Unfriend Elephants : Neither friend nor foe — we all stand on overlapping ground.
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In Thai media, “elephants” are often portrayed through familiar images of grandeur, their deep ties to national history, or their innocent charm and playfulness. But in this documentary, we encounter elephants in a very different way—dangerous, unsettling, and prompting us to question whether these wild animals, long regarded as friends of humans, can truly still be considered companions at all.
Unfriend Elephants is one episode in the documentary series “the Sixth Mass Extinction,” directed by Wanchai Tantivitayapitak, a veteran in documentary and environmental work who has reported countless times from the field. This documentary took about two years to film, requiring the crew to work in areas where wild elephants actually live. That meant they had to accept unpredictable risks—from the terrain and environment to the behavior of the animals themselves.
Wanchai chose to tell the story of wild elephants, which in recent years have often made headlines for encroaching on farmland, destroying crops, or even injuring people. Such reports frequently end with familiar explanations—whether it’s forest degradation forcing elephants to search for food outside, or populations too large for their habitats to sustain. However, the documentary does not stop at these explanations. Instead, it moves beyond them to a more thought provoking issue: the question of “overlapping spaces.”
ภาพจากสารคดี Unfriend Elephants
This short phrase is deeply tied to decades of policy decisions—land development and allocation, and economic expansion by both the state and private sector—which have often treated forests as reserve resources rather than ecosystems full of life. The documentary takes us across different regions of the country to show that the conflict between wildlife and humans is not isolated. It recurs again and again, following the same pattern: forests shrink, elephants’ traditional pathways are cut off, food sources become insufficient, and when elephants must survive, human farmland becomes the answer—an answer they do not need anyone’s permission to take.
We may already be familiar with these stories from the perspective of conservation, but what is striking about this documentary is that it also opens space for us to hear the voices of villagers who suffer the consequences. For them, having their farmland destroyed by wild elephants means losing income, accumulating debt, and facing seasonal insecurity in their lives. The conflict between people and elephants cannot be seen as simply black and white, nor reduced to a flat narrative of humans versus nature. In truth, the villagers are ordinary people forced to live with the outcomes of resource management structures in which they have never allowed to help design.
Another compelling aspect the documentary conveys is the remarkable intelligence of elephants, which adapt very quickly. When humans attempt to respond to their encroachment with various measures, the elephants are able to learn and find ways around them—whether by changing routes, avoiding barriers, or even accurately remembering patterns of human management. By contrast, government measures and related agencies move slowly, lack integration, and often amount only to short term fixes after problems have already occurred.
The title Unfriend Elephants does not mean that humans must sever ties with elephants. Rather, it refers to a situation in which the relationship between the two sides is being pushed to a point where coexistence through affection is no longer possible. The promotional description of the documentary, which states that humanity’s attempts to deal with the problem “are failed attempts,” is by no means an exaggeration. What the film clearly emphasizes is that this issue cannot be solved with outdated ideas or with tools and technology alone. It requires restructuring land use and the rural economy—the very roots of the conflict.
ภาพจากสารคดี Unfriend Elephants
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