Helping elephants by helping communities to help their elephants…
…a brief introduction to the Asian Elephant Wellness Project
The Asian Elephant Wellness Project was established to create collaborations between organizations and facilities that work with Asian Elephants. Our activities include development and funding of asian elephant conservation projects throughout the world.
Through our actions, advocacy and awareness programmes we are bringing together a global network of scientists, qualified trainers and instructors, elephant enthusiasts, individuals and communities that are dedicated to the health and welfare and preservation of the Asian elephant.
We are building a foundation of people to collaborate in this collective effort worldwide; stronger together to help fight the universal problems facing Asian elephants and their communities.
About Our Founder - Dr Trish London DVM, CVA.
Trish London began working with elephants 24 years ago as the first intern at The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. She continued to volunteer at the Sanctuary every summer throughout college and went to the University of Georgia Veterinary School to pursue her dream of becoming an elephant doctor.
During her senior year of vet school in 2003, she spent a month with the elephant department at Chiang Mai University in Thailand. On return to the US she committed to small animal emergency and intensive care medicine for 10 years in Portland Oregon and became certified in veterinary acupuncture.
In 2016 Trish traveled to Nepal for the first time and was reintroduced to the situation faced by elephants and their mahouts across Asia. This changed the course of her life and career. She channeled all of her time, effort and commitment into working in elephant conservation and begun what she coined as her personal ‘Elephant Odyssey’.
For the past 6 years she has been on an elephant odyssey traveling and working at a variety of elephant facilities and with elephant veterinarians throughout SE Asia in Cambodia, India, Laos, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.
Trish has been an instructor for the Ecology and Conservation of South East Asian Elephants Course with School for Field Studies at Elephant Valley Project, in Cambodia and instructor and elephant practitioner for the Elephant Management and Medicine Course, with Loop Abroad in Thailand.
She published “Acupuncture Used to Successfully Manage Lameness in a Female Asian Elephant in Thailand” The Point, A Publication of the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society.
In November of 2019 Trish was invited to become the consulting veterinarian with Global Sanctuary for Elephants in Brazil and is the veterinarian assisting with transport of elephants from zoo to sanctuary. She will be traveling to Brazil again in 2021 to help move a mother-daughter elephant duo from a zoo in Argentina to the Global Sanctuary for Elephants in Brazil. When not at the sanctuary she consults on almost a daily basis about the elephants and other animals at the sanctuary .
Trish founded Asian Elephant Wellness Project a US-based 501 C3 in 2020. The Asian Elephant Wellness Project was established to create collaborations between organizations and facilities that work with Asian Elephants.
Nepal became Trish’s home-away-from-home for the past 6 years. It was in thee summer of 2018 that Trish first met an elephant Sita Kali when she collapsed after being ill for several months after she was attacked by another working elephant in town.
After exhausting all other options to find a safe new home for Sita, Trish bought Sita Kali, employed a new team of experience mahouts and together they have been managing her care ever since.
Sita Kali, along with our most recent rescue Jaymati Kali, now live together at Sapana Village, an elephant retirement facility that is run in parternship with Sapana Lodge and Direct Aid Nepal.
You can learn more about Sita Kali and Jaymati Kali’s story here.
