Although some people living in the forest may be afraid of animals bumping in the night, the sight of an elephant rummaging through their kitchen did not come as a complete surprise to one Thai family.
Kittichai Boodchan jokingly captioned a Facebook video he took over the weekend showing an elephant nosing its way into his kitchen, “It came to cook again.”
The elephant pokes its head into Kittichai’s kitchen in the early hours of Sunday, perhaps prompted by the midnight cravings, and uses its trunk to locate food.
Before the video cuts out, the elephant is seen taking up a plastic bag of liquid, examining it momentarily, and then shoving it into its mouth.
Kittichai and his wife reside in a national park in western Thailand, near a lake where wild elephants bathe in the forest.
He was unconcerned about the enormous animal because he recognizes it as a regular visitor to his town, where it feeds, departs, and returns to the forest.
He said that the elephant had demolished their kitchen wall in May, resulting in an open-air kitchen idea akin to a drive-through window.
Its only mission this weekend was to locate food.
A basic rule of thumb in dealing with unwanted guests crashing is not to feed them, according to Kittichai.
“When it doesn´t get food, it just leaves on its own,” he told AFP. “I am already used to it coming, so I was not so worried.”
In Thailand’s national parks and adjacent regions, wild elephants are prevalent, with farmers sometimes reporting instances of their fruits and corn harvests being devoured by a ravenous herd.
