The Elephant Breeding Center is a popular place visited by both national and international tourist to get more information on domesticated elephants and the baby elephants born there. The center is just 10 to 15 minutes drive from the Chitwan National Park.

Traditionally, captive elephants were not raised for breeding in Nepal because elephant with a calf needs to be laid off from work for at least 3-4 years. It is not only a daunting task to train the calves but also fairly expensive. The availability of young elephants from the wild for recruiting until a few decades ago did not require breeding elephants in captivity. The establishment of Elephant Breeding Center has provided an opportunity to retain traditional skill of training elephant and their handlers. With this objective, government of Nepal established an Elephant Breeding Center at Khorsor in 1986.

The breeding program began with 20 elephants out of which sixteen individuals were received from the Government of India while four were gifted from the Government of Manmyar and two from the Government of Thailand. These elephants were used for breeding purposes. In the beginning, captive bulls were used as stud but recently wild bulls visiting the Center are contributing significantly in reproducing offsprings.

Long ago, Nepal’s lowland had dense forest and the human population was scanty. At that time the wild elephant population in the lowland was abundant. Due to deforestation and expansion of human population, the number of wild elephants is decreasing now. Their conservation has become essential today and the elephant breeding Center was established with the objective of conserving the genetic resource and produce elephants in the country.

Check out our latest photo gallery of Elephant Breeding Center and if you like the video of a baby elephant playing with its mother please do like us on Facebook by clicking the Like button just on the right hand column of our website.