Work, includ­ing offer­ing tour­ists rides, is “not bad” for ele­phants — in mod­er­a­tion — so long as it takes into account the work­load, stress, and wel­fare of each indi­vidu­al ele­phant, accord­ing to Dr Pakka­nut Ban­siddhi, Research­er, Cen­ter of Excel­lence in Ele­phant Research and Edu­ca­tion, Chi­ang Mai Uni­ver­sity.

Dr Pakka­nut revealed this at the Glob­al Sus­tain­able Tour­ism Coun­cil con­fer­ence in Chi­ang Mai, Feb­ru­ary 28, much to the sur­prise of some, includ­ing “GT”. After the event, Dr Pakka­nut kindly sup­plied “GT” with a sum­mary of the main find­ings of six recent research pro­jects that looked into ele­phant wel­fare in north­ern Thai camps (PDF).

Not­ing that the research took place against the back­ground of poor gen­er­al con­di­tions for ele­phants and mahouts, there were more sur­pris­ing find­ings:

Elephants that are ridden are less stressed …

“Ele­phants that par­ti­cip­ated in rid­ing activ­it­ies, with more work hours/day had bet­ter body con­di­tion and health meas­ures.” A main find­ing of “Art­icle 4” in the down­load

Ele­phants that par­ti­cip­ated in saddle rid­ing had lower over­all fecal glu­c­o­cor­tic­oid meta­bol­ite con­cen­tra­tions (FGM — a stress hor­mone), gluc­ose, and insulin levels, per­haps due to the pos­it­ive effects of exer­cise. A pre­lim­in­ary find­ing in an art­icle still under review by journ­als

… than observation-only elephants

Ele­phants in the obser­va­tion-only pro­gram had high­er FGM levels com­pared to ele­phants that par­ti­cip­ated in work activ­it­ies. A pre­lim­in­ary find­ing from an art­icle still under review by journ­als

Ele­phants in the obser­va­tion-only camp had com­par­at­ively high FGM levels. They also had poor body con­di­tion and poor lip­id and meta­bol­ic pro­files, pos­sibly related to less exer­cise and a diet high in cal­or­ie-dense sup­ple­ment­ary foods such as bana­nas and sug­ar cane. A pre­lim­in­ary find­ing from an art­icle still under review by journ­als

“GT” asked Dr Pakka­nut for her inter­pret­a­tion of the find­ings:

“We think it means that work­ing and walk­ing are enrich­ment activ­it­ies for ele­phants that may guard against stress,” she replied.

“Ele­phants in the obser­va­tion-only pro­gram do not walk much and spend less time with mahouts com­pared to ele­phants doing oth­er types of work. So they may stress from lim­its on exer­cise and reduced inter­ac­tion time with their mahouts.

A mahout with young ele­phant at Ele­phant Nature Park, Thai­l­and. Image source: Alex­an­der Klink (CC by 3.0) via Wiki­me­dia.

“How­ever, we found high­er stress levels dur­ing the high tour­ist sea­son. So, even if work­ing and walk­ing are good for ele­phants, we have to con­trol their work­load and the num­ber of tour­ists encountered by each ele­phant.”

GT asked: “Were the ele­phants that showed high­er FGM in the obser­va­tion-only camps moved there in their life­time? Would a new and unfa­mil­i­ar life­style cause them stress? Would ele­phants born and raised in those con­di­tions be bet­ter suited?”

Dr Pakka­nut respon­ded: “Most of them were at the obser­va­tion-only camps for more than one year, so I don’t think this is acute stress from a new and unfa­mil­i­ar life­style. Some ele­phants may be able to cope with longer term stress con­di­tions but I don’t think all of them can. More stud­ies are needed to answer and sup­port my ideas.”

As Dr Pakka­nut acknow­ledges, there is more research to do to get a clear­er pic­ture. Note, for example, the seem­ingly very small sample sizes for art­icles 4 & 5 and the fact that only one obser­va­tion-only camp was included.

How­ever, if these find­ings are proven to be cor­rect by fol­low-up stud­ies, it might mean that there are a lot of var­ied and mean­ing­ful tour­ism-related jobs that could bene­fit Thail­and’s cap­tive ele­phants.

Elephants are smart

Unem­ploy­ment has neg­at­ive con­sequences for the men­tal and phys­ic­al well-being of human anim­als.

A “what if”: What if oth­er intel­li­gent and sen­tient beings like ele­phants also need some­thing chal­len­ging and mean­ing­ful to fill their days?

