Introduction: Which History of Elephant Tourism?
The history of elephant tourism in Laos cannot be told as a single, continuous story. It includes commercial camps established around major tourist destinations, small-scale ventures developed by mahouts and local families, veterinary and welfare initiatives led by international organisations, and conservation projects increasingly oriented towards breeding, socialisation and eventual reintroduction into the wild. These different projects have often overlapped. Yet they have not necessarily understood the elephant, the mahout or the purpose of conservation in the same way.
In this chapter, domesticated elephant follows a term widely used in the Lao elephant sector for elephants living under individual or institutional human management. It does not imply that the Asian elephant has undergone domestication at the species level. Where appropriate, village elephant and captive elephant are used to identify more specific social and institutional situations.
This chapter does not attempt to provide a comprehensive history of every elephant tourism operation in Laos. Instead, it follows one particularly revealing institutional trajectory: the development of Elephant Adventures, the wider activities of ElefantAsia, and the subsequent establishment of the Elephant Conservation Center (ECC). This trajectory is important not simply because these initiatives played a prominent role in the recent history of captive-elephant management in Laos. It also allows us to observe a gradual transformation in the way the elephant problem itself was defined.
Elephant Adventures emerged at a moment when the decline of logging and other changes in the rural economy were leaving elephants and mahouts with fewer opportunities for work. Tourism offered a possible—if uncertain—alternative. In this earlier model, the central problem was how to sustain elephants, mahouts, and their existing working relationships after the contraction of the timber economy. Veterinary assistance, tourism income, and support for mahout livelihoods were therefore closely connected. The elephant was not yet imagined primarily as an animal that needed to be separated from human use. Rather, the immediate concern was how an inherited human–elephant relationship could survive under rapidly changing economic conditions.
The later development of the ECC introduced a different emphasis. Breeding, the formation of elephant social groups, reduced human contact and the possibility of reintroduction became increasingly central to its conservation vision. This should not be understood simply as a linear progression from an exploitative tourism project to a more enlightened conservation institution. It also represented a change in the moral and practical object of care: from sustaining relationships among elephants, mahouts and rural communities towards restoring a more autonomous elephant sociality oriented, at least aspirationally, towards the wild.
Following this transition makes it possible to examine a broader transformation within elephant conservation. What happens when the “way of the mahout”—a system based on intergenerational knowledge, daily proximity, labour, discipline, affection and mutual dependence—is gradually displaced by the ideal of an elephant whose well-being is associated with distance from humans? What forms of care become more visible in this transition, and which forms of knowledge and responsibility become less visible? The history traced below does not offer a simple choice between tourism and conservation. Rather, it shows how competing understandings of welfare, work, sociality and the proper relationship between humans and elephants came to be institutionalised within the same historical lineage.
To make these competing understandings visible, the chapter distinguishes three analytical paths that emerged from within and around the ElefantAsia network. The first, associated here with Gilles Maurer’s social-ecological research, seeks to understand domesticated elephants, wild elephants, mahouts, forests, labour, ownership and economic change as elements of a single relational system. The second, represented by Ingrid Suter’s welfare-centred work, assumes that many elephants will remain under human management and asks how those relations can be improved through veterinary care, welfare assessment, professional standards and institutional reform. The third, developed most fully by Sébastien Duffillot and the ECC, uses intensive human care, scientific management and mahout knowledge to create more autonomous elephant social groups oriented towards reherding and possible rewilding.
These are not three mutually exclusive schools, nor are they labels necessarily used by the people concerned. They identify different answers to a common question: should conservation primarily understand and sustain existing human–elephant relations, reform and standardise them, or employ them as a transitional means towards greater separation? The historical sections that follow reconstruct the common institutional setting from which these paths emerged. The later discussion of welfare campaigns and Nicolas Lainé’s biocultural critique then places them within a wider conflict over whether elephant ethics should be organised through relations or through separation.
It is within this longer transformation that we can understand the significance of the caravan that began operating in 2007, carrying travellers with elephants and mahouts from Hongsa towards the Mekong.
From Hongsa to the Mekong: Elephant Adventures in 2007
In 2007, a small-scale elephant caravan called Elephant Adventures began operating in Hongsa, northwestern Laos.
Travellers arrived from Luang Prabang or Pak Beng by boat, following the Mekong to Tha Souang before continuing overland to Hongsa. The following morning, near Sibounheuang village, each guest met an elephant and its mahout and set out on a journey of several days through villages, rice fields, river valleys and forests.
The caravan passed through Ban Then, crossed the Nam Tap River and continued to Ban Nam Tap. On arrival, the elephants were taken to the river and then released into the forest for the night. The next morning, guests could accompany the mahouts to retrieve the elephants, groom them and take them to bathe. On a steep uphill section, everyone travelled on foot. Farther along the route, the group visited a small, non-industrial logging site, where mahouts demonstrated how elephants could move timber. The journey then followed the Nam En River to a small Khmu village before reaching Ban Kheng En and the Mekong.[1]
This was not a short ride around a fixed elephant camp. It combined travel by boat, vehicle, foot and elephant, crossing a lived landscape over several days.
A map published with the Green Discovery itinerary shows the Hongsa basin, villages, rivers, mountain ridges, existing roads, forest trails and the Mekong as parts of a single journey. Roads were already present and were used for supplies and emergency access. Yet substantial portions of the route depended upon forest paths and on mahouts who knew where elephants could walk, drink, forage and rest.[2]
Figure 3.1. The Elephant Adventures caravan route, c. 2007–2008
Travellers entered Hongsa overland from Tha Souang. From the Hongsa area, the caravan crossed Ban Then, Ban Nam Tap, the Nam En watershed and Ban Kheng En before reaching the Mekong. Rather than operating within a fixed elephant facility, the journey connected elephants, mahouts, villages, forests and rivers across a regional landscape.
