World
Mosha, Thai elephant wounded by land mine, gets her 9th prosthetic limb
Mosha was 7 months old when she stepped on a land mine near Thailand’s border with Myanmar and lost a front leg. That was a decade ago.The New York Times
Mosha was 7 months old when she stepped on a land mine near Thailand’s border with Myanmar and lost a front leg. That was a decade ago.
This week, she received her ninth artificial leg, thanks to the Friends of the Asian Elephant Foundation hospital in northern Thailand.
Mosha is one of more than a dozen elephants who have been wounded by land mines in the border region, where rebels have been fighting the Myanmar government for decades. She was the first elephant to be fitted with a prosthetic limb at the hospital near Lampang.
Mosha weighed about 1,300 pounds when she was wounded. Today, she weighs more than 4,000 pounds, and her growth has necessitated frequent upgrades of her artificial leg.
Motala, another resident of the hospital, lost a front leg to a land mine in the same border area in 1999. She is now more than 50 years old. “The Eyes of Thailand,” a 2012 documentary, featured her being fitted with an artificial limb.
Dr. Therdchai Jivacate, a Thai orthopedist who helped design prosthetic limbs for the elephants, said they could not survive without them.
“When she cannot walk, she is going to die,” he told The Daily Telegraph in Britain in 2009, when Mosha was fitted with a new prosthesis.
When Mosha received her newest artificial limb last week, he told Reuters: “The way she walked was unbalanced, and her spine was going to bend. That means she would have hurt her cartilages badly and eventually stopped walking. And she would have died because of that.”
The Thai Elephant Conservation Center estimates that there are 2,000 to 3,000 elephants living in the wild in Thailand and about 2,700 domesticated ones.
In the past, many elephants in Thailand worked in the logging industry, where their agility and strength made them a valuable asset. But the Thai government banned logging in the nation’s forests in 1989, putting them out of work.