In the second story in a series celebrating the amazing things young New Zealanders do every day, meet Jack Lanting, a Kiwi teen whose heart is as big as the Thai elephants he has dedicated his life to protecting.

Lily the Thai elephant had been force fed methamphetamine for years by her handler. When Jack Lanting, a big-hearted Waikato teen, met Lily, now safe in the Elephant Nature Park, it was love at first sight. Eight years later, having spent much of his life supporting elephants in Thailand, he wants to open his own elephant sanctuary. Jack, 16, says his reasons are simple: ”I want more than anything to give elephants a life worth living”.

Jack was only eight years old when he first went to Thailand on a family holiday and became concerned about elephants he saw .

”I had wanted to ride an elephant, see them play soccer and paint pictures, but I was upset to learn what they went through to have tourists on their backs and do silly tricks. I decided that I would rather see them free from saddles and being like an elephant should be,” Jack says.

It was on this trip that he met Lily.

”From the moment I met her and the entire time I was there she wanted to be with me and I loved being with her. We spent all our time together,” Jack says.

Jack decided he wanted to provide a better life for another elephant, a life like the one Lily had come to enjoy. In a remarkable effort, he raised $20,000 and in November 2010 he returned to Thailand with his mum Viv and bought a broken-down former trekking and logging elephant, aged in her 70s. Jack named his elephant Kwan Jai, Thai for “beloved”.

Jack donated her to the Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, a rescue and rehabilitation centre founded in 1996 by Thai woman Lek Chailert, and he was there again in 2013 when Kwan Jai died.

Since then Jack has returned to Thailand many times with his mother, and is in the final stages of planning and fundraising for his own elephant sanctuary to be built in the country he has come to know so well and love so much.

”I’ve taken every opportunity to learn all I can about elephants and working with them. I still have a lot to learn though,” Jack says. ”There is nothing else I have ever wanted to do and the elephants need help. They need me.”

Jack says he takes inspiration from environmentalist and adventurer Robert Swan, who said: “There is no greater threat to the planet than people believing someone else will fix things”.

”It’s true,” says Jack, ”and I am not prepared to wait for someone else to do something when I know I can do it myself. I want more than anything to give elephants a life worth living. They deserve to be able to find their natural character, it’s that simple really.”

Jack says he has never imagined a life where he is not working with elephants.

”There has been some hard times but I’ve never given up and I know that I will not stop helping them because I have seen too much and I will never let them down,” he says. “When I’m working with elephants I feel like I belong.”

Jack’s planned sanctuary will focus on helping both captive elephants in the tourist industry and wild elephants.

”Both need help,” he says.”The project will be a hands off experience for visitors who will be able to enjoy watching elephants being themselves which is the best entertainment they can give. There is no point in saving the elephants if there is no jungle and local people need to be on board for conservation to truly work.”

The project will combine reforestation efforts, human and wild elephant conflict abatement measures that include beehive fencing (that also creates added income) around local farmers crops, creating a co-op with farmers that helps to raise their income and to see the elephants as a benefit to them rather than a pest.

The project will also be an education project with programmes dedicated to school groups that includes sponsoring Thai children to attend for free. ”They are the ones who will be able to make the biggest difference in the future for their own country,” says Jack.

”I want the project to be as eco-friendly as possible by generating electricity from a river and the sun, running all our vehicles on bio-diesel and growing most of our food. We will show locals how permaculture can help them to grow their crops without pesticides faster and better quality. Being organic, these crops will sell for a lot more money, and by choosing crops that elephants don’t like such as coffee and cacao that grow under the trees, they will not need to cut the trees down.

”If a wild elephant does wander into their crops and destroys it, we will support the farmer and his family by allowing them to take food from our gardens and some extra to go and sell at a market until they are back on their feet.”

Jack says he wants to employ entire families to keep them together. ”I have seen a lot of Thai families living apart and not able to be with each other for months.”

Jack says he has always loved elephants since he first me Lily when he was just a small boy in Thailand. ”Maybe I relate to them,” he says.

”I love their sense of humour but I also feel so sad for them. They are so big and strong and even though knowing what they have been through, most are still gentle to humans, forgiving and don’t hold grudges even though they have every right to.”

To find out more about Jack’s work or to make a donation visit kwanjaielephantfoundation.com

Previously in Amazing Kids: You’re never too young to save the planet

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Every year Charles Anderson takes his daughter on a road trip around his home region, seeing it as a chance to share something special and fleeting with a daughter who is getting bigger in the blink of an eye. For the third such trip of her young life, he tries, and fails, to go camping in the Marlborough Sounds.

We were somewhere on the Queen Charlotte Drive, winding around myriad corners in the blazing sunlight when she started complaining that it was too hot.

She squirmed and groaned and winced. So, I put on the air conditioning. Then it was too cold. So, I wound down the windows. Then it was too windy. So, then Ivie, now two years old, started to wail.

This was the start of a holiday.

