Using Elephants for Human Benefit - Is There a Line?

The very first tales of human history, oral and written, describe animals being used for human benefit. Durga rides on the back of a lion, Mary and Joseph ride a donkey to Bethlehem, Indian kings observe war on elephants, Inuits strap huskies into sleds to travel. Literal or metaphorical, we are taught through through these kinds of stories that humans have the ability to use animals to make our lives easier and better. Adding this to the belief that humans are the most intelligent and powerful animals on the planet, it seems a natural step of convenience and resourcefulness: to discover the potential usefulness of surrounding organisms and to use them to personal advantage.

Surrounded by relief carvings of war elephants, majestic animals carrying courageous warriors into the battlefield with the best vantage point possible, Angkor Wat is a perfect monument of animal and man working together to victory. Throughout Asia there are festivals which dress elephants in glorious lights and costumes, painting them beautifully so they can be admired and revered with awe by the millions of spectators who turn out to watch them pass. In China, millions of people gape at their skill and balance to be able to lift their entire form into a headstand, engulfed by the carnival atmosphere of circus lights and sounds for an incredible evening of entertainment and wonder. People pay eye watering amounts of money to have a painting by an elephant as a document of their accuracy and socio-emotional intelligence to appreciate art and colours. Paying to see these spectacular sights supports the elephants, keeps them fed, celebrates their intelligence, and ensures generations after us can see these incredible animals doing incredible things.

I visited India in 2013 (did I mention...?) and at the very end of my trip I adventured over to Jaipur to see the famous Amber Fort. The monument is incredible: a huge mass of orange stone with floating gardens and one straight slope leading directly into the Fort accessible only (seemingly) by elephant. Those huge ellies were so happy! They had leftover paint on their trunks from a festival a week or so before, they were draped in colourful cloth to protect them from the sun, and they walked with the baskets on their backs so gracefully and with such ease. They weren't swaying, they weren't stomping - they seemed perfectly content with their tasks. I'm only little, as was my basket partner, so there's no way we made any difference to the elephant - it's like wearing a backpack to a human! The ride was very short, 5-10 minutes, and the elephants all walked in a long line so they're with their herds and their friends all day long. To be honest, the ride was lumpy and uncomfortable, but I rode on the back of an elephant and that's awesome right! It's such a must-do experience, and that's great!

3 years later I paid attention when somebody showed me more.


I had no idea in 2013 what the training methods for elephant riding were. It's a spectacle: I didn't look further than the fun I was having because why would I? What would I need to know? It's like riding a horse, surely. I just didn't know. I didn't know because I didn't think there was anything which I should know about it, and therefore I didn't look for it. Because I didn't look for it, I accidentally supported an industry which has killed so many siblings, babies, mothers, and friends of the elephants I love so much at ENP.

The Pahjaan is a terrible construction. I feel like that's a general consensus to anyone who has seen this video, read the other posts, or done any research into it themselves. What does it look like to you? To me it looks similar to the process of breaking a stallion. Literally, the phrase is "to break a stallion". Breaking a horse, breaking an elephant - we're outraged by the latter but, to many, the former is different. Why is that? Let's hit up with cultural relativity and the concept of "the other" for this bit.

Let's just give the academics in the internet a moment to gasp, shrivel away from their screens, and reset their pacemakers, because this is about to get messy. Please bear with - this argument could go on for years and fill the internet, so we're going to make a lot of assumptions and skip a lot of stages just to get to my main thinking points.

Elephants are exotic to westerners. We don't have them naturally in Europe and America these days, so they're different to the self which makes them "other". Because we've decided they're special, they should be protected and it's a crying shame that any of them are in such abusive institutions, and these should be shut down immediately. Horses? Oh no, they're work animals. They're boring compared to an elephant and anyway, we've always used them! To a certain extent that's legit - we've bred a lot of horses specifically for temperament and working ability to serve transport purposes and to act as a trading commodity. Many tribes use wild horses still rather than domesticating them fully, but the process of being able to ride a horse requires similar training to elephants: breaking the animal's instinct to not be burdened with excess weight and to be able to go its own way rather than obey someone else's decision. Why do we seek to protect an exotic animal from harm but we're perfectly happy to keep the same harm going to animals we consider normal, when the exotic animal is normal to their local habitat too? Why should we be imposing our values upon other cultures, telling them what to cherish and what to abandon? Who defines the difference between pet and vermin, food and companion?

Enter cultural relativity. Elephants are an amazing source of income. Aside from riding, Elephants enable trade connections throughout the world by hauling logs for boutique furniture, their hairs are used for jewellery, their ivory is incredibly lucrative on the open and if not more so on the black market, and they provide a spectacle for billions of tourists a year. Would removing elephants from trading remove Thailand from a lot of trading? Would it be ethical to remove a huge economic powerhouse from the Asian economy, potentially plummeting whole communities into unemployment in order to relieve animals into a diminished habitat?

A huge percentage of elephants are only used for tourism - if we take away this use for them, could we potentially wipe out the Asian elephant in Thailand? Their habitat has been destroyed by human settlement, logging, uncontrolled fires, excessive pesticide use, etc. - would it be fair to release them all into this environment? On the other hand, if the tourist trade were wiped out with elephant riding, how many human families would be put into poverty and starvation? Elephants are very destructive in the wild and human communities are having to expand into the jungle to survive with population rates constantly rising. If elephants pose a threat to human life with overlapping habitats, who takes priority?

