WORKING ELEPHANTS IN ASIA: LOGGING, TREKKING, ETHICALITY

WORKING ELEPHANTS

Elephants have been employed to do many kinds of tasks. They have been used in road building to pull wagons and bush boulders. Some elephants have been trained to raise their trunk in salute to visiting foreign leaders and dignitaries. They have even been put work at railway station switching yards. A pad is placed on the animal's forehead and they are used to push as many as many as three cars at once to hook up with other cars.

Upkeep for working elephant is expensive. Elephants consume about 10 percent of their body weight every day. Domesticated elephant eat about 45 pounds of grain with salt and leaves or 300 pounds of grass and tree branches a day. In Nepal, elephants are given rice, crude sugar and salt wrapped with grasses into melon size balls a treat.

In the old days captured elephant were sold in auctions. Elephant markets still exist today. Females usually bring the highest prices. Buyers usually bring along astrologers to like for auspicious signs and markings that were believed to indicate temperament, health, longevity and work ethics. Many buyers are people in the logging industry or, in the case of India, overseers of temples who want the sacred animals to keep at their temples and bring out during important occasions with gilded headdresses and false tusks made of wood.

Old elephants are sold at used elephant markets. Buyers there look out for pink edges on the ears (a sign of senility), long legs (bad gaits), yellow eyes (bad luck) and foot cancer (a common disease). New recruits are often paired with senior elephants to get them acclimated.

Websites and Resources: Save the Elephants savetheelephants.org; International Elephant Foundation elephantconservation.org; Animal Diversity Web animaldiversity.org ; BBC Earth bbcearth.com; A-Z-Animals.com a-z-animals.com; Live Science Animals livescience.com; Animal Info animalinfo.org ; World Wildlife Fund (WWF) worldwildlife.org the world’s largest independent conservation body; National Geographic National Geographic ; Endangered Animals (IUCN Red List of Threatened Species) iucnredlist.org

Asian Elephants and Logging

Elephants are very important in the teak business. They are skilled professionals that are trained by their Karen mahouts to work alone, in pairs or in teams. One elephant can usually drag a small log on land or several logs through water with the chains that are harnessed to its body. Bigger logs can be rolled by two elephants with their trunks and lifted off the ground by three elephants using their tusks and trunks.

It reportedly takes 15 to 20 years to train an elephant for the logging in the forest. According to Reuters recently captured elephants “methodical, repetitive training methods teach the animals to respond to simple commands over several years. Aged about six, they graduate onto more complex tasks such as piling logs, dragging logs or pushing them up and down hills into streams using their trunks and tusks, before starting full-time work aged around 16-years old.Such animal worth as much as $9,000 a piece, and earn $8 or more for a four-hour day. Female elephants with short tusks are used for pushing things. Males with long tusk are good for logging because their tusks enable them to pick up logs. the tusks get in the way if the push something.

Work elephants used to hoist logs onto trucks that usually carry the logs to rovers, where the logs are float to mills. Men saw teak logs in the water and water buffalo, that kneel on command, pull the logs out of the water and push them onto carts.

Elephants are still used in Burma to move teak logs. Drivers, called “oozies”, prepared their mounts with a pick-ax-like tool called a “choon”. If necessary the elephants can be transported from place to place in trucks or trailers pulled by trucks. Elephants used in illegal logging are sometimes brutally used.

Elephants are a good alternative to clear cutting because they can be used to select only the species of tree that are needed, they don't need roads and they can maneuver through all kind of terrain. Because elephants in Thailand may be out of work soon as the teak forests are depleted, I say transfer them to the Pacific northwest were they can used as alternative to the clear cutting used there.

Elephants are cheaper and most frailty than tractors and damaging forest roads. "Instead of hauling away heavy green logs with bulldozers and tractor skidders, which scar erosion-prone hillsides," wrote Sterba, Burma uses elephants to pull their lighter dried logs to rivers on which they float to staging areas for exporting processing." [Source: James P. Sterba in the Wall Street Journal]

Elephants and the Great Tsunami of 2004

In Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka elephants were put to work clearing away rubble and debris in the search for bodies. Elephants were regarded as better at this job than bulldozers and other kinds of heavy machinery because they had lighter, more sensitive touch. Many of the elephants that did the work were employed in circuses and tourist parks.

One elephant handler told the Los Angeles Times, “They’re very good at this. The elephant’s sense of smell is much better than that of human’s. Their trunk can get right into small spaces and lift the rubble.” Bulls were applauded for their strength and ability to lift concrete walls. females were considered smarter and more sensitive. The elephants did not hand the bodies, which were often badly decomposed when they were found but lifted debris while human volunteers collected the body. Elephants were also put work towing cars and moving trees.

Temple and Festival Elephants

Elephants are common sights in India, even in the large cities such as Delhi and Bombay. The elephants are used mainly in religious parades carrying effigies of Hindu gods are sometimes dressed in gold for religious festivals and marriage processions. Mahouts earn about $85 a day working at religious festivals.

