Elephants in Thailand receive prosthetic limbs after landmine accidents
A decade ago, Mosha wandered into landmine territory between Myanmar and Thailand. One of her legs was lost in the blast.
The Asian elephant was recently fitted for an updated prosthetic limb to replace her front leg from Friends of the Asian Elephant Foundation hospital located in northern Thailand. This makes her the first elephant from the hospital to successfully use an artificial limb.
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Mosha is on her ninth leg, according to New York Times. It took two years of recovery at the hospital before she was fitted with her original artificial leg. As Mosha continues to grow, she receives new prosthetic limbs to support her additional weight and height. According to Reuters, she received the first when she weighed 1,300 pounds. Today, she is upwards of 4,000 pounds.
"The way she walked was unbalanced and her spine was going to bend," Mosha's surgeon Therdchai Jivacate told Reuters. "She would have died."
Mosha isn't the only elephant to be fitted with a leg. The Friends of the Asian Elephant Foundation hospital, which was founded in 1993, currently has 17 patients—one of them being Motala, who suffered a similar circumstance in 1999 and was transported to the same hospital.
It took ten years for her landmine-inflicted wound to heal, but since then she, too, has received various versions of her prosthesis. A 2012 documentary, "The Eyes of Thailand," chronicles both Mosha and Motala's journeys and experiences in what is known as the world's first elephant hospital.
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Topics Animals
