Jaipur: Elephant Village Care & Conservation Experience

Care rather than rides

This is a visit built around how elephants are looked after, not around sitting on one. There is no riding here.

What you do instead is spend three hours with the animals and the people who work with them every day, which turns out to be far more interesting than a photograph from a howdah.

Hathi Gaon

The elephant village was built outside Jaipur in the 2000s specifically so the animals and their mahouts would have trees, water and space rather than a city lane. Around a hundred elephants live in it with their keepers' families.

What you learn

Daily routine, which is mostly eating: an adult elephant works through around 150 kg of vegetation a day and drinks up to 200 litres of water. Feeding one is slower and stranger than you expect.

Behaviour and communication — elephants use infrasound below human hearing, which is how separated animals stay in contact over kilometres. The trunk has roughly forty thousand muscles and no bone.

Foot and skin care, which is the real work. Elephant feet carry four tonnes and go wrong easily; nails and pads are checked and filed constantly. The skin is two and a half centimetres thick and still sunburns, which is why they throw dust and mud over themselves.

The mahouts

Most have worked with the same animal for years, often from a family that has done this for generations. They are the most interesting people on the property and they will answer anything — how they read a mood, what an animal came from, how long trust took.

Ask them. It is the part of the visit people remember.

Practical

Three hours. You may get wet or muddy depending on what the animals are doing — bring a change of clothes.

No flash photography, and stay where the keepers put you. These are large animals and the rules exist for both sides.