I'd like you to imagine something with me for a moment.
Imagine you wanted to save elephants from extinction. It's your life's goal. No fame for you. No fortune.
You're gonna live in a tiny Cambodian village as a foreigner, distrusted and disliked.
You're gonna take anti malarial pills that cause walking hallucinations.
You're going to live in a shack in the woods where bugs crawl on your face while you sleep.
You're gonna trade it all for these creatures.
And you don't even know if it's going to work.
This is the story of the Elephant Valley Project and their decade-long fight against extinction.
Imperfect people banded together in the hopes of pushing back against the inevitable.
And in truth, we didn't come here to tell their story. If anything, we came here expecting to expose them as liars.
But we were wrong, they weren't lying.
And their organization is probably the best bet that Cambodia has to save its last remaining elephants.
And I want to start by acknowledging just how hard this story is for us to tell.
They deserve a documentarian far beyond my skill, and I genuinely hope someday they get one.
But in the meantime they're kind of stuck with us. So let's get into it.
To begin, I guess it's best to explain how we ended up here.
We're in the capital of Mondulkiri province, a town of 7,000 in the incredibly rural northeast of Cambodia.
It's by no means a teeming metropolis, but it does have something that most cities don't: elephants.
The lands nearby are inhabited by an indigenous tribe called the Bunong people,
animists with a history, language and culture completely different from that of the surrounding Khmer.
The Bunong have a multi thousand year relationship with elephants and consider them more than just animals.
To them, they're vehicles, they're farmworkers, they're gods, they're family.
But we aren't here because of them, we're here because of Reddit.
Weeks ago I received a direct message from a man named Tyler claiming he loved our videos
and wanted to know if we'd come out and make one on his ecotourism organization.
Which if, I'm being honest, set off all sorts of red flags for me.
I may be overly cynical, but if someone says they love you and follows up by saying they want something,
chances are you can ignore the first half.
And the sad situation is that elephant tourism in Southeast Asia is rarely ever what it claims to be.
The more flowery the language, the more likely it's scamming idealistic tourists.
Almost nobody is looking deeper into these organizations to see if they're anything like they're claiming.
Tour agencies don't really care so long as they get the five-star review. Money talks and elephants are money.
My research found virtually no third party evidence to confirm Tyler's organization was legit.
In fact, the only thing we could find made it seem like the locals hated them being here.
So while we agreed to his invitation, the strong expectation was that we weren't going to tell the story they wanted.
But the truth is a shield.
As of this video, there are 73 captive elephants remaining in Cambodia and a few hundred still left in the wild.
And of those 73, about half live in the areas surrounding this town.
They're communally owned by the Bunong people and some elephants can have up to forty five different owners.
They're the last of a dying resource of a dying culture.
But it wasn't always this way.
Within living memory these communities would have had dozens of elephants each
and their entire society would have revolved around them.
Elephants would transport villagers to market. They'd carry crops from the farm.
They'd haul logs, move stone and serve as the heart of an entire religion.
Split between dozens of elephants it was light work. A few hours a day earned them a life of relative leisure.
But all that changed as the great die-off began.
Already a collapsing commodity, the Vietnam War brought a bombing of this region that was unprecedented in history.
U.S. Bombers targeted elephant convoys trying to disrupt Viet Minh supply chains.
Hundreds died. When the Khmer Rouge took over, starvation, overwork and sadism killed hundreds more.
Communities that one generation before could claim 20 working elephants now had one. Two if they were lucky.
But the work required was the same.
For those elephants that survived to the modern era, they were now doing ten times what they'd done before.
And they were older. These aging elephants were being worked to death.
They had their limbs broken, but they had to keep working.
It wasn't that the Bunong were trying to abuse these animals,
it's that they were trying to sustain a way of life that was quickly disappearing.
When the farm is struggling, you can't just retire the tractor, no matter how rusted it's become. By the early 2000s, the situation was dire.
The last link protecting the elephant's complete devastation were a people who were struggling to survive themselves.
The Bunong were being dragged into the cash economy completely unprepared.
Exploitative Khmer businessman bought everything they held dear: Their land, their elephants, their forest.
As some of the poorest and least educated people in the country, they had little choice.
How can you fight something you don't understand?
So in steps a foreigner.
In 2005 a Brit named Jack comes to Mondulkiri. He isn't an expert in… well anything, really.
But, he's what you'd call - I guess the polite word is "driven".
He doesn't understand the Bunong and the elephants.
He doesn't really understand the Khmer and their government, but he does understand the cash economy.
He understood the white tourists now starting to flood into the country.
He understood the shift towards conservation in the west and how to tap into it.
And with that tiny bit of knowledge he turned this town on its head.
But saving elephants is about more than bringing in tourists.
It requires a cultural shift at every level of society.
It requires setting up a forest reserve free of poaching and logging.
It requires building up the local communities so they no longer need to sell themselves wholesale.
It means protecting more than just the elephants, but the entire ecosystem around them.
In a country that's losing a tenth of its forests every decade, that's easier said than done.
And when you change the economy, the people who relied on the old ways aren't just going to roll over and accept it.
Especially from a foreigner.
It wouldn't be a stretch to say that the EVP are hated here in town.
