Whither captive elephants?
“The elephants you see in an elephant trekking camp, zoo or circus are zombies, the spiritless shells of elephants.” — Lek Chailert, founder of Save Elephant Foundation and Elephant Nature Camp
What is the future of captive elephants in a post-COVID-19 world? Or at least in a world that has adapted to cope with the virus.
“COVID-19 presents a serendipitous opportunity for elephant-based tourism. With the bulk of elephant camps still closed, the industry has the time to reset itself and restructure camp management in a way that eliminates previously poor standards and methods of captive elephant management. As proposed by other tourism sectors vulnerable to mass tourism, elephant camps should consider offering a higher quality product, complete with better elephant welfare and improved camp practices,” wrote Dr. Ingrid Suter, Captive Elephant Researcher at the Asian Captive Elephant Standards (ACES).
There are approximately 15,000 elephants in captivity and of these over 4,000 are used in the tourist industry in South and Southeast Asia, an industry that World Animal Protection (WAP) estimated to have generated approximately US$ 676 million annually, give or take a 100 million dollars, before COVID-19. Thailand has almost three quarters of the tourism elephants (Figure 1).
The COVID pandemic sweeping the world now has almost completely shut down all elephant tourism activity, creating a massive economic and welfare crisis for the elephant owners from Thailand to India.
“The cost for taking care of the 78 elephants and 300 staff is five million Thai baht (US$ 161,290) per month,” saidAnchalee Kulmapijit, owner of Maesa, one of Thailand’s oldest elephant camps near Chiang Mai. “But we will not leave anyone behind and will try to take the best care of the elephants for as long as we can.”
Maesa Elephant Camp has altered its entire business model. Anchalee told me last February she had done so after visiting Lek Chailert’s Elephant Nature Park.
“I saw that Lek’s place was full of visitors, and there was no riding and no show. That convinced me she had the right model,” Anchalee told me. “The elephants will be much happier.”
But will they be? A massive battle has been raging over the past decade to win the hearts and minds — and dollars — of tourists in search of an elephant experience when they visit Asia. One side supports the traditional ‘hands-on’ model that involves elephant riding, washing, feeding and watching a circus-like performance. The other side argues that training elephants and using them for such activities involves immense cruelty and is unethically harmful to such intelligent, social creatures as elephants. Visitors should only observe them, hands-off.
Who is right?
The Use them or Lose them model
“Elephants are very expensive to take care of properly,” said John Roberts, Director of Conservation Activities for Anantara Resorts and Spas worldwide. In 2005 he established the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation, which initially aimed to rescue street elephants and their mahouts in Thailand and put them to work in the tourist industry.
Speaking of mahouts, Roberts said, “You can’t stop over 4,000 years of tradition when the biggest asset that feeds these families is their elephant. So try to help through tourism…, while giving mahouts the tools and opportunity to treat their elephants well.”
Since then, the foundation has become involved in many other activities, including protecting a wild elephant corridor in the Cardamom Mountains of Cambodia.
Roberts continued, “Many tourists, especially from China, are not going to spend money visiting an elephant camp just to watch elephants standing around. Without their tourist money it would be impossible to provide properly for elephant upkeep and support mahouts and their families.”
We were meeting in the restaurant of the impressive Anantara Golden Triangle resort north of Chiang Rai, located where the borders of Thailand, Myanmar and Laos meet on the Mekong River. “Properly managed riding, bathing and shows are healthy for elephants and provide them with amusement, so they won’t become bored,” Roberts told me. “Camps can also have observation-only activities for those who prefer that. It doesn’t have to be either-or.”
Roberts’ views on elephant hands-on use are shared by a large number of elephant owners, veterinarians and researchers working in Southeast Asia. In response to criticism and campaigns from animal rights and welfare groups urging tourists to boycott facilities with riding and shows, the Asian Captive Elephant Working Group(ACEWG) was set up in 2015. The ACEWG statement contains many laudable goals, including the legal acquisition and use, physical and mental welfare, maintenance of the traditions and culture surrounding elephant care and identifying sustainable means for covering the costs of captive elephants while encouraging ethical management and conservation, to name just a few.
One of the key objectives of the ACEWG is outlined in number 15 of their statement: “A certification program for elephant tourism camps is urgently needed. This has the potential to encourage the development of a much-needed registration system for all captive elephants, enforce best practices for welfare, improve training opportunities for mahouts, and provide a means by which camps that follow best practices are rewarded by greater financial viability.”
Such a certification scheme was developed and officially launched in January 2019, called the Asian Captive Elephant Standards (ACES). Its development holds elements of intrigue too complicated to go into here, but suffice to say that its two primary driving personalities, Nicholas Dubrocard and Dr. Ingrid Suter, agree wholeheartedly with John Roberts.