Describing an elephant at a festival, Pamela Constable wrote in the Washington Post, "Upon arrival...the elephants were painted with florescent flowers and hearts, draped with velvet curtains, loaded with a half-dozen costumed festival officials and set off for the all-day parades. Along the route, families held up their children to be blessed, poured fruit to water into the elephants trunks or simply gazed in awe...When the procession was over, the elephants were given a short break and then trucked back to Delhi, where they had wedding to work."

Major temples used own their own herds of elephants but "changing times have forced Kerala temples to give up the herds of elephants they traditionally maintained," and Indian naturalist told Reuter. "Now they have to hire the beasts from the mahouts."

Elephants belonging to maharajs often false tush made of painted and polished wood. females make the best mounts but the often lack impressive tusks so the wood tusks are fitted over the like false teeth. In the 1960 some maharjas had fallen on such hard times that some of them leased out their elephants as taxis.

Asian Elephants and Tourism

Maharajas and the great white hunters of the Raj used trained elephants to hunt tigers. Elephant fights featuring rutting males used to be the feature event at Maharaji birthday parties. Howdahs are the platforms of elephants that maharajas ride on. There are used in the tourism business as are wood and canvas saddle..

In India and Nepal, elephant are widely used on safaris that look for tigers and rhinos and to take tourists to tourist spots. Female elephants are preferred to male one. Of the 97 elephants used to carry tourist up a hill to a popular fort in Jaipur India only nine are males. The reason is sex. One tourism official told AP, “the bulls often fight among themselves while they are carrying tourists on their backs. Because of biological demand, the bull elephant in rut often and becomes bad-tempered. In one case an aggressive male pushed a female into a ditch while it was carrying two Japanese tourist. The tourists were unhurt but the female elephant died from her injuries.

Elephant Treks

Elephant treks are popular in Thailand, especially in the Chiang Rai area. Trekkers usually ride on wooden platforms that are tied to the backs of the elephants, who are amazingly sure footed on the steep, narrow and sometimes slippery trails. The mahouts sit on the elephants’ neck and guide the animals by nudging a sensitive area behind their ears with a stick while the trekkers sway back and forth in a firm, steady motion.

Describing an elephant trek Joseph Miel wrote on the New York Times, "The boy driving our three-ton conveyance was barely learners-permit age, he knew what he was doing. On the scariest ascent, he demonstrated this by wisely jumping to safety...we flung to and for at every upward elephant strode, with fear providing the strength that kept our numb hands glued to the plank."

When riding on an elephant you can feel the raised spine and rumbling movement of the shoulder blades. Sometimes elephant people-carrying elephants in Thailand stop on the trail to snack on leaves and plants and tourist he try to urge them on get a swat from the trunk and spray of water.

The naturalist Alan Rabinowitz who has made a career of establishing refuges for leopards, jaguars and tigers prefers traveling by foot. He told National Geographic that he finds riding on elephant to literally be a pain in the butt. Elephants may be good for transporting gear, he said, but they’re “only fun to ride for the first 20 minutes. After that you get very sore.”

Asian Elephants and Safaris

According to Biologist Eric Dinerstein who spend several years in Nepal using elephants to track rhinos, elephants have a penchant for retrieving fallen or lost objects such as lens caps, ballpoint pens, binoculars. "[This] can be a blessing when you're traveling through tall grass, "he says, "if you drop it, chances are your elephants will find it." One time an elephants topped dead in it tracks and refused to budge even after the mahout started kicking the animal. The elephant then stepped backwards and picked up an important filed notebook that Dinerstein inadvertently dropped.

"The females," Millers said, "were especially adept at looting my pockets of [bananas and brown cane sugar treats]. Once, nine of them pinned me to the fence at the shrine of Mastiamma. Quietly but firmly, with the ultimate in good manners, these ladies robbed me of everything edible I possessed. When I tried to escape, there was always a trunk, a hefty shoulder, or a massive foreleg casually blocking the way."

No one pushed or jostled or grabbed. It was all as genteel as a cookie-and-sherry party at a Victorian parsonage...The mahouts tried to dissuade the animals with one or two half-hearted bangs on their heads with the ankis, but these only produced foolish gurgles from somewhere up at the tops of their trunks. they knew exactly how far they could go." [Source: "Wild Elephant Round-up in India" by Harry Miller, March 1969]

Are Elephant Rides Cruel?