If we assume for the sake of argu­ment that Dr Pakka­nut’s research find­ings are backed up by fur­ther research, then what are the altern­at­ives for ele­phants? First, there is not enough wil­der­ness for the ideal scen­ario in which cap­tive ele­phants are set free to roam unim­peded across their ances­tral lands and engage in the chal­len­ging and mean­ing­ful work of sur­viv­al. Second, simply exist­ing with­in the lim­ited land area of an obser­va­tion-only camp eat­ing the ele­phant equi­val­ent of room ser­vice may not be worthy of the creatures’ poten­tial.

More “what ifs”: What if train­ing and employ­ment by a bene­vol­ent tour­ism industry was the best out­come for ele­phants? What if it were under­taken trans­par­ently against a back­ground of much improved gen­er­al liv­ing con­di­tions using con­tem­por­an­eous best prac­tices that were tailored to the per­son­al­it­ies, tal­ents, and interests of indi­vidu­al ele­phants? And what if it instilled great­er levels of pro­fes­sion­al­ism and pride among mahouts? Would that not be a good thing for both spe­cies?

Maybe there is a soft bigotry of low expect­a­tions — of ele­phants or humans (maybe both) — that assumes ele­phants can­not or would rather not find interest and mean­ing in pro­duct­ive work with and among humans. If there are low expect­a­tions of what’s pos­sible, Dr Pakka­nut does­n’t share them. She agreed with a pro­pos­i­tion “GT” put to her, based on her research find­ings and this flight of fancy, that “ele­phants can bene­fit cog­nit­ively, psy­cho­lo­gic­ally, and phys­ic­ally by being pos­it­ively chal­lenged by their mahouts and inter­act­ing with humans”.

(Also read The New York Times art­icle “Unem­ployed, Myanmar’s Ele­phants Grow Antsy, and Heav­ier”, Janu­ary 30, 2016.)

But, training …

Ele­phant expert John Roberts con­tends in his “GT” Insight on “Ele­phant Tour­ism: The harms of received wis­dom” that much of today’s pop­u­list con­cern about the wel­fare of cap­tive ele­phants stems from when the bar­bar­ic prac­tice of “crush­ing” their spir­it came to light.

Accord­ing to Mr Roberts, the tor­ture asso­ci­ated with “crush­ing” has been incor­rectly con­flated with the Thai word “phajaan”, which “refers to a religious/spiritual cere­mony per­formed before any train­ing pro­ced­ure”.

“This has been harm­ful because tra­di­tion­al train­ers in the north all say that the phajaan is neces­sary to suc­cess­fully train an ele­phant. Indeed a train­ing team will per­form a phajaan even if they’re about to attempt a fully pos­it­ive rein­force­ment train­ing ses­sion.”

Even if Mr Roberts is cor­rect, it appears that in the wider world the word phajaan will forever be asso­ci­ated with old-school crush­ing. Duck­DuckGo it and look at all the top res­ults.

Crush­ing is a bru­tally effi­cient set of tac­tics for tam­ing wild-caught calves that was widely imple­men­ted in Thai­l­and and through­out South­east Asia in an era when ele­phants were used as organ­ic tract­ors, trucks, and tanks. For cen­tur­ies — in agri­cul­ture, forestry, and oth­er indus­tries requir­ing brute strength, as well as for war in a region often riv­en by rivalry — ele­phants were prized beasts of bur­den.

War ele­phant of Siam, 1866. Photo by John Thom­son. Sourced from the Wellcome Trust via Wiki­me­dia.

Accord­ing to Mr Roberts, Thail­and’s inter­na­tion­al image was dealt a severe blow about 20 years ago when video foot­age of crush­ing tech­niques went vir­al. The foot­age is by no means the first nor most recent doc­u­mented case of the worst prac­tices — and there will likely be more — but it was the first to raise wide­spread aware­ness of crush­ing. This was pos­it­ive because the inter­na­tion­al back­lash forced the Thai gov­ern­ment’s hand.

Tra­di­tions die hard in Asia — and so did a lot of young ele­phants at the hands of this par­tic­u­lar one — but the Thai gov­ern­ment made crush­ing prac­tices illeg­al almost imme­di­ately. And, recog­nising that it would be dif­fi­cult to enforce the law, the Thai gov­ern­ment also ordered the Forest Indus­tries Organ­isa­tion — the gov­ern­ment depart­ment with the most work­ing ele­phants at the time — to devel­op and pro­mote more humane train­ing tech­niques.

The prob­lem Mr Roberts has with the video is that it con­tin­ues to be used to mis­rep­res­ent today’s real­ity on the ground. It per­sists in vari­ous forms online — in remixes and samples — and is often presen­ted as though it were the latest news. And it con­tin­ues to eli­cit both under­stand­able emo­tion­al responses and incom­pre­hens­ible gen­er­al con­dem­na­tions of Thai­l­and and the Thai people.