I met with Mr. Dubrocard, the Managing Director of ACES, in a Bangkok hotel in February last year. I asked him why he was doing the certification scheme since it didn’t look like they were making much of an income from it. “I’m doing it because there seems to be a global misunderstanding about the use of elephants…. ABTA has been listening to the animal rights people and they always think any use of animals by people is wrong. If the management is done right, riding is good for elephants. We have studies that show that observation only can be stressful and harmful.”
ABTA is an association of tour operators and related businesses in the travel industry. I later looked up the ABTA advisory, it was quite robust. Just a sampling: “ABTA believes strongly that elephants should not be subject to punishment and cruelty in order to make them submissive to humans. There is now a strong weight of evidence to suggest that harmful training methods of elephants are widespread. For that reason, ABTA has revised its guidelines, working with experts and Members to update these, categorising activities such as riding or bathing as unacceptable. The vast majority of Members, including the UK’s largest travel companies, have already stopped selling elephant rides and similar activities and we would encourage consumers to avoid these activities.”
No wonder ACES was worried about ABTA. It has over 4,300 members globally in the travel industry.
To help counter what Dubrocard considers to be ABTA’s misinformed opinion, ACES has as its Captive Elephant Researcher Dr. Ingrid Suter, who studied captive elephants in Laos for her doctorate at the University of Queensland in Australia. Dr. Suter has been a prolific and outspoken promoter of captive elephant use. In an email exchange she said in part:
“In short, we have worked extremely hard to create a set of >190 individual criteria that assesses all aspects of captive elephant welfare, tourism needs and expectations. There are some lengthy administrative checks (ensuring all elephant are legal according to each national/local law), as well as taxation, staff employment, Standard Operating Procedures, reporting etc. The elephant living quarters, chains, environmental enrichment, breeding, veterinary and dietary components etc are all reviewed and approved by elephant veterinarian specialists and elephant camp management experts… we examine all relevant research papers and academic studies, taking our criteria from evidence-based research rather than the trends and emotions of animal-rights activists and keyboard warriors. While this is our strength, it is also our weakness, as simply touching an elephant is viewed by many as animal cruelty and subjecting an elephant to a lifetime of fear and inappropriate training, despite what the reality may be. The complex nature of endangered species management, private elephant ownership and community development falls on deaf ears in many Western countries. It can be difficult to work in an environment when many people think you are promoting animal cruelty. Nevertheless, our overall goal is harm minimisation and reduction :- if an elephant is going to live in human care, then let’s ensure this occurs at the highest level of welfare possible to create the lowest amount of stress for the elephant.”
To justify riding, bathing, shows and so on, the ACES and ACEWG people depend quite a bit on research carried out by veterinarians at the Chiang Mai University and the Thai National Elephant Institute, located south of Chiang Mai, in association with Dr. Janine Brown of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia. They have published a number of articles that seem to show that captive elephants exhibit lower levels of stress while being ridden by tourists or performing in shows than just wandering around in observation-only camps. The stress in observation-only camps is caused by mixing too many elephants that don’t like each other in too small a space. Apparently, elephants are like that crabby aunt everyone seems to have who doesn’t like the new neighbors who just moved in. The elephants are also found to be in better physical shape because of the exercise.
The complete set of arguments supporting hands-on use is complicated and well summarized in a recent article on the travel giant Fodor’s website.
I asked Mr. Dubrocard why it was so important to fight the animal rights and welfare groups. Couldn’t the same amount of money be made in observation only camps? “No,” he replied. “Without the income from the different activities there would not be enough to support all the captive elephants, their mahouts and the businesses properly. Management and welfare of elephants would suffer.”
The observation only model
Lek Chailert of Save Elephant Foundation has been a driving force for over 20 years in trying to change captive elephant tourism from the traditional model, which involves harsh training of young elephants so that they submit to allowing strangers to ride and wash them and be trained to perform all kinds of unnatural tricks, such as playing games, painting pictures and parading around in elaborate costumes, to name but a few.
“Elephants deserve to be free,” Lek told me when I met with her at the 250-acre Elephant Nature Park (ENP), located in the rugged hills north of Chiang Mai. “I want to let them go to be wild in the forest, but around here there is not enough forest. So I let them roam free at my park.”
Later that evening a film was shown to the many visitors at the pre-COVID shutdown ENP. Called Elephant on the Edge, the film showed shocking, graphic scenes of young elephants being dragged with ropes into a log framework called a “crush”, which immobilized it, then being beaten mercilessly to force it to its knees. There followed many scenes of young elephants being beaten with sticks, iron bars and bull hooks by men holding restraining ropes or leg chains forcing the elephants to accept a human on its back. Multiple scenes then showed older elephants being forced to pull large logs, carry tourists on their backs, wear costumes while performing, all the while being goaded with bull hooks or stabbed with small knives or nails, sometimes collapsing onto the ground in exhaustion.
