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Manifa Travel / Manifa Elephant Camp

4 weeks ago

Spectacles of Suffering: Elephant Tourism and the Logic of Poverty Porn
In recent years, international animal rights organizations have launched highly visible campaigns against elephant tourism in Southeast Asia. Prominent groups—such as PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and World Animal Protection—circulate images of elephants in chains, beaten with bullhooks, or forced to carry tourists on their backs across social media and international news platforms. The intent of such campaigns is clear: to reveal the hidden cruelty behind seemingly innocent tourist attractions and to mobilize global outrage. Yet the ethical and aesthetic structure of these campaigns bears a troubling resemblance to the logic of poverty porn—a visual economy that commodifies suffering to elicit moral emotion, while obscuring the complex social realities behind the image.

Like poverty porn, these campaigns rely on shock and pity. The chained elephant becomes the emblem of victimhood, and the Western viewer, confronted by the spectacle of pain, is invited to “take action”: to boycott, to donate, to share. The emotional transaction is immediate and gratifying; the moral geography is clear. The Southeast Asian mahout or camp owner becomes the villain or the benighted other, the elephant the passive victim, and the Western consumer the potential savior. In this dramaturgy of compassion, the animal’s suffering functions less as a site of understanding than as a stage for the performance of moral virtue.

This representational logic reproduces a familiar colonial divide between the ethical North and the unethical South. Just as poverty porn situates the Global South as a landscape of human misery awaiting salvation, the imagery from these organizations casts Southeast Asia as a region of cruelty awaiting enlightenment. The campaigns implicitly position Western norms of animal welfare as universal truths, while local practices—shaped by centuries of cohabitation, labor, ritual, and ecology—are erased or reduced to signs of barbarity. The “freedom” of the elephant is thus defined not through Lao or Thai cosmologies of kinship and interdependence, but through a Western liberal imaginary of autonomy and rights.

What disappears in this framing are the multiple, historically entangled relationships between humans and elephants in the region. In Laos and northern Thailand, elephants have long lived within a continuum of forest, village, and agricultural life. They are not domesticated in the Western sense, nor entirely wild. They work, rest, and age alongside humans in landscapes that are social as much as ecological. To represent every form of human–elephant labor as “abuse” is to ignore this relational ecology and the ways local people negotiate care, control, and survival under changing economic and environmental pressures.

The problem, then, is not that these organizations oppose cruelty, but that their visual and rhetorical style transforms ethics into spectacle. The chained elephant is meant to wound the conscience of distant spectators—but it also fixes Southeast Asian people and elephants alike within a static image of suffering. As with poverty porn, the viewer’s compassion becomes a form of consumption: to care is to click, to share, to boycott. The relation is emotional but not relational.

Donna Haraway urges us to stay with the trouble—to remain in the discomfort of complexity rather than fleeing to moral purity. Applied here, this means refusing the pornography of compassion that flattens difference into guilt and innocence. Advocacy for elephants need not depend on vilifying local communities or idealizing an abstract wilderness. It could instead begin from the situated knowledge of those who live and work with elephants every day, acknowledging that care and coercion are often entangled.

If we are to imagine a more just ethics of multispecies coexistence, it will not come from the circulation of suffering images, but from cultivating the kinds of relationships that those images obscure. To “free” elephants in the moral imagination of the West may be easy; to live well with them in the troubled landscapes of Southeast Asia is far more difficult—and far more necessary.

Questions for Further Thought
This analysis suggests that the path toward a more just coexistence is not simple. It requires us to "stay with the trouble" and confront the uncomfortable questions that the spectacle of suffering obscures:

1. On "Non-Western" Well-Being: The essay critiques imposing a Western ideal of 'freedom.' This forces us to ask: What constitutes elephant well-being in a “non-Western” context? Can a form of happiness exist within a human-elephant relationship of "coexistence" and "labor"? Or is the liberation of animals from all human utility—returning them to an "abstract wilderness"—the only universal good?

2. The Line Between Labor and Abuse: Following this, where do we draw the line between "labor" and "abuse"? Is this a universal, ethical absolute that can be applied everywhere, or is it—and must it be—defined culturally and relationally, specific to the ecology of a place like Laos and Thailand?

3. The Ethics of 'Likes' and Algorithms: Why are we, as media consumers, more viscerally responsive to a shocking image of cruelty than to a complex explanation of cultural coexistence? Do the very algorithms of social media, which reward immediate engagement ("likes," "shares," "outrage"), structurally amplify the logic of poverty porn and the spectacles promoted by these organizations, making a nuanced, non-colonial conversation almost impossible?

4. The Dilemma of the Boycott: If the 'ethical' solution offered is to boycott, what are the material consequences for the very beings we seek to "save"? When tourist revenue disappears, what happens to the mahouts and the elephants they can no longer afford to feed? Does our moral action, performed from a distance, inadvertently create a new, less visible form of suffering (e.g., starvation, a return to illegal logging) by destroying a local economy? ... See MoreSee Less

Manifa Travel / Manifa Elephant Camp updated their cover photo.

2 months ago

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Manifa Travel / Manifa Elephant Camp

2 months ago

From Rescue to Coexistence: Charting a Sustainable Future for Elephant Tourism

The emerging elephant camp at Kuang Si Waterfalls National Park represents an intentional departure from the Western-centered “rescue model” that has shaped much of Asian elephant tourism discourse in recent decades.

The rhetoric of rescue—where elephants are “saved” from exploitation—often functions less as a structural solution and more as merely high-priced transfers of ownership and a performative act of greenwashing. Sanctuaries are marketed as inherently ethical, while all forms of labor are framed as inherently exploitative. This binary obscures the historical and cultural reality of mahout–elephant relations in Southeast Asia, where care, kinship, and work have long been intertwined.

Moreover, such a framing is not consistent with recent animal welfare research, which demonstrates that elephant activities—whether tourist observation, riding, bathing, or interactive experiences—are not inherently harmful. When poorly managed, these practices can indeed compromise welfare; but when designed with appropriate conditions, they need not be problematic and may even provide forms of environmental and social enrichment. To dismiss all forms of elephant labor as exploitation oversimplifies a far more nuanced reality, and risks replacing evidence-based welfare standards with moral absolutism.

The global promotion of sanctuaries also frequently carries a postcolonial undertone: Western NGOs and activist groups impose their own moral frameworks, sidelining the voices of local communities who have lived with elephants for centuries. By privileging external standards over indigenous knowledge, such models risk reproducing the very hierarchies of expertise and authority they claim to resist.

The sustainable coexistence model being developed at Kuang Si offers an alternative. Rather than erasing the mahout’s role, it seeks to integrate elephants, mahouts, and institutions as co-partners. Elephants are not commodities exchanged under the guise of rescue, but living beings whose care is maintained through employment, shared responsibility, and ecological integration.

Kuang Si’s 16,000 hectares of protected forest provide a rare opportunity to test this approach in practice. Supported by both the Lao Forestry Department and Tourism Department, and drawing interest from mahouts themselves, the project positions coexistence—not rescue—as the foundation for ethical and sustainable elephant futures.

By moving beyond the rescue/sanctuary binary, this initiative invites us to rethink the political economy of elephant tourism in Laos, and to imagine models of conservation that resist greenwashed universalism while remaining grounded in local community knowledge and practice. ... See MoreSee Less