I didn’t honestly know much about Asian elephants and their situation before our trip to Anantara Golden Triangle to take part in their elephant researcher program. As our trip got closer, several blogger friends talked to me about a video they had seen of baby elephants being tortured in order for their mahouts to ride them. The graphic video certainly left me with a lot of questions, most nagging was if riding an elephant in Thailand was ethical.
Part of our elephant researcher program included sitting down on our first evening with Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation (GTAEF) founder John Roberts and a team from Think Elephants International to discuss what we’d be seeing and doing over the next week. I no doubt surprised John and the team with some hard hitting questions. What Tim and I learned from working with the wonderful folks at Think Elephants International and GTAEF during our stay has been beyond thought provoking and has become a regular topic of conversation as we still try to sort out how it all left us feeling. That’s probably why this is one of the most challenging posts I’ve written to date…
Captive Elephants and the History of Mahout-ing
One of the hardest things for me to come to terms with was seeing captive elephants. My parents owned horses when I was a kid, and Tim and I have rode camels in Jordan, so I wasn’t expecting elephants to be much different. When you see horses, they are fenced in a pasture. The camels roam the Arabian desert freely, though always return to their owners because they know that is where their food comes from. That’s because both horses and camels have been domesticated by humans.
What does that mean exactly? Dictionary.com defines domestication as “the process whereby a population of living organisms is changed at the genetic level, through generations of selective breeding, to accentuate traits that ultimately benefit humans.”
Elephants have never been domesticated, but because even thousands of years ago they were recognized for their intelligence and learning abilities, they were trained for domestic purposes. Kings first used elephants to help fight wars through the dense jungles. Over time, elephants came to be used in the logging industry to destroy their own environment and eventually causing flooding to treeless areas.
It wasn’t until 1988 when Thailand suffered a disastrous flood and the worst in a century that the government realized exactly the harm that they were doing and on January 10, 1989 logging was banned. While undoubtedly a very wise choice as wild Asian elephants populations had greatly declined and deforestation caused the loss of lives and homes, the logging ban put about 20,000 captive Asian elephants and their mahouts out of work.
It was at this time that tourism started to boom in Thailand and mahouts realized they could earn a living through elephant tourism activities.
So Why Not Just Release Elephants Back to the Wild?
If only it were that simple. Something undoubtedly agreed upon by John Roberts and every single person we interacted with at GTAEF and Think Elephants International is that we’d all like nothing more than to see every elephant live out its days as a wild elephant of its own free will. But there simply isn’t room for all of the Asian elephants.
The biggest threat to the Asian elephant are the loss of their habitat and the continually growing human population in tropical Asia. According to the WWF, “about 20% of the world’s human population lives in or near the present range of the Asian elephant”. The natural habitat is dwindling and migratory routes are cut off because of human settlements. As a result, elephant populations are small and unable to mingle.
The Evolution of GTAEF
When John Roberts first started the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation, he bought an elephant from a mahout in order to rescue it. A month later, the mahout was back with another elephant. It was at that point that John realized he needed a much bigger plan. Rescuing a few elephants from begging on the streets would only be helping those few e