Andrea Sachs wrote in the Washington Post: In March 2023, a photo of Pai Lin made the viral rounds. The image of the septuagenarian female illustrated the dark and painful underbelly of elephant tourism in Thailand. The Asian elephant's back sloped down like a ramp, the weight of countless visitors crushing her spine. Pai Lin spent a quarter of a century entertaining tourists. She is now retired, living her remaining years at the Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand in Tha Mai Ruak, the sanctuary that released the photo. However, around the world, many elephants and beasts of burden are not so fortunate. New generations of animals have joined their elders in a trade that is still prevalent but has been gaining more vocal opponents over the years. [Source: Andrea Sachs, Washington Post, March 30, 2023]

You weigh less than 200 pounds, even after several bowls of mango sticky rice. An Asian elephant can tip the scale at five tons. How harmful can your comparatively light frame be to the largest land mammal in Asia? Very, according to animal welfare experts. "Elephants' bodies didn't evolve to carry people in saddles," said Cabrera Holtz. "It damages their spines."

At elephant attractions in Southeast Asia and India, trainers will often use a sharp object to prod the animal into performing. In Thailand's historic city of Ayutthaya, a UNESCO World Heritage site, PETA filmed chained elephants and handlers intimidating the animals by waving weapons around their heads. "Even when a single tourist is riding on their back and everything seems peaceful, there is always a mahout hiding a sharp bullhook under his cloth and walking behind the elephant to control its behavior," said Nutcha Ampai, chief executive and co-founder of Siam Luxe, a travel agency in Bangkok. "We can definitely confirm that they are painful to the elephants, despite any counter argument you may have heard."

When considering an animal attraction, humane experts urge travelers to look at the larger picture. For instance, what happens before and after the activity, when sympathetic eyes are no longer watching. In Asia, some trainers still use an abusive system called phajaan (originally a ritual ceremony) to force the elephants to perform. Carol Kline, director of the hospitality and tourism management program at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, describes the technique as "breaking the spirit" of the elephant.

"The welfare concern about the phajaan is that the elephant is manipulated into performing non-natural behaviors through violence and domination tactics that include beating, starving, and solitude," said Kline, author of several publications on the ethics of animal tourism. When not entertaining tourists, the animals might be chained, tied up or locked away in enclosures. Their caretakers may feed them substandard diets and deprive them of vet care. They have no freedoms or choice in the matter, advocates say. "If people saw the conditions and how they lived," Baker said, "they would be embarrassed by their Instagram posts."

How to Be Ethical About Elephants

Mary Jo DiLonardo wrote in Travel+Leisure: “Visiting an animal sanctuary while traveling can be a great way to support local animal welfare and conservation efforts, but you need to do your homework because there are many bogus sanctuaries operating that can lure in well-meaning and unsuspecting tourists,” Wendy Higgins, director of international media for Humane Society International, told Travel + Leisure. An immediate red flag is if visitors can participate in any hands-on interactions with elephants such as playing with babies or taking elephant rides. Another warning sign is if the elephants perform in shows or demonstrations, like painting, Higgins said. “These are entirely unnatural displays for which the elephants will be forced to train, and there is no welfare benefit to the elephant whatsoever. A true sanctuary will never encourage or force any animal to interact with people, especially tourists.” [Source: Mary Jo DiLonardo, Travel+Leisure, January 9, 2024]

“When travelers visit Asia, particularly places like Thailand, they are focused on captive elephants because of opportunities to interact with them,” Nilanga Jayasinghe, a wildlife conservation manager at WWF, told T+L. “However, it's important to remember that there are also wild elephants in these places, and they are facing significant conservation challenges. There is direct value in keeping these elephants wild, living as elephants should live.”

“As a general rule, a true sanctuary will allow you to look but not touch the elephants,” said Higgins. “A sanctuary will allow you to see elephants just being elephants in as near a wild setting as possible, and the tourist is a mere observer.” Another pro-tip: research what is offered at an elephant tourist location and look at photos before visiting. These are some telltale signs that sanctuaries are not ethical:
1) Elephants are restrained, particularly chained by the foot.
2) Workers carry bullhooks. These are long poles with sharp hooks on the ends that have been used to control elephants.
3) The location offers elephant rides, elephant painting, or other interactive experiences, like feeding the elephants.
4) They engage in captive breeding to always have baby elephants on hand for tourists to pet or feed.

“Unethical elephant facilities attract tourists because people love elephants and are delighted at the possibility of getting up close and personal. What they won't necessarily know is that the elephants are not willing participants in that encounter, and can suffer greatly for the tourist trade,” said Higgins.

“Visiting these establishments perpetuates a cycle of animal suffering in which the animals experience boredom, frustration, and even physical pain or fear. These places can also pose a danger to the human visitors in some cases because elephants are very large powerful animals whose behavior can be unpredictable in an overcrowded or stressful situation.”

If you choose to visit a genuine elephant sanctuary, look for ones that give back to practical and local conservation efforts, Higgins suggested. “By supporting those sanctuaries that are doing things right, and promoting your visit on social media with a reminder that you chose it for its ethical practices, it's a great way to encourage other travelers to do the right thing too.”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Animal Diversity Web animaldiversity.org ; National Geographic, Live Science, Natural History magazine, David Attenborough books, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Discover magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, Wikipedia, The Guardian, Top Secret Animal Attack Files website and various books and other publications.

Last updated December 2024