Looking at this itinerary today, many people would focus immediately on the fact that tourists rode elephants. This chapter asks a different set of questions.
Why was such a journey conceived as a conservation activity?
Why did it disappear?
And why did the same ElefantAsia network later produce the Elephant Conservation Center, an institution that increasingly placed reherding and rewilding at the centre of its mission?
Following this transformation reveals that the history of elephant tourism in Laos was not a simple story of moral progress from exploitation to protection.
1. A history different from elephant tourism in Thailand
The history of elephant tourism in Southeast Asia is often told through the experience of Thailand.
In January 1989, the Thai government imposed a national ban on logging in natural forests. Large numbers of elephants and mahouts subsequently entered an already expanding tourism sector. Elephant camps became widespread, offering activities that ranged from performances and riding to bathing, feeding and observation.[3]
The history of Laos was different.
In the early 2000s, international tourism in Laos—especially in Luang Prabang—was itself still taking shape. Elephant tourism did not merely transfer logging elephants into a mature mass-tourism industry. Elephants, mahouts, forests and village cultures became part of the process through which Laos was presented as a destination to the international travel market.
Elephant Village, ElefantAsia, Green Discovery, Elephant Adventures, Manifa Elephant Camp and the later Elephant Conservation Center were not identical projects. Yet all emerged in relation to a shared set of problems: declining opportunities in forestry, the livelihoods of elephant owners, mahout employment, veterinary access, low reproduction and the uncertain economic future of domesticated elephants.
ElefantAsia’s own retrospective account states that its founders developed an ecotourism elephant-riding itinerary in 2007 and proposed it to Green Discovery, which marketed it under the name Elephant Adventures. The stated objectives included replacing more exhausting logging work, sustaining mahout traditions, supporting local development and financing elephant conservation.[4]
Understanding elephant tourism in Laos therefore requires more than a history of occupational transition from logging to tourism.
It requires an account of how landscapes once shared by people and elephants were reorganised through tourism, industrial development and conservation science.
2. Hongsa and Muang Thong: two elephant regions, two futures
Northwestern Laos had at least two important centres of domesticated-elephant culture: Hongsa and the area known locally as Muang Thong, officially Thongmixay District, adjoining the Nam Phouy National Biodiversity Conservation Area.
Hongsa: the loss of a mobile landscape
Hongsa once supported a substantial population of domesticated elephants, elephant owners and highly experienced mahouts. The elephants did not remain permanently at logging sites. They moved between villages, agricultural land, forests, rivers and places of work. When not working, many spent extended periods foraging in the forest.
Elephant Adventures did not introduce an entirely new elephant culture to Hongsa. It reorganised existing practices of mobility, forest use, mahout knowledge and village hospitality as a small-scale form of international tourism.
Yet the project emerged as Hongsa was approaching profound transformation. Hongsa Power Company was formed in 2009 to develop a 1,878-megawatt lignite mine-mouth power station. The project incorporated the mine and power plant together with roads, water infrastructure, transmission facilities and resettlement areas.[5]
The power project was not necessarily the sole cause of the decline in elephant keeping. Broader changes in forestry, employment, agriculture, transportation and land use also mattered. Local accounts nevertheless describe elephants leaving Hongsa for tourism businesses elsewhere in Laos and for foreign destinations, while some mahouts entered different occupations.[6]
When elephants leave, more than a numerical population is lost. A caravan such as Elephant Adventures required:
- compatible elephant–mahout teams;
- a chief mahout able to select and coordinate them;
- knowledge of water, forage and resting places;
- relations with villages along the route;
- the ability to release elephants safely into forest overnight; and
- the collective experience needed to respond when terrain, weather or an individual elephant required a change of plan.
Roads also changed the meaning of the journey.
The Elephant Adventures map shows that roads were never entirely absent. Vehicles carried visitors from Tha Souang to Hongsa, delivered supplies to Ban Nam Tap for larger groups and provided an emergency evacuation route. Initially, roads supported the caravan as secondary infrastructure.
As roads expanded, however, they also enabled agricultural conversion, settlement, commercial transport and more intensive access to previously remote areas. A trail could remain physically open while becoming unsuitable for elephants because of crops, fences, traffic, land claims or the disappearance of forest where the animals could forage and rest.
For Elephant Adventures, remoteness was not simply an obstacle. It was part of the journey’s substance. The fact that a route could not be travelled quickly by vehicle—and that mahouts knew how to cross it with elephants—was precisely what gave the journey its form.
Roads brought Hongsa closer to the outside world. At the same time, they helped erase the Hongsa that Elephant Adventures had turned into a journey.
Muang Thong: what access to forest made possible
Muang Thong followed a different path and continues to retain a significant population of domesticated elephants.
This cannot be explained merely by suggesting that its residents valued tradition more strongly. The decisive material condition was its proximity to the extensive forests of Nam Phouy.
Research by Gilles Maurer and his colleagues describes Thongmixay as an area where village elephants could still be released seasonally into forest, forage with a degree of autonomy and encounter wild elephants. The authors interpret the older system not as complete confinement but as a form of elephant keeping characterised by common access to forest resources, intermittent human supervision and seasonal freedom. They also document how agricultural intensification, divided land access and tighter protected-area boundaries have placed this system under increasing pressure.[7]
Around Nam Phouy, domesticated females have encountered and mated with wild bulls. Maurer and his co-authors consequently argue that the wild and domesticated populations cannot be understood as wholly separate demographic systems. The reproduction of village elephants has depended partly on access to wild males, while the survival of domesticated elephants has also been shaped by the economic decisions of their human owners.[8]
Human beings, domesticated elephants, wild elephants, forest, labour, ownership and reproduction therefore formed a single social-ecological system.
The contrast between Hongsa and Muang Thong is significant:
In Hongsa, the landscape that sustained elephant culture was industrialised and reorganised. In Muang Thong, the forests of Nam Phouy preserved much of the physical space in which relations among people, village elephants and wild elephants could continue.
