Elephant on Zoom

There is a limit of what all activities can now go online!

You cannot visit the Zoo? Not to worry. In Thailand, ‘The Elephant’ program has taken streaming to new heights. It runs elephant camps and with no international tourists coming to visit, some 85 of these camps have shut down.

But to raise funds to ensure that the elephants are taken care of, they have started a new program – The Elephant in the Zoom. It’s a zoom-call, obviously, video, with an elephant! This is to bring in some fun element while getting in some money.

It does not come cheap though. Rates begin at $75 to bring elephants in on a Zoom video call for 10 minutes and if you pay $145, callers also get a three-minute Q&A session with elephant experts.

This is understandable as mahouts – elephant keepers – need around US$20 a day just to feed their elephant and also provide for their own family. Elephants consume between six and 10 per cent of their body weight daily, and it costs around US$18,000 to look after a single animal for a year.

Well, unarguably, this a real out-of-the-box idea and if nothing else, your money will feed the mahouts and the elephants; more importantly, watching an elephant is better than looking morosely at your office colleagues in endless Zoom calls.