percent of the three to four thousand elephants left in Thailand are domesticated and working in the tourism industry. A fact not necessarily bad if it weren't for the 'domestication' the elephant endures. A baby is separated from its mother at an early age, bound and put in a small cage and beaten with metal barbed clubs for days until it is 'broken' and ready to take commands. This is followed by a life, the span of which is often shortened by forty or fifty years, of hard labor.

Can we be satified with these decisions? Is it even important to make sure that the elephants make it? Should it be a priority in our modern world to shepard any species, especially one that is on an order of intelligence approaching our own, to some sort of long term survival? 'Loosing the Elephants' examines these questions and reveals elephants like no visit to the zoo or circus ever will.