This does not mean that the protected-area system was created to preserve domesticated elephants. Nor does it mean that formal conservation rules have always supported village access.
If the protected area had been completely closed to local people and village elephants, the social-ecological system described by Maurer could not have persisted. What mattered was both the survival of a large forest block and the continued porosity of its boundaries.
Muang Thong maintained elephants not by separating them completely from people, but because access to forest still made a continuing human–elephant relationship materially possible.
3. ElefantAsia: respect for culture and the impulse to enlighten
Two tendencies coexisted in the early work of ElefantAsia.
The first was relational and biocultural. It sought to protect elephants together with mahouts and the social worlds in which they lived.
Elephant Adventures described elephants as part of Laos’s cultural heritage. Travellers were invited to learn about mahout life, travel between villages and forests and contribute to the continuation of both elephant and mahout culture. In its 2007 French-language publicity, Hongsa was described as a sanctuaire des derniers éléphants domestiques du pays—a sanctuary of the country’s last domesticated elephants.[9]
At that time, sanctuary did not necessarily mean a facility in which elephants were removed from human relations. It referred to a region in which elephants, mahouts and their shared culture still survived.
The second tendency was modernising and managerial. It sought to improve local practices through Western veterinary medicine, international development programmes, formal training, standardised records and institutional management.
Elephant Adventures contributed five per cent of its turnover to ElefantAsia’s mobile veterinary programme. In cooperation with the Lao National Animal Health Centre, ElefantAsia trained veterinary personnel, operated a mobile clinic, distributed first-aid materials and created a national registration database. Between December 2007 and July 2009, the Mobile Veterinary Unit recorded treatment of 347 domesticated elephants, most of them working in logging.[10]
These interventions had substantial practical value. Laos had very limited specialist veterinary capacity, medicines were difficult to obtain in remote districts, and injuries and chronic conditions associated with forestry were often untreated.
Yet the programme also institutionalised a hierarchy of knowledge.
Nicolas Lainé observed that Western veterinary medicine was used mainly for elephants working in tourism facilities, while mahouts in neighbouring villages were often reluctant to consult veterinarians even when ElefantAsia provided treatment free of charge. Some village mahouts instead emphasised forest access, rest and elephants’ own selection of medicinal or restorative plants.[11]
This reluctance should not be understood simply as ignorance.
Western veterinary medicine tends to identify symptoms, diagnose a condition, administer treatment and document the progress of an individual body. Village elephant care may also consider workload, season, forest release, plant selection, individual temperament, human–elephant history and ritual or spiritual relations.
Free medical treatment removes a financial obstacle. It does not resolve questions of authority:
Who defines illness?
Who knows the elephant best?
Which forms of knowledge become institutionally legitimate?
The Mobile Veterinary Unit’s own published report reflects this tension. It valued mahouts’ daily role and employed a multilingual liaison officer, but it also described some mahouts as lacking understanding of preventive medicine and framed external education as the remedy. Information from Thai elephant-care manuals and international veterinary literature was translated and transferred into Laos.[12]
ElefantAsia therefore spoke of respecting mahout culture while simultaneously treating that culture as something that needed to be trained, corrected and modernised.
This was not simply cultural rejection. It was a form of developmentalism that included local culture while retaining external authority over what counted as improvement.
A corresponding form of saviourism was already possible within this model. The narrative was not yet “rescuing elephants from Lao people.” It was closer to rescuing both elephants and mahout culture from decline through foreign expertise, conservation funding, veterinary science and international tourism.
The coexistence of relational commitment and managerial intervention within ElefantAsia is important for the argument that follows. It helps explain how the same institutional network could later generate social-ecological research into human–elephant interdependence, welfare programmes designed to reform and standardise that relationship, and the ECC’s attempt to reorganise it towards greater elephant autonomy. The three paths outlined in the introduction were later developments of tensions already present in ElefantAsia’s early practice.
4. Elephant Adventures: a mobile conservation economy
Elephant Adventures was not an elephant-riding business to which conservation language was later attached.
Green Discovery’s operational documentation describes a carefully structured, high-cost and low-volume product.
Groups were limited to six guests. In principle, each traveller was assigned one elephant and one mahout. A chief mahout, local guide and cooks also accompanied the caravan. For groups of one or two guests, an additional elephant carried camping and kitchen equipment. For groups of three or more, supplies were delivered by vehicle to Ban Nam Tap rather than continually increasing the load carried by the elephants.[13]
Participating elephants and mahouts were selected by the chief mahout. The documentation emphasised reliable commands, experienced elephant–mahout teams, safety instruction and knowledge of the forest. Green Discovery described the project as converting logging elephants into “quality and humane ecotourism activities.” It also stated that host villages were paid according to arrangements defined with villagers.[14]
The programme was explicitly marketed as upmarket. In 2007, the five-day tour cost US$990 per person for two participants, US$700 for three or four participants and US$600 for five or six. The intended customers were travellers prepared to accept basic accommodation and difficult terrain in return for an extended journey with elephants and mahouts.[15]
The project attempted to create a mobile conservation economy.
- Tourism revenue would employ mahouts.
- Villages would earn income.
- Logging elephants would move into work that was presented as less exhausting.
- Veterinary treatment and reproduction programmes would receive funding.
- Travellers would learn from mahouts.
Later Elephant Adventures material stated that mahouts were paid more than they had earned in logging. When the elephants and mahouts needed two additional days to return to Hongsa without tourists, they received the same daily payment. Village funds also received contributions for each guest-night, while five per cent of total turnover went to the Mobile Elephant Clinic.[16]
The object being conserved was therefore not the elephant’s body in isolation. It was a mobile relationship connecting elephants, mahouts, families, villages, forests, rivers and visitors.
This should not be romanticised as the untouched survival of traditional culture.
