Our Elephant Partners

The domesticated elephants employed by Kāfæ Mūl Cĥāng™ (KMC) to produce our amazing coffee are treated to a much better life. They are fed a delightful diet of fruit, rice and other favorites. As well, with the funds we provide, they are never used for tourist shows. Instead, they are able to freely roam the grounds of the Kāfæ Mūl Cĥāng™ home base near Chiang Mai, becoming part of the Kāfæ Mūl Cĥāng™ ‘family’.

Our home and processing facility is in the land of the elephants. With twenty-three elephant parks, there are more elephants here than anywhere else in Asia. A third of Thailand’s elephants are within a five-mile radius of our home. We are literally surrounded by elephants.

We joined our own three elephants and our neighbor’s fifteen elephants and formed the Kāfæ Mūl Cĥāng™ company.

The production facility shares the same compound as our house. The house is completely open to the elephants. Sometimes they sneak their trunks thru a window and grab our lunch or salad or a bunch of bananas on the counter. It’s hysterical!

Here they are cared for better, even, than they are at the foundations. They are like family, just as your companion animal(s) are to you. “Nobody loves and respects elephants more than my family,” says Sukanya Nathanson. “We have literally brought them into our home like family. They sometimes eat in our kitchen. We nurse them and heal them and feed them better than anywhere I’ve seen. We treat them like royalty. They receive the tender care they deserve. Many elephants have had hard lives… so we like ours to have fun and peace. My wish is for happy elephants around the world, a revolutionary effort to save these gentle giants before it’s too late.”

It’s very expensive to care for elephants. These beautiful beasts can eat one out of house and home. It can cost ten-times more to sustain an elephant than a human. Healthy young elephants fetch a price of upwards of $60,000 and they can cost $1,200 monthly for food and upkeep. That’s a year’s pay for most Thais. That’s why the number of elephants in Thailand is dwindling. They can live around 70 – 80 years on average and can eat 300 – 500 kilos a day. Elephant nature parks and tourism have helped tremendously, but are limited and only a piece of the puzzle.

Even though our elephants help with the coffee for three months of the year, we still care for them twelve months a year. We feed them extraordinarily well, like family, and their caregivers are paid double the going rate.

Our elephants don’t do tricks, they don’t dance, paint or play soccer for tourists. Some of those abilities are done through brutal and painful training techniques — you can view these brutal training techniques on various websites. Our elephants are almost never worked or exert themselves under effort or strain. They just relax, enjoy life, eat, mate, and play.

Our elephants eat like royalty. The elephants’ menu includes papaya, mango, pineapple, starfruit, durian sugarcane, bananas, tamarind, rice, apples and pears. For three months a year, they eat a few delicious, nutritious coffee cherries a few days a week — less than 2% of their food intake. The coffee beans do no harm to the elephants and provide excellent nutrition.

From our experience, the elephants either like them or are indifferent to eating the beans — except for one. He doesn’t like them and won’t eat them, so we love him just the same and pass no judgments — to each his own.

After the elephants eat the coffee cherries, they pass through their digestives system and are excreted, either with the cherry intact or partially digested. We pick these from their dung, which consists of these and other undigested plant fibers. We then clean, dry and roast the beans and sell in micro-lot batches.

Further production takes place at our home in the mountains of Chiang Mai. We choose the conditions. Our elephants are allowed to roam the land. We don’t chain them and keep them stationary to poop beans. They remain free and as safely mobile as is possible for them.

Our goal is to employ hundreds of elephants in the production of coffee, thus providing the funds to care for them in this style year-round. Expanding sales of Kāfæ Mūl Cĥāng™, will allow us to bring more and more mahouts into ‘the fold’, who can free their elephants from bondage and eliminate the need for using them as show animals, for brutally training them, chaining them and mistreating them.

Sukanya performing a ”first sort” from
some more dung

Is it true our elephants get regular massages?

Yes, and they love listening to Mozart and Beethoven. Also they are very smart and love to play and have fun.

Elephant fruit salad

Elephants in our house

Sukanya feeding an elephant