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Mosha (left) and Motala find refuge and medical treatment at the Friends of the Asian Elephant hospital in Lampang, north-central Thailand, after each lost a leg to land mines. Many elephants injured by blasts were used for logging—often illegal—in Myanmar and reach the hospital across the border only after days of walking.
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The Thai hospital has treated over a dozen elephants wounded by land mines, often hurt when their mahouts, or caretakers, released them at night to forage in Myanmar. Both the Burmese army and rebels have laid mines over decades of conflict, and the country is one of the few where land mines are still being planted.
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Mosha was seven months old when a mine took her leg. Still growing at four, she's measured at a Thai animal hospital for a new prosthetic, essential since elephants carry so much of their weight on their forelegs.
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The prosthetic team uses a bag filled with foam beads to make a cast of Mosha's leg; it envelops the stump, and when activated by suction conforms to the shape of her leg.
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Technicians transform casts into lifelike legs down to skin color and toenails for Mosha and Motala, at the Prostheses Foundation in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
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Mosha's caretaker calls the elephant his daughter and spends the day playing with her and feeding her. When he trains her to lie down, to stand still for a bucket of bananas, or to raise her leg for a cube of sugar, he is preparing her to wear her new artificial leg. He has been with the elephant for most of her life at the hospital, and when he goes home for holidays, he misses her.
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Mosha will continue to need new replacement legs, as her growth will not stabilize until she is about 25 years old. Since elephants' forelegs support two thirds of their weight, Mosha would almost certainly have died without a prosthetic limb.
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