Guests received a “Basic Mahout Course Certificate.” They were tested on commands in a village courtyard. Logging skills were demonstrated for visitors. At the end of the journey, the elephants were reportedly brought to the riverbank to kneel as the guests departed.
These were forms of tourism staging. Regional practices were selected, arranged and made legible to an international audience.
Elephant Adventures consequently had a dual character:
It was a biocultural journey grounded in living mahout knowledge and regional landscapes, but it was also a commercial product that packaged those relations for the international tourism market.
Commercialisation does not necessarily make a relationship false. Nor does the presence of local culture make a tourism activity automatically responsible.
The relevant questions concern who designed the product, whose knowledge carried authority, how revenue was distributed and what kinds of lives the elephants were able to lead.
5. Was Elephant Adventures intended as a permanent model?
It remains uncertain whether Elephant Adventures was conceived as a permanent means of sustaining Hongsa’s elephant culture.
Several possibilities remain open.
- It may have been intended as a long-term community-based tourism model.
- It may have been conceived as temporary employment for elephants and mahouts affected by declining forestry and the approaching transformation of Hongsa.
- It may also have functioned as a transitional project while ElefantAsia prepared a more permanent, concentrated facility at Nam Tien.
The available evidence establishes that both models were being considered during the same period. A 2010 article written by ElefantAsia staff described elephant trekking in Laos as still being in its infancy while stating that an ElefantAsia-sponsored “sanctuary” was about to open. The article was based on veterinary data collected between 2007 and 2009, during the period when Elephant Adventures was being actively promoted.[17]
This demonstrates concurrent planning. It does not prove that Elephant Adventures was deliberately designed from the outset as a short-lived bridge to the ECC.
The project received substantial investment. It had a dedicated website, international media coverage, books, films, promotional materials and distribution through Green Discovery. Elephant Adventures was still advertising future caravan departures on its website in 2011. Some Green Discovery pages remained archived through February 2014, although the persistence of an online page does not establish that tours were still being operated at that date.[18]
Nevertheless, the model was structurally fragile.
It required several compatible elephant–mahout teams, a capable chief mahout, enduring relations with villages, knowledge of a long route, camping and food logistics, access to forest and an international sales network able to sell an expensive specialist journey.
When elephants and mahouts left the region, the problem was not merely that there were fewer animals available. The collective capacity to organise the caravan was progressively lost.
When forests became farms, roads or industrial areas, routes might remain geographically traceable while becoming socially unsuitable for elephants. The journey depended on access to water, forage, rest areas and forest where elephants could stay overnight without damaging crops or creating conflict.
The disappearance of Elephant Adventures probably resulted from at least two overlapping processes.
First, changes in elephants, mahout employment and landscape access around Hongsa made the tour increasingly difficult to operate.
Second, growing criticism of elephant riding in Western travel markets made it increasingly difficult to sell, defend and reinvest in.
At present, the chronology of the second process requires further research. Booking records, Green Discovery correspondence, tour-operator policies and interviews with former staff would be needed to establish when anti-riding pressure became commercially decisive.
Changing international ethics did not necessarily create the original material crisis. They may, however, have made it far harder to reconstruct a model that was already losing its regional foundations.
The operational base weakened first; the changing moral market then reduced the possibility of rebuilding it.
6. From dispersed relations to concentrated conservation
The Elephant Conservation Center did not suddenly appear as an external sanctuary opposed to elephant tourism.
It emerged from the same network of veterinary care, reproduction programmes, mahout training and ecotourism development associated with ElefantAsia.
According to the ECC’s official history, the organisation was registered in Sayaboury Province in 2010. It was established at Nam Tien with an elephant hospital and a land concession intended to support breeding and socialisation. The ECC then began purchasing elephants from owners who had decided to sell. Its official account explicitly connects the centre’s creation to declining logging opportunities and the effort to redirect mahouts towards ecotourism.[19]
The ECC and Elephant Adventures therefore represented two different spatial arrangements of conservation.
Elephant Adventures: a dispersed model
This model connected elephants still owned in villages, mahouts, local hosts, shared forests, rivers and existing travel routes.
The ECC: a concentrated model
This model brought elephants into a dedicated territory governed by an organisation with veterinary facilities, paid staff, breeding plans, land rights, scientific partners and access to international funding.
The first model depended on the continued viability of a regional social landscape. The second could continue even when elephant keeping in the surrounding region was declining, provided that the institution retained land, revenue and administrative capacity.
This was a practical adaptation. Where families could no longer maintain elephants, moving the animals to a dedicated centre could appear to be the most realistic way to provide land, food, medical care and long-term management.
Yet the solution also changed the elephants’ social position.
An elephant that had been family property, a participant in village life and a mobile presence in a regional landscape could become an individual protected and managed by a specialised institution.
The mahout could shift from owner, relative or locally embedded practitioner to employee within an organisational hierarchy.
The forest was increasingly redefined from a lived and shared space used by villagers and elephants into a conservation territory governed through institutional agreements.
The ECC was designed to protect elephants from the collapse of regional elephant-keeping systems. It was also made possible by transferring elephants out of those systems.
This is not a contradiction that can be resolved simply by deciding whether the ECC is good or bad. It is the institutional dilemma at the centre of its history.
7. How the conservation narrative changed
A comparison between Elephant Adventures and the later ECC reveals a transformation in the language of conservation.
The earlier vocabulary emphasised:
- elephants and mahouts;
- the “Way of the Mahout”;
- cultural heritage;
- village hospitality;
- forest journeys;
- humane ecotourism;
- local development;
- veterinary care; and
- economic alternatives to logging.
The crisis was defined as declining forestry employment, inadequate veterinary care, low reproduction and the disappearance of mahout culture.
The proposed solution was to relocate human–elephant relations within a different economy.
In its contemporary public presentation, the ECC increasingly emphasises:
- rescue;
- rehabilitation;
- natural behaviour;
- socialisation;
- reherding;
- rewilding;
- release; and
- recovery of wild populations.
