Kulen Elephant Forest

Kulen Elephant Forestis a conservation organization founded in 2018 byDavid Piot,The reserve, a 400-hectare elephant retirement park, was opened in December 2019, protecting the captiveAsian elephantsinSiem Reap ProvinceinCambodia, as well as protecting up to 1100 acres of protected forest inhabited by the former elephants ofAngkorUNESCO World Heritage site.
KEFs elephants are located in Bos Thom Community Forest in Ballangk commune, Prasat Bakong district, 40 km north from Siem Reap city on National Road 64. Every tour departs from KEF office in downtown Siem Reap where a shuttle will take visitors on a one-hour drive to the Kulen Elephant Forest.
At the KEF reserve, visitors with no more than 12 people in a group, will spend time learning about elephants and follow them by foot through their natural habitat, observing their relationships and behaviors, as they browse in the forest. The elephants do not take people on rides nor are they required to perform tricks or beg people to buy food for them.
Presently, Kulen Elephant Forest consist of ten elephants, which is the largest herd of private owned elephants in Cambodia, the bull Kham Song, and the nine females Chi Chlorb, Chi Mean, Chi Ole, Chi Tone, Chi Youl, Gom Phoy, Iplock, Itok, and Savath, retired to the Bos Thom Community Forest at the foothills of Kulen Mountain inSiem Reap Province, one hour from the citySiem Reapand world famous templeAngkor Wat.
Eighteen mahouts are working in shifts to care for the elephants and keep them from causing any damage to the local villagers’ fields. KEF elephants and the KEF mahout staff have since April 2019, been trained and managed by the Swedish zookeeper and elephant consultantDan Koehl, being responsible for care and management of KEF elephants and Mahouts as elephant welfare director.
In 2023, KEF became the first elephant facility throughout Cambodia to be awarded ‘Certified Facility’ accreditation from leaders in elephant venue auditing,Asian Captive Elephant Standards(ACES), as part of a program coordinated byDeutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit(GIZ) and thePacific Asia Travel Association.
The audit covered 193 criteria in eight different areas including elephant welfare, elephant interaction, community relations and biodiversity, and conservation. The result of this audit was the awarding of a silver-level certification, representing the satisfaction of 100% of the mandatory criteria and 70%-plus of the advanced criteria.
Since 2023, KEF has in collaboration with the Cambodian chapter ofThe School for Field Studies(SFS) also contributed to scientific research, by letting their elephants be part of the schools Asian Elephant Ecology program and field exercise. Students from SFS studied the Kulen elephants on distance, while the elephants were browsing in the forest, and later collected plant material they had eaten, in order to identify which species of plants the elephants eat. Finally, it was possible to make a list of 80 species of plants which are parts of the Kulen elephants diet, and a scientific paper about the studies will be published in autumn of 2023.
Wars, and the time during which Cambodia was ruled by theKhmer Rougereduced the population ofCambodia’s elephants, both in the wild as well as in captivity. Cambodia is presently home to less than 75 captiveAsian elephants, most of them being cared for by private owners inMondulkiri Province.It is estimated that there are over 500 wild elephants in Cambodia, with around 110 living in theKeo Seima Wildlife Sanctuaryand nearly 200 in theCardamom Mountains.