This high­lights a couple of things: First, that the video is indeed dis­tress­ing and hard to watch. Second, that those who con­tin­ue to use the video to rep­res­ent the cur­rent situ­ation either: 1) need to do their home­work, or 2) they use it to delib­er­ately mis­lead people into join­ing their side of a com­plic­ated debate.

This is not to deny that ter­rible tech­niques are still used in some places. Crim­in­als exist. Crimes hap­pen. How­ever, Mr Roberts would assert that the gen­er­ally accep­ted and adop­ted prac­tices for train­ing ele­phants in Thai­l­and are now focussed on rein­for­cing pos­it­ives rather than crush­ing spir­its — an evol­u­tion that his organ­isa­tion, the Golden Tri­angle Asi­an Ele­phant Found­a­tion, has help to spread in mahout com­munit­ies across South­east Asia for the past sev­en years.

The video below is from Myan­mar’s “first ever” tar­get train­ing pos­it­ive rein­force­ment work­shop for ele­phants that took place in Decem­ber 2015.

Dr Pakka­nut said that she and her col­leagues had not yet done any dir­ect research into ele­phant train­ing. For her latest think­ing on the top­ic she poin­ted to a review art­icle that she recently had pub­lished in the Journ­al of Applied Anim­al Wel­fare Sci­ence:

A cri­ti­cism of ele­phant tour­ism is that all ele­phants are harshly trained so they can par­ti­cip­ate in activ­it­ies such as trekking, shows and paint­ing. We do not dis­pute that inap­pro­pri­ate train­ing meth­ods are used at some ven­ues; how­ever, the extent is dif­fi­cult to veri­fy because there is no over­sight, and train­ing meth­ods are left up to mahouts or own­ers (Rizzo­lo & Brad­shaw, 2018). Without a com­pre­hens­ive sur­vey of train­ing meth­ods used in Thai­l­and, based on extens­ive dir­ect obser­va­tions, this will remain a con­tro­ver­sial top­ic. Pakka­nut Ban­siddhi, Jan­ine L. Brown, Chat­chote Thitaram, Veer­a­sak Pun­yaporn­withaya & Korakot Nganvong­pan­it (2019): “Ele­phant Tour­ism in Thai­l­and: A Review of Anim­al Wel­fare Prac­tices and Needs”, Journ­al of Applied Anim­al Wel­fare Sci­ence

Perspectives

If the fol­low­ing addi­tion­al find­ings from Dr Pakka­nut et al’s recent research are accur­ate they would sug­gest to “GT” that the anim­al justice war­ri­ors of the west should maybe turn their atten­tion to their own back­yards first:

“Thai ele­phants had bet­ter BCSs (body con­di­tion scores) when com­pared to those from North Amer­ic­an and UK zoos.” A main find­ing of “Art­icle 4” in the down­load

“The work­ing bulls in this study had bet­ter body con­di­tion than those in west­ern zoos ele­phants, which could be due to high­er amounts of exer­cise.” A main find­ing of “Art­icle 5” in the down­load

Mean­while, experts and research­ers on the ground in Thai­l­and should con­tin­ue to make pro­gress in bet­ter under­stand­ing ele­phants, evolving best prac­tices, chan­ging atti­tudes and habits in camps and among mahouts, and improv­ing the over­all con­di­tions.

As Mr Roberts argues, without the sup­port and over­sight of “enlightened” trav­el­lers and tour­ists will­ing to vis­it ele­phant camps, spend their money, and ask the hard ques­tions, pro­gress will be a lot slower and much more dif­fi­cult — if not impossible.

Dr Pakka­nut and her col­leagues are doing import­ant field research that — for now and maybe only tem­por­ar­ily — val­id­ates what ele­phant experts like Mr Roberts have felt they have known for years. It also reminds us non-experts that we should not be so arrog­ant as to assume we know best.

Just as con­di­tions are improv­ing for many cap­tive ele­phants, and just as they are being bet­ter under­stood by research­ers employ­ing the sci­entif­ic meth­od, the last thing ele­phants need is to be led down a road paved by anim­al wel­fare groups — with good inten­tions — to a brand new hell.

Fea­tured image: A mahout feed­ing an ele­phant at the Ele­phant Nature Park, near Chi­ang Mai, Thai­l­and. By Adbar (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wiki­me­dia.

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Disclosure by the author

I have no dog in this fight — and I don’t con­done dog-fight­ing! I have NOT been paid to take part in this debate by any side. I am as con­cerned about the wel­fare of ele­phants as the next non-expert human. My only firm opin­ion on this issue is that it is com­plic­ated.