The centre describes the creation of socially compatible elephant groups as preparation for eventual release into Nam Pouy. Mahouts continue to contribute their knowledge to this process, while released elephants remain subject to observation, GPS tracking and ranger patrols.[20]
This was not merely a change in terminology.
In the earlier model, sustaining a continuing human–elephant relationship was itself a conservation objective.
In the later model, that relationship increasingly became a means of preparing elephants for greater social autonomy and reduced human dependence.
The change should not be depicted as completely linear. The ECC continues to employ mahouts, acknowledges their expertise and depends on direct human intervention in veterinary treatment, breeding, socialisation and rewilding.
Indeed, the ECC’s own description of rewilding makes the continuing relationship visible. Former mahouts track released elephants; mahout knowledge is described as essential; government agencies, rangers, biologists, donors and technology all remain involved.[21]
The ECC’s defining tension is therefore not that it has eliminated human–elephant relations.
It is that:
Operationally, the ECC remains deeply relational, while institutionally its preferred future is directed towards increasing separation and wildness.
Rewilding is not the absence of human–elephant work. It is a new and highly organised form of that work.
8. From welfare campaigns to an activity-based moral market
From the 2000s onward, the international language used to evaluate elephant tourism also changed.
Rosaleen Duffy and Lorraine Moore argued that animal-welfare organisations had become influential actors in the global governance of elephant tourism. They also warned that universal standards could reproduce North–South power inequalities when they failed to engage seriously with local practices and economic conditions.[22]
This change did not begin with an invented problem. Many tourism venues did keep elephants under conditions that raised serious welfare concerns, including prolonged restraint, hard substrates, limited social opportunities, nutritionally unbalanced diets and inadequate veterinary care. Campaigns by international animal-protection organisations made these conditions more visible to tourists and travel companies.
World Animal Protection’s 2017 report Taken for a Ride was especially influential. Based on visits to 220 venues in six Asian countries, including Laos, it documented the conditions of 2,923 elephants and reported that three quarters were living under poor or unacceptable conditions. All elephants in the lowest-scoring group were kept at venues offering riding, while the highest-scoring venues offered no riding or performances and generally restricted direct tourist contact.[23]
The report’s evidentiary contribution and its methodological limits must be distinguished. Its rapid welfare-conditions assessment recorded such factors as restraint, shelter, hygiene, diet, social interaction, daily routines, management and tourist activities. It was designed to identify broad institutional conditions across a very large number of venues. The report explicitly acknowledged, however, that it did not directly measure the welfare state of individual elephants. It assessed the conditions presumed to affect welfare and converted them into a single score for each venue.[23]
This distinction became less visible as the findings moved from assessment into campaigning. A correlation between riding venues and poor conditions was increasingly translated into the stronger claim that riding, training or direct tourist contact was itself reliable evidence that an elephant had been subjected to cruelty. WAP’s campaign materials presented “wildlife entertainment” as a category to be phased out and promoted observation-only sanctuaries and viewing elephants in the wild as the principal ethical alternatives. Its normative premise—“wild animals belong in the wild, not in entertainment”—preceded and exceeded the narrower empirical question of how particular management practices affected the welfare of particular elephants.[23]
International discussion consequently came to rely increasingly on visible moral oppositions:
- riding versus no riding;
- touching versus no touching;
- bathing versus no bathing;
- captivity versus freedom;
- camp versus sanctuary.
Within this framework, the most visible tourist activity can become more important than the elephant’s overall life.
A photograph of riding may be treated as sufficient evidence of an institution’s ethics before anyone investigates the duration and conditions of the activity, the elephant’s health, forest access, exercise, diet, social environment, veterinary records or relationship with its mahout.
What subsequent welfare research showed
Research conducted subsequently by Chiang Mai University, the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and their collaborators did not support the use of a simple activity label as a proxy for welfare. A major review concluded that claims of universal brutality in elephant tourism were often based on anecdote rather than solid science, that management varied substantially among camps and that not all tourist activities were necessarily detrimental. Welfare, the authors argued, should be evaluated through objective physical, physiological and psychological evidence.[24]
Studies of individual elephants produced results that complicated the riding/no-riding distinction. At five camps with different management systems, elephants at an observation-only venue had some of the highest body-condition, insulin and glucose measures and poorer metabolic profiles than elephants receiving exercise through riding programmes. Across camps, greater walking distance and work time were associated with healthier metabolic measures, while tourist numbers and the provision of bananas, sugar cane and other supplementary foods were associated with higher body condition and less favourable metabolic indicators. The authors did not argue that riding was inherently beneficial. They concluded that hands-off facilities must still ensure adequate exercise and appropriate diets.[25]
A separate study of 122 elephants at fifteen camps found that saddle-related wounds were rare. By contrast, excessive body condition, hard substrates and the improper use of control equipment emerged as identifiable concerns. Approximately one quarter of elephants whose mahouts carried an ankus showed wounds in areas where the tool could be applied. The relevant welfare issue was therefore not the mere visibility of a saddle or ankus but the conditions and manner in which equipment was used.[26]
Another year-long comparison of elephants in saddle-riding, bareback-riding and no-riding programmes found no clear indication that riding per se negatively affected the two physiological markers examined. Overall faecal glucocorticoid metabolite concentrations were lowest in the saddle-riding group, although results varied among camps, biomarkers and sample types. The researchers cautioned that chaining, inappropriate ankus use and limited social opportunities could still adversely affect welfare and that no single physiological measure provided a complete assessment.[27]
These studies do not establish that every riding programme is harmless. Nor do they invalidate the poor conditions documented at many venues by WAP. They challenge a different inference: that the presence or absence of riding, contact or observation can, by itself, reveal the welfare of an individual elephant.
