News
What Somboon and Nong Lek Eat in a Day
Sep
An adult elephant spends most of its waking hours eating. For Somboon and Nong Lek, that means a steady supply of sugarcane, cut fresh and stacked ready for the day ahead. Sugarcane is the base of their diet — high in energy, easy to strip and chew, and something they will happily work through for hours.
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Between the sugarcane, the fruit, and the supplement balls, each of them eats somewhere in the range of 150 to 200 kilograms of food a day — a rough guide based on their size and age rather than something we weigh out precisely each morning. Nong Lek, the larger of the two, tends to eat toward the higher end.
The fresh half
Alongside the cane comes fruit. Bananas, pineapple and banana flower go into the baskets our guests carry out to the feeding station. It looks like a lot in a basket. Set against the appetite of a fully grown elephant, it disappears quickly.
The half you make yourself
Fresh food alone does not cover everything an elephant needs. That is what the supplement balls are for: banana, rice, rice bran, pumpkin, tamarind and a little salt, mixed and rolled by hand into dense, palm-sized rounds.
Each ingredient is there for a reason. Rice and rice bran carry the bulk. Pumpkin adds vitamins. Tamarind has been used in Thai elephant care for generations to help digestion. Salt replaces minerals lost in the heat.
Guests on our half-day visit make these themselves — mixing, rolling, and handing them over the same morning they are made. Nothing goes home in a gift bag.
Why we let visitors help
Preparing food is the part of elephant care that visitors can genuinely take part in without asking anything of the elephants in return. Somboon and Nong Lek do not perform, and they are not asked to. They eat, they walk, they bathe. Everything our guests do is built around that, not the other way round.