Every year since she was born I have endeavoured to take my daughter on a trip around the top of the South Island. So far, we had been to Karamea and Farewell Spit. I saw it as an excuse to show her more of the awesome area in which we were fortunate to live. But also, I wanted to see it for myself – it’s easy to get complacent when these places are on your doorstep. So that way we would both be seeing things for the first time. It was a romantic notion. We would share something.

I had not spent a night in the Sounds since I was close to her age.

Ivie was nearing three years old now and I believed that it could be time to try camping in a real tent.

For days ahead of our departure I extolled the virtues of sleeping in a “special tent”. This was where “big girls” liked to reside, I told her. It was exclusive. It was a big deal.

But as we rounded the coastal curves of the Sounds, surrounded by an aquamarine ocean, thick forest islands and a glinting sun that managed to cast the sail boats in an almost magical light, the screams that reverberated around the car seemed to dull that magic just a touch.

Ice cream.

I promised her ice cream and playgrounds.

“Playbwound?” she said with a rising inflection through her tears. “Ice cweem?”

“Only if we stop crying,” I replied.

She nodded, rubbing saline and snot from her eyes and nose.

Yes, I would negotiate with terrorists.

We rolled into Momorangi Bay Campground in the early afternoon. We found our tent site on the water’s edge and said polite hellos to the families who were to be our new neighbours. I was almost apologetic.

I hauled the tent out of the boot and unfurled it. I wrestled with poles and pegs while trying to ensure Ivie did not run into oncoming traffic or into the water’s edge. In the space of about 20 minutes we had our sleeping quarters.

Ivie giggled and ran inside and threw herself onto our sleeping bag. This was going to work, I told myself. I was winning.

Nice work dad.

We swam in the water and splashed through the shallows. She was grinning. She was having fun.

Nice work dad.

“Like Peter Pan,” Ivie said of the scene.

Looking around I thought ‘yes, it is a bit like Neverland’. But reflecting on last year’s trip, I knew that this little Peter Pan was getting bigger. She was running and talking and getting sassier. Time was speeding up.

Once upon a time I would pick her up, rock her back and forth and softly sing Otis Redding’s ‘Sitting on the Dock of the Bay’ to her until she fell asleep. It was beautiful. These days I used that song as a weapon. Lifting her was like picking up a bowling ball. She hated to sleep. These days I would sweep her up, taking effort not to aggravate the herniated disc that blew out doing such a manoeuvre a year earlier. Then I would engage the core and rock her back and forth, singing like a maniacal karaoke singer, while she screamed ‘NO DADDY, NO DADDY’.

Before long, her eyes would roll back in her head and eventually, eventually, eventually, she would pass out. Really, it would make me feel absolutely horrible. Like I was chloroforming my kid.

It was the early afternoon and Ivie was getting tired but stubborn. So, I bundled her into the car for a “little dwive” and we rolled onwards through the Sounds. She fell asleep. I kept driving and soon, quite unplanned, we were in Picton and Ivie woke up to see the town’s giant destination playground out of the corner of her eye.

“Playbwound! Pirate ship!”

She was correct. There was indeed a pirate ship and a water park. I was unprepared.

No spare nappies, no swimming costume.

But this was Ivie’s weekend. So, I stripped off her nappy, put her pants back on and implored her not to soil herself.

Then she was off, careering through water features – crazed and half naked. She was excited. She was screaming. She was trying to do everything that the big girls were doing. I was trying to ensure she didn’t kill herself. It was unsurprising then, that the inevitable happened. She soiled herself.

We headed back to the campground, singing Hakuna Matata and leaving her shitty pants back in Picton.

We ate fish and chips as the sun went down. Ivie was mucky with tomato sauce. I got her changed into her pyjamas.

“I don’t wanna go to sleep yet,” she said.

So, we read books. We read her brother’s Star Wars character encyclopaedia, which she insisted we pack. She learned about “Loda” and “Ham Soda” and the extensive George Lucas universe. The sun went down, and we put on the lamp. I told her stories and sang ‘Sitting on the Dock of the Bay’ to her for 850^th time. These were my go-to techniques for encouraging unconsciousness. My techniques were not working. She wriggled and writhed and crawled around the tent in the semi-dark.

Then she turned to me.

“Daddy, I want to go home now.”

It was late. It was dark. We were in close proximity to several young families. I could have tried to convince her. I could have put my foot down. I could have used Otis Redding as a weapon while the neighbouring families pondered whether I was torturing my child. Instead, I sighed, and put her inside the car while I took down the tent in the dark.

As we drove home I called Ivie’s mother and told her what was going on. I put her on speakerphone.

“Ivie,” she said. ‘What happened?”

“We go home now,” Ivie replied. “It wasn’t a very good idea.”

“Maybe another time?” I asked her.

“Yea, another time.”

Then, she fell asleep.

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This content is entirely funded by Flick, New Zealand’s fairest power deal. In the past year, their customers saved $320 on average, which pays for a cheeky bottle of wine in the trolley almost every shop. Please support us by switching to them right now!