A 2024 comparison of elephant-welfare assessment systems makes the methodological difference explicit. It identifies the strengths of WAP’s approach—its focus on tourist camps and its capacity to survey institutions on a large scale—but also notes that assumptions and subjective criteria may influence scoring, that the method focuses on the institutional rather than individual level and that it lacks several validated measures and more recent developments in animal-welfare science. The authors recommend combining resource-based conditions with animal-based outcomes and evaluating nutrition, environment, health, behaviour and mental state together.[28]
Taken together, this literature establishes a methodological point:
An activity label is not a welfare assessment.
From assessment to platform rule
The activity-based vocabulary was particularly compatible with the needs of international tourism distribution. Tour operators and online platforms could not continuously examine the diet, exercise, restraint, health, social environment and human relationships of every elephant sold through their systems. They could, however, prohibit visible categories of activity.
In 2016, after a World Animal Protection campaign supported by more than 550,000 people, TripAdvisor and Viator announced that they would cease selling tickets to many attractions involving direct contact with captive wild animals, explicitly including elephant riding. WAP reported that more than 160 travel companies had made comparable commitments by early 2017.[29] Ethical judgement was thereby translated into a scalable commercial rule: an activity could be excluded without a whole-life assessment of the animals involved.
Social media and review platforms extended the same logic to reputational judgement. A photograph of riding could circulate independently of information about duration, load, terrain, exercise, diet, forest access, rest or veterinary care. Individual consumers could impose reputational costs on a venue through a category that was immediately recognisable and morally charged.
Elephant Adventures would have been particularly vulnerable in this emerging prohibition-based market. Its small groups, forest movement, mahout expertise, village payments and veterinary contributions could all be documented. Yet the entire model could still be rejected through the single classification “multi-day elephant riding.”
The complex question—
Under what conditions did these particular elephants travel, carry weight, forage, rest and respond to their mahouts?
—was displaced by the simpler question:
Did tourists ride them?
The transformation of the 2010s should therefore not be described simply as the discovery or more accurate recognition of elephant suffering. It was also a reorganisation of ethical attention. Concern became increasingly elephant-centred within international tourism discourse, while elephants were progressively abstracted from their relationships with mahouts, local communities and historically formed systems of work and care. Complex and context-dependent questions of welfare were translated into a simplified moral vocabulary—riding or not riding, contact or non-contact, exploitation or rescue, captivity or freedom—that could be readily communicated to tourists and institutionalised by tour operators and booking platforms.
9. The welfare response: Suter and ACES
A different response to prohibition-based ethics emerged from Ingrid Suter and the welfare framework associated with the Asian Captive Elephant Standards.
Suter had worked with ElefantAsia and later became a co-founder of ACES. Her position does not call for the abolition of elephant tourism. It argues that large numbers of elephants will remain under human management and that their lives should be improved through veterinary care, evidence-based husbandry, mahout skills and enforceable standards.
In a 2020 commentary, Suter argued that the elephant-tourism industry was capable of positive change and that mahout skills could contribute to conservation without the difficult and limited process of rewilding. She also criticised animal-rights messaging that overlooked the socio-economic and geopolitical complexity of elephant conservation in developing countries.[30]
ACES attempts to evaluate more than the presence or absence of riding. Its audit framework includes body condition, diet, water, social contact, working hours, shelter, substrate, foot care, veterinary records and staff conditions. It also examines employment contracts, wages, insurance, leave, training and legal documentation. Certification requires institutional transparency, corrective action and repeated assessment.[31]
This is considerably more comprehensive than a single activity prohibition.
Yet the system also reveals another problem: the organisational cost of becoming auditable.
The following example requires a brief positional note: the author works with Manifa Elephant Camp and draws here on direct involvement in its management and international communication. Around 2022–2023, Manifa was offered an opportunity to participate in a supported ACES assessment or certification process. The camp did not reject the welfare objectives. It lacked the staff capacity to prepare the extensive English-language policies, records and evidence during the difficult period of reopening after COVID-19.[32]
An audit fee can be subsidised while the organisational cost of auditability remains substantial.
Certification assesses the lives of elephants, but it also assesses whether an organisation can translate its practices into documents that are legible to an international standard.
A small locally managed camp may possess experienced mahouts and extensive forest access but lack:
- an English-speaking compliance officer;
- formally written policies;
- digitised medical and employment records;
- time for repeated reporting; and
- staff dedicated to international certification.
The difference between a certified and an uncertified camp therefore cannot automatically be treated as the difference between high and low welfare. It may also reflect differences in administrative resources, language capacity and international institutional access.
The welfare model offers a more nuanced method than prohibition alone. But nuance comes with high evidentiary and bureaucratic demands, while the prohibition model can be communicated through a single photograph or word.
10. Lainé’s biocultural critique: what was lost?
Nicolas Lainé is a cultural anthropologist whose research examines relations among humans, animals and environments in South and Southeast Asia. In Laos, his ethnographic work has focused particularly on the shared lives of elephants and mahouts, local ecological and ethno-veterinary knowledge, and the ways in which elephant health is understood through relations among people, animals, plants, forests and spirits.
His work can also be situated within a wider turn in the critical humanities and multispecies scholarship—including the anthropology of nature—that questioned the modern separation of nature and culture. From this perspective, an elephant is neither a purely natural being standing outside society nor a passive object onto which human culture is imposed. Its habits, capacities, health and forms of knowledge develop through historically specific relations with other elephants, people, plants, landscapes and invisible beings. The task of anthropology is therefore not simply to add “local culture” to an otherwise biological account of the animal. It is to examine how human and elephant worlds have been produced together, and what happens when conservation institutions attempt to separate them.
