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It's time to turn our backs on elephant rides

As featured on Huffington Post.


With a wave of the mahout’s hand, the heavily-saddled elephant lifts its front leg and allows the handler to climb on top of him. Tourists wait nearby, lining up to go on a ride of a lifetime, on the back of an elephant. Outwardly, the elephants seem to be healthy and happy. Behind the scenes, however, a much crueler state of affairs exists.


Chained Asian elephant in captivity

When the elephants aren’t working, they’re likely to be kept inside concrete pens and shackled by short chains in separate areas, preventing these highly social creatures from having contact with one another. Eventually they start to sway, rocking back and forth from boredom, and bob their heads in a state of loneliness and frustration. Come daylight, they’re taken away to perform for the tourists once again.

It’s been well documented that elephants at tourism venues will have almost certainly endured a lifetime of abuse. For in order to domesticate an elephant, a process called ‘breaking’, ‘crushing’, or ‘phajaan’ is needed, which involves applying physical restraints including chains and rope, punishment with bull hooks, and the deprivation of food and water to young elephants that have been taken away from their mothers. This in effect breaks their spirit and forces the animals to submit to humans so they can learn unnatural tricks and behaviours. Oftentimes, the elephant calves die from being apart from their mothers and subjected to severe physical and psychological trauma: it’s been said that only 1 in 3 survive the breaking process. If they do survive however, the heavy chains, shackles and bullhooks become a part of their every day life to remind them of human dominance and their need to comply.

The breaking process is in itself severely torturous and breaks the elephant’s psychological wellbeing for life. This video shows the breaking process. Warning: may disturb some viewers.

For a species that is already on the path towards extinction, it’s difficult to comprehend how this kind of treatment is legal.


Captive Asian Elephant in Nepal

There are 40-50,000 elephants left in Asia and 25% of them are captive. Within the 25%, 3000 are used for tourism and a recent report by World Animal Protection reveals that most of them are being kept in cruel and inadequate conditions. Many also develop active lesions on their backs from heavy and inappropriate saddles and are forced to work with enduring injuries. Frighteningly, the number of elephants used for elephant entertainment has also increased by nearly a third in 5 years, some of whom would have been sourced from the illegal wildlife trade. It was also found that many of these tourism venues provide little to no educative value to its audiences on the state of these creatures in the wild- a missed opportunity, especially in a region where the elephant is already endangered due to human activity.

While elephants have been used for labour for thousands of years, much has changed about what we know of them now: in the last few decades, they’ve been found to be more intelligent than thought, raising questions about how we treat them and whether they should be kept in captivity at all. Public opinion is also changing: a survey found that 80% of respondents think that wild animals belong in the wild, and would prefer to see them in their natural habitats.


Watching elephants on safari

Public opinion appears to be changing, indicating that most prefer to see animals in the wild.

In the same vein, Lonely Planet recently made an announcement that they will not promote elephant rides or shows and all content they produce from now will reflect this position. They join a larger sentiment of more than 160 leading travel companies, including Qantas Vacations, who have signed a pledge to stop promoting travel with elephant entertainment, including trekking, rides and performances.


Seeing elephants in the wild on safari

Lonely Planet joins other leading travel companies in supporting responsible and sustainable tourism that doesn’t involve captive wild elephants.

May this be a sign of more commitments to come from the private sector, a decrease in demand for such cruel entertainment and draw us closer to a day where no elephant shall ever have to fall victim to a bullhook ever again.


Herd of Elephants walking through Amboseli - Bee-Elle

Wild and free, as they should be.

 

As featured on Huffington Post.

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