Not by everyone of course, but a vocal minority. If you go to cafes, you'll see petitions against them.
If you talk with the other tour companies, they'll slander them without prompting.
To an inexperienced tourist, they'd probably seem like the enemy.
Like white imperialists stealing bread from the mouths of local people.
After all, even though they're replacing a way of life that we in the west would consider abusive, they are replacing a way of life.
But like I said: Jack knew his own people. Tourists heard his call and Mondulkiri began to explode.
Hundreds of tourists became thousands and then tens of thousands.
People who a decade before would have been riding exhausted elephants up a hill,
were now paying to see them eat bamboo from a distance.
When researching this story we went out with a number of the different tour groups to sort of see what they had to offer, experience all we could.
In truth, we had expected that we were going to, at the very least expose somebody – pop a lie somewhere.
But when we got here, what I personally experienced changed my point of view.
This isn't just about environmentalism. It's more about economics.
What Jack did is, when he came here, he didn't quite tell people that they were wrong.
He showed them that more money could be made, simply by adopting his system.
And with the money he was making with his own organization, he fundamentally altered the future of this species.
When we went out with the EVP, we saw a genuine desire to do right by these animals and to educate the tourists who'd paid to visit them.
Instead of sugarcane, the tourists were given a medical checklist and taught to read signs of distress.
Teenagers, who would have otherwise blushed at the word, were asked to inspect wounds to an elephant's vagina.
Not exactly a whistle-stop photo tour.
The only time they were even allowed to approach was to clean fly larvae out of the skin.
They took a group of kids who were completely ignorant and gave them an education.
Sure, they didn't get the perfect selfie, but they left better people.
And with their money, the EVP has helped the Bunong preserve 2,000 hectares of their ancestral forest.
It's paid for schools, for vets, for education, and forest rangers.
It has given thousands of jobs to local indigenous community.
Now let's compare that to the situation with L.E.A.F, one of the newer competitors trying to capitalize on the tourist boom.
L.E.A.F is a perfect example of the local market trying to keep up.
Without EVP, they wouldn't have batted an eye at selling whatever a tourist wanted.
They'd originally offered elephant rides, for years even. But the market eventually just wouldn't accept it.
The times had changed.
Angered at what they saw as unfair competition, they started a smear campaign against the EVP.
But the truth is a shield, and it failed. So they decided to recreate themselves in their image.
They copied their website and documentation.
They bought a hundred hectares of forest and gained NGO status.
And in doing so, they've become successful.
But not completely, because they didn't truly copy them.
They'd created a husk, almost a shell of what they needed to be.
The moment you joined their tour it's clear what they are.
They treat their elephants like trained animals undergoing a performance.
Tourists are brought to engage, not to learn.
The elephants are made to swim against their will and when they fight back, they're kicked and forced into the water.
We watched their mahout spray Raid into an elephant's infected wound, just inches from a poster promoting their top quality vet services.
Elephants were threatened with a stick to the face and they recoiled like any animal who has a history of abuse.
But the selfies? Oh, much better selfies.
In perhaps the most telling part of our experience with L.E.A.F,
when we were reading their documents on how great their treatment of animals was, their office manager kicked a stray dog in the face.
And I don't say this to imply they're evil, they're not. Pretty much every other project in Mondulkiri felt the same.
I honestly think they're trying to do the right thing.
But L.E.A.F's actions are much more in line with the average Khmer attitude towards these animals than EVP's are.
It's easy for us to judge their treatment of dogs, but how do you view a rat?
Why is a dog more special? It's entirely cultural.
My point isn't to assign blame or say they're specifically wrong.
It's to show the effect that the EVP has had on the market. Their competitors know they have to change to survive.
They just haven't quite figured out how.
Or perhaps more accurately, why.
But if you're in North America researching on the internet, they might as well be the same organizations.
And that's the real value of Jack's legacy here.
As frustrating as it must be for the EVP staff to see themselves imitated by the lesser dedicated, it's definitely a good thing.
The market that was just a decade before built on abuse is being forced to change.
It isn't there yet, But the evidence of its success is everywhere.
While they haven't quite figured out how to put the words into practice, they do see the writing on the wall.
The market has shifted beneath them.
The EVP may be losing the war of internet misinformation, but they're winning the war on the ground.
And ultimately, that's the goal.
This is a culture war. With it has come the natural backlash of being forced to change.
But the real question at play here is not who's right or wrong, but: what is an elephant?
What are they for?
Are they horses meant to be ridden? Are they oxen meant to plow our fields?
Or are they wild animals, meant to be kept away from human society entirely?
There's no right answer, only a spectrum of opinion. Where you fall on that spectrum is completely up to you.
But with just a few hundred left, it's a window of opinion that's soon to be closed for good.
The EVP are forcing this market to change, for better or worse.
If you think that's a good thing, pay them. Get that worse selfie. Learn about wounded vaginas and deforestation and indigenous rights.
But if you want to swim with the last remaining elephants in Cambodia, their competitors are happy to oblige.
At least for now.
The choice is yours to make. But don't forget that by making it, you're genuinely changing things.
You're the market. They're just a supplier.
This is Rare Earth.
If she starts to run this way, I will yell at you though. Okay.
Evan: Just let him learn, it's the only way.