In 2018, Lainé brought this relational perspective directly into the debate over elephant conservation in Laos. His article, “Asian Elephant Conservation: Too Elephantocentric? Towards a Biocultural Approach of Conservation,” criticised the tendency to treat the elephant as a species or sentient individual separable from the human and ecological relations through which its life had historically been constituted. The ECC was not incidental to the article. Lainé used it as a prominent example of a modern conservation institution whose efforts to improve elephant welfare and recreate elephant social groups could also marginalise mahout knowledge, village life and multispecies relations. The article subsequently prompted a published response from ECC founder Sébastien Duffillot and a further reply from Lainé and Serge Morand.[33][34]
Lainé’s criticism was therefore not that the ECC lacked veterinary care, forest land or mahout employment.
His central argument was that mainstream conservation had become too elephant-centred. By treating the elephant as an isolated biological subject, conservation risked reducing people, villages, plants, forests, spirits, work and historical relations to secondary variables around the species.
Against this elephantocentric approach, Lainé proposed a biocultural understanding of conservation.
His analysis raises a question that institutional employment alone cannot answer:
Is employing mahouts the same as recognising them as co-authors of conservation?
Similarly:
Is recording and using mahout knowledge the same as preserving the relations through which that knowledge is created?
The ECC formally responded that it did not exclude mahouts or local knowledge. It emphasised its employment of mahouts, its cultural and educational activities and its attempts to combine traditional expertise with modern conservation science. Lainé and Serge Morand subsequently replied that the deeper biocultural challenge remained unresolved.[34]
Both positions contain important truths.
The ECC plainly depends on mahouts. Their knowledge contributes to socialisation, reproduction, veterinary intervention, behavioural assessment, tracking and release.
But if the ultimate institutional objective is the creation of autonomous elephant groups and their integration into a wild population, mahout knowledge can become a technology for reducing the future role of mahouts.
In Elephant Adventures, the elephant–mahout relationship was the centre of the journey.
At the ECC, the relationship increasingly becomes a professional means through which a more autonomous elephant society may be produced.
What receded in this transition was not merely an elephant-riding product.
It was the possibility of treating the continuing shared life of elephants and mahouts as a conservation objective in its own right:
- their movement through regional landscapes;
- the participation of villages in that movement;
- the production of forest knowledge through daily practice;
- the passing of elephant knowledge between generations; and
- the continued mutual adaptation of particular elephants and particular people.
Lainé’s critique was difficult to dismiss because it did not introduce a wholly foreign ideal.
It returned a question already contained within ElefantAsia’s own history:
Why was the human–elephant relationship now treated as transitional when it had once been the very thing Elephant Adventures claimed to conserve?
At the same time, Elephant Adventures itself should not be transformed into a lost utopia. The project already contained the hierarchy of expert and local knowledge, the staging of culture for foreign visitors and the idea that outside institutions would define and manage the solution.
ECC did not simply betray an earlier relational philosophy.
A more accurate interpretation is that two tendencies were present from the beginning:
- a commitment to sustaining elephants, mahouts, villages and forests as a connected world; and
- a commitment to improving, standardising and governing that world through external science and professional institutions.
Elephant Adventures temporarily held these tendencies together.
The ECC subsequently institutionalised the second more successfully than the first.
Seen in this way, the disagreement between Lainé and the ECC was more than a dispute over one conservation centre. It foreshadowed the wider historical divergence examined in this chapter’s conclusion: even as critical scholarship was dismantling the nature–culture divide, conservation and tourism institutions were finding new ways to organise elephant ethics around the ideal of restoring a natural animal through increasing distance from human culture.
Conclusion: Two Diverging Histories of Animal Ethics
The trajectory from Elephant Adventures to the Elephant Conservation Center should not be understood simply as a progression from tourism to conservation, or from the exploitation of elephants to their protection. It reveals a more complicated transformation in the moral and institutional understanding of human–elephant relations in Laos.
Elephant Adventures emerged in response to an immediate historical problem. As logging declined and industrial development around Hongsa reorganised land, employment and forest-based livelihoods, elephants and mahouts faced the loss of both work and the material conditions that had sustained their relationships. Tourism offered an imperfect and perhaps temporary alternative. It did not remove elephants from human society. Instead, it attempted to carry an existing human–elephant relationship into a changing economy, while veterinary assistance and tourism income helped maintain the practical infrastructure of care.
The ECC developed from this earlier institutional history but gradually articulated a different conservation ideal. Breeding, elephant socialisation, reduced human contact and the possibility of reintroduction into the wild became increasingly important. The moral object of conservation consequently shifted. The central concern was no longer only how elephants and mahouts might continue to live and work together after the decline of logging, but how elephants might recover a more autonomous social existence at a greater distance from humans.
The three paths outlined in the introduction can now be seen as divergent uses of this shared institutional legacy. Maurer made human–elephant interdependence an object of social-ecological investigation. Suter treated the continuing relationship as a field for welfare reform and professional improvement. Duffillot and the ECC increasingly organised human care and mahout knowledge towards the production of more autonomous elephant social groups.[35]
These responses overlapped and were not three opposing schools. Their most revealing difference concerned the future towards which care was directed. Should conservation sustain a continuing human–elephant relationship, reform and standardise it, or employ it as a transitional means towards greater elephant autonomy?
This three-part distinction operates at the level of institutions, research programmes and practical responses within the Lao elephant sector. It is not identical to the broader divergence between two histories of animal ethics. That divergence concerns a wider historical paradox: relational approaches in the humanities and social sciences were challenging the separation of nature and culture, while international tourism markets were increasingly converting that separation into a simplified and saleable ethical choice. The three Lao paths intersected with this wider divergence, but they did not map neatly onto it.
The transformation also took place within a wider reorganisation of international elephant tourism. Campaigns that documented poor conditions at many venues translated complex questions of welfare into activity-based distinctions that could be readily understood by tourists and enforced by travel companies. Subsequent welfare research complicated these distinctions, showing that riding, contact or observation alone could not reliably predict an individual elephant’s welfare. Yet the simplified vocabulary—riding or not riding, contact or non-contact, exploitation or rescue, captivity or freedom—proved particularly compatible with the needs of online platforms and a reputational market.
