This is the incredible moment a blind elephant danced and swayed along to music after a kindhearted man played the piano for her in the wild.
Paul Barton, a celebrated British pianist, went to Thailand in 1996 in search for adventure. Instead he found love and a quest for life. He and his wife have been working to rehabilitate elephants at Elephant World sanctuary for the past two decades.
Recently, Barton decided to fulfill a long cherished dream of playing music to the blind elephants. He did this by dragging his piano all the way up the mountain where the elephants usually gathered.
“I was heartbroken when I first saw Lam Duan arrive at Elephants World in 2012.
She’s so restless but when you play music to her, she stops being restless and is calm. Being blind, she’ll sway back and forth.”
Lam Duan spent the first 20 years of her life working in the logging trade, before spending a further 10 in the trekking industry. The next 30 years were spent being looked after by a pair of owners before being moved to Elephants World.
The pianist performed a beautiful classical piano piece for a blind elephant named Lam Duan at Elephant World. The live music appeared to comfort the sightless pachyderm, who swayed happily with the tempo of the music.
“I had previously worked with blind children for two years and seen the impact music had in their lives, so I wanted to try out that theory with these blind elephants. This elephant in particular was so intelligent, I thought it would appreciate some music.”
Barton thought hard about what kind of music elephants would enjoy and finally decided on Beethoven. The first elephant he played Beethoven for dropped the food she was eating and stared at him the entire time.
“If you play classical music to an elephant, something soft and beautiful, something that human beings have been listening to for hundreds for hundreds of years, something that is timeless – and you play that to an elephant that is blind and they’ve never heard music before – the reaction is priceless.
Related Story
There is a special bond between you and the elephant. You are communicating with them in a different language. That language is neither ours nor theirs. There is something infinitesimally wonderful in a piece of Beethoven that connects me to that elephant and that feeling is otherworldly.”
The heartwarming clip is incredibly raw: just British pianist Paul Barton and an upright piano among the trees; the elephant, Lam Duan, incredibly comfortable in Paul’s presence as he works the keys.
Watch the video below:
by 