After the film, Lek addressed the 50 or so visitors who attended the showing — some were crying.
“Elephants are born to be independent, and in the wild. It is not in their nature to work. Most people don’t investigate to find out what is behind what they see. The training the elephants endure is abusive, and they are forced to do tricks and paintings against their will. Most elephants are soaking with blood before they will submit. If an artist is painting something, they should paint with their heart, and not be forced to do it,” Lek told the assembled. She continued to speak more about how humans should learn to love animals and not abuse them.
Later I spoke with Lek again and asked her what she thought lay in the future for captive elephants.
“I still believe the world can change,” Lek said, smiling. “People are becoming more educated. Animal rights people are standing up and raising their voices more, and spreading the word. Conservation groups are fighting harder, and speaking out more for the animals. I hope we can spread the word– the facts about these animals– and more people will begin to love and care for them. I still have hope that it isn’t too late to create peace for the animals. Being able to see people come to the park and fall in love with these animals makes my heart smile.”
It was hard for me to see any possibility of compromise or reconciliation between people like Lek and those on the ACEWG and ACES side. They were on different levels of consciousness, living in different worlds.
Last year WAP released an update report of their 2017 Taken for a Ride report, in which their researchers carried out a survey of 3,837 elephants at 357 elephant camps in Thailand, India, Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Malaysia as of January 2020. In the Asian countries evaluated for this report they found 2,390 (63%) elephants suffering in severely inadequate conditions at 208 (58%) venues. Improved, yet still inadequate, conditions were experienced by 1,168 (30%) elephants. Only 279 (7%) elephants were kept in truly high-welfare observation-only venues.
The WAP research found distressing cruelty to captive elephants in all countries. It involves separation of mothers and calves, harsh training methods, restriction of movement, poor nutrition, limited or no veterinary care, social deprivation and punishment. In most tourist venues the elephants are chained for long periods when not needed for tourism activities, often in inadequate shelters featuring concrete floors and unhygienic conditions. They will typically have little or no social interaction with other elephants and are made to perform strenuous and stressful activities. The researchers also noted many venues actively trying to breed more elephants into captivity. This not only fails to address the core problem of elephant captivity, but also reduces the limited resources available to the elephants already in the industry.
I met with the lead author of the report, veterinarian Dr. Jan Schmidt-Burbach, World Animal Protection’s Head of Wildlife Research and Animal Welfare, in Bangkok while the report was being prepared.
“The welfare problems are not limited to just the camps that promote riding and shows,” Dr. Schmidt-Burbach told me. “There are many problems in the so-called ‘sanctuaries’ and ‘rescue centers’ that do not allow such activities, but do allow bathing. Many people think that elephants enjoy being bathed by tourists. But these activities require constant control of the elephants by their mahouts, and having eight or ten tourists frantically throwing water on an elephant, shouting and laughing, is hardly enjoyable for an elephant.”
“Breeding is one of the biggest problems,” continued Dr. Schmidt-Burbach. “Too many observation only camps allow the elephants to reproduce, which just perpetuates the captive elephant situation.”
“I know,” I replied. “But they argue that it’s for conservation purposes. It’s supposedly to keep genetic variability available if needed to rewild into depleted areas.”
“That’s just an excuse used to increase the number of captive elephants to use for business purposes,” Dr. Schmidt-Burbach replied. “It would make much more sense to use resources to conserve wild elephants than to use the money and staff for breeding and supporting more captive elephants.”
“So ideally, captive elephants would eventually die out?” I asked.
“Yes, that’s the objective. There will always be a few for various reasons, but the elephant tourism industry and their use in shows should disappear.”
“It would make much more sense to use resources to conserve wild elephants than to use them for breeding and supporting more captive elephants.” - Dr. Jan Schmidt-Burbach, WAP
Post-COVID world for captive elephants
The questions surrounding how captive elephants should be treated and used have only been touched on here. These questions are also relevant for African elephants, as human populations increase and continue to encroach on elephant habitat, decreasing its area and fragmenting it. Already there are elephant sanctuaries, rescue centers and trekking camps in Africa, but on a small scale compared to Asia. Some of the people involved are already struggling with questions of what kinds of use are appropriate, acceptable and ethical, and have developed a manual for Standards for Elephants in Human Care.
All those who care about elephants must try to use the best scientific evidence obtained from research with elephants to decide what is best for them.
