World
In search of food: Hungry Elephant smashes through kitchen wall at night
A family in Thailand was shocked when it discovered an elephant’s head poking through the kitchen wall beside the drying rack.
In a video that went viral on Facebook, an elephant appeared to be looking for something to eat while his trunk rummaged through the kitchen drawers, knocking pans and cooking paraphernalia to the floor.
According to details, Rachadawan Phungprasopporn and her husband were stirred by the noise and rushed to the kitchen to see what had happened while they saw and filmed the episode on her phone while an elephant with its huge ivory tusks was rummaging through the cupboard with its long trunk.
"It came to cook again," wrote Kittichai Boodchan sarcastically in a caption to a Facebook video, he shot over the weekend of a mammoth mammal nosing its way into his kitchen.
At one point, the elephant also picks up a plastic bag of liquid, considers it briefly, and then sticks it in its mouth — before the video cuts out.
Kittichai and his wife live near a national park in western Thailand, by a lake where wild elephants often bathe while roaming in the jungle.
He was calm by the mammoth mammal, recognising it as a frequent visitor as it often wanders into homes in his village where it eats, leaves and shoots off back into the jungle.
Kittichai said a general rule of thumb in dealing with unwelcome visitors crashing is not to feed them.
'He came to the house about two months ago and was looking around, but didn't damage anything then.’
The elephant had destroyed their kitchen wall in May, he said, creating an open-air kitchen concept reminiscent of a drive-through window.
This weekend, its sole task was to find food.
Wild elephants are a common sight in Thailand´s national parks and its surrounding areas, with farmers sometimes reporting incidents of their fruits and corn crops being eaten by a hungry herd.
Thailand has an estimated 2,000 Asian elephants living in the wild but there is often conflict when they come into contact with humans on roads and in villages.