Messy.

So: is Angkor Wat a document of excellent warfare techniques, systemic cruelty to elephants, or evidence of the true purpose of elephants as they exist in the circle of life? Do the Asian festivals celebrate elephants or ridicule them, elevate the status elephants or degrade them? Do Chinese circuses demonstrate the amazing feats possible by training elephants into athletes, pushing their bodies as a human athlete would do to achieve excellence, or are they a pay-per-view for one of the cruelest animal torture camps available to the public? If humans are enjoying the show, surely this is the aim of the exercise - the higher social animal exploits lesser animals for personal gain. Classic resourcefulness and an expression of manipulative cognitive function which is often considered a complex trait. Are paintings a demonstration of similar complex cognitive function and social expression, or are they cries for help from depressed and mentally unstable creatures? Are any of them any of these, a mixture, neither?

I think that the lynchpin to this argument is method. It makes sense to use animals for work: they are strong, they like exercise, and it makes for efficient transport. It is resourceful, it does benefit both sides, it is often necessary for the development of human societies as we have constructed them. The treatment whilst training them for this work and their ongoing care, however, is crucial. There is no excuse for brutally whipping animals with chains with the true intention of breaking their spirit. The mentality of 'man vs beast' is outdated. Gradually a more cooperative training mentality is coming into play with the rise of 'Dog Whisperers', game techniques with horses, and general understanding of how to achieve mutual benefit which is starting to demonstrate that more can be done with a trust bond between human and animal than a fear bond. Creating a trust bond, however, takes time and time is money. Why would you spend 10 years bonding with an elephant to get it happy with being ridden by you rather than 10 days in a Pahjaan and it'll have thousands of paying tourists on its back by the end of the month? A hook in the hand is immediate, whereas an emotional bond is tiresome.

It can be extended to all animals, and then we get even messier: which animals deserve 'happy' status? Ones we consider pets, exotic animals we like to look at... vermin? Should we base it on how we judge their cognitive function to compare to our own? Dolphins - absolutely lovely, let's learn their communication patterns! But pigs? Eugh nope, only good for breakfast so cram them into cages and into the bap you go my tasty, tasty friend. To what extent do we need to prioritise human life over the ethical treatment of all animals? If a medicine has to be tested in order to see if it is safe, are you going to put forward your 2 year old daughter or your bunny rabbit? There are so many reasons that these topics are so messy, and often it's because we blur so many lines with our emotions. It's a nightmare, and it's messy because we've been inconsistent with our approaches, but that's human nature.

If method is the lynchpin, the turning point is education. I don't think anyone would ride an elephant if they knew the process the animal was put through to get to that stage. I didn't know, and I think if I had I would not have ridden the elephant in Jaipur. I certainly wouldn't as I am now. Everybody I have spoken with about the Pahjaan, the hook and all the cruelty involved in harmful elephant tourism has been appalled and would not support elephant riding any more. Most of them would have or have ridden elephants before, but equally just didn't question the background.

I said above that I'm little and my ride was 10 minutes maximum. That's hardly a burden, and that's true. Having to carry 2-4 tourists up and down every 10 minutes though... that means for an average 10 hour day around 60 trips with 240 people... on concrete paths in 40+ degree heat with no breaks, minimal food and water, and similar conditions overnight... that's a burden. That's going to hurt. Even past the Pahjaan the cruelty continues as the trauma of the process is reinforced with every trip, hook buried in forehead and chains waiting at the shelter. A lot of elephant riding centres which claim to be 'cruelty free' because they do not use Pahjaan on site are not cruelty free - the damage has been done and is being reinforced every time they are ridden.


Equally though, kindness also has to be well placed. If you have beaten a dog with your fists daily for 5 years there is no way in hell you can expect a cheery reception when you finally lunge at it for a cuddle. Elephant rehabilitation is a huge change for the elephants: the world as they know it is being turned upside down and that can result in huge mental health difficulties. ENP seeks to educate about this side of elephant life too, as a lot of people consider rescue as the final step on the happiness and freedom trajectory when in fact there is still a lot of work to be done. Elephants have to relearn who and what they are, readjust years of associations of humans with pain and punishment, words with fear, nature with injury and work.

Most people love the idea of interacting with exotic animals, and I fully support that. The manner in which it is done, however, is crucial. I'm not here to preach to you what should be done and what shouldn't (I still can't get over the fact that we have two separate industries for cow leather and cow meat, because we can't collaborate and create excellent quality in both by treating one cow well and then using every part of it, therefore lessening waste and reducing a little bit of methane), but I'd like to think that if you've made it this far in this super messy post that maybe your head is full of more questions than answers too. Questions are great, because at least then we're thinking.

There is ethical elephant tourism available in the form of helpful ecotourism: helping to support rescue parks such as Elephant Nature Park. So often we don't know what we're supporting when we decide to do something - it's unreasonable to expect everyone to know the ins and outs of every industry ever ever ever. I don't think I can answer most of the questions I have raised here, but I can debate them and try to expand my own thinking in the process. I do think that education is key, though, and so if you've made it this far then I'm really pleased and thank you - whatever your ongoing belief is, at least it's a little more informed. I had no idea about any of this before ENP, and it really scares me how well covered it remains. Maybe we can try to uncover it, one page view at a time.