A striking historical paradox therefore emerges. At precisely the moment when critical humanities and multispecies scholarship were questioning the separation of nature and culture, influential parts of the increasingly platform-governed tourism industry were institutionalising that separation as a form of marketable animal ethics. Scholars influenced by Donna Haraway and related approaches were showing that humans and other animals do not inhabit separate moral and social worlds. They emphasised historically formed relations, mutual dependency, embodied communication, situated knowledge and the difficult responsibilities generated through living together.[36] In international tourism discourse, however, the morally legitimate elephant was increasingly represented as one liberated from work, training, direct contact and ultimately from sustained relations with humans.
The result was not the disappearance of elephant tourism. Tourism was reorganised around a new moral product. Visitors were invited to consume observation, rescue, sanctuary and proximity to an imagined return to nature. The tourist did not cease to participate in the elephant economy but was repositioned within it—from a consumer of elephant labour to a supporter, witness, volunteer or symbolic rescuer. Meanwhile, the mahout’s historically accumulated knowledge could be recast not as part of the infrastructure of care but as evidence of an undesirable human domination from which the elephant should eventually be released.
Seen from this perspective, the history of Elephant Adventures and the ECC intersects with two divergent translations of animal ethics. One is an increasingly relational mode of thought: an intellectual movement away from rigid distinctions between humanity and nature and towards multispecies coexistence, situated responsibility and “staying with the trouble.” The other is a marketable ethical simplification: the conversion of complex questions of welfare and coexistence into standardised consumer choices communicated through images, activity labels, tour classifications and booking-platform rules.
This does not mean that the earlier “way of the mahout” should be romanticised or protected from criticism. Human–elephant relations have always contained affection and violence, cooperation and coercion, knowledge and inequality. Nor does it mean that breeding, elephant socialisation or carefully planned reintroduction have no conservation value. The question is not whether tradition or rewilding is inherently good. It is what forms of care, knowledge, livelihood and responsibility each model makes possible—and what each model renders invisible.
The history examined in this chapter therefore cautions against treating separation from humans as the self-evident endpoint of elephant ethics. In Laos, elephants, mahouts, families, forests, state institutions, veterinary networks, tourism businesses and international organisations have become entangled through long and often difficult histories. There is no return to an untouched world preceding these relationships. The challenge is not merely to reduce contact or remove elephants from work, but to regenerate forms of coexistence in which elephant welfare, mahout knowledge, local livelihoods and forest landscapes can be sustained together.
The movement from the “way of the mahout” towards rewilding should consequently remain an open question rather than a completed moral journey. What is gained when elephants are encouraged to form more autonomous social lives? What is lost when interspecies knowledge and daily human responsibility are displaced? And who possesses the authority to determine which relationships count as care and which are defined as exploitation? These questions cannot be answered by a universal list of permitted and prohibited tourist activities. They require attention to particular elephants, particular mahouts, particular landscapes and the histories through which they have learned—however imperfectly—to live together.
Notes
[1] Green Discovery Laos, “Way of the Mahout: Elephant Caravans in Northern Laos,” archived May 27, 2008. The itinerary describes travel from Tha Souang to Hongsa, the departure from Sibounheuang, passage through Ban Then and Ban Nam Tap, retrieval of elephants from the forest, the logging demonstration, the Nam En route and the final stay on the Mekong.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080527152009/http%3A//www.greendiscoverylaos.com/elephant/ele-01.html
[2] Green Discovery Laos, “Way of the Mahout—Maps,” archived July 5, 2008. The map page remained represented in the Wayback Machine through February 2014. Copies of the maps were also supplied by the author. Publication or reproduction of the images may require a separate rights review.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080527152009/http%3A/www.greendiscoverylaos.com/elephant/ele-05.html
[3] Sureeratna Lakanavichian, “Impacts and Effectiveness of Logging Bans in Natural Forests: Thailand,” in Forestry Policies and Institutions Working Paper: Impacts and Effectiveness of Logging Bans in Natural Forests in Asia-Pacific (FAO, 2001); Pakkanut Bansiddhi, Janine L. Brown and Chatchote Thitaram, “Welfare Assessment and Activities of Captive Elephants in Thailand,” Animals 10, no. 6 (2020): 919, DOI 10.3390/ani10060919.
https://www.fao.org/4/x6967e/x6967e09.htm
[4] Elephant Adventures, “Who We Are,” archived June 25, 2011. This is the organisation’s retrospective account rather than an independent institutional history. It states that Gilles Maurer and Sébastien Duffillot founded ElefantAsia, developed the tourism itinerary in 2007 and proposed it to Green Discovery.
[5] Hongsa Power Company Limited, “Overview.” The company states that it was formed in 2009 to develop and operate the 1,878-megawatt Hongsa lignite mine-mouth power plant. Its project descriptions identify the mine, associated roads and resettlement infrastructure.
https://hongsapower.com/index.php?id=1&layout=page&model=cms&view=item
[6] The movement of Hongsa elephants into Lao tourism facilities and foreign destinations is based partly on the author’s regional knowledge and testimony from local elephant-sector participants. Publicly available records do not yet provide a complete list of individual elephants, dates and destinations. This point should eventually be supported by interviews, registration records and export documentation.
[7] Gilles Maurer, Olivier Gimenez, Baptiste Mulot and Nicolas Lescureux, “Under Pressure: How the Human–Wild–Captive Elephant Social-Ecological System in Laos Is Teetering Due to Global Forces and Sociocultural Changes,” People and Nature 3, no. 5 (2021): 1047–1063, DOI 10.1002/pan3.10247. The paper discusses communal forest access, seasonal freedom, land privatisation, agricultural intensification and increasingly divided access to resources.
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pan3.10247
[8] Gilles Maurer et al., “Wild–Captive Interactions and Economics Drive Dynamics of Asian Elephants in Laos,” Scientific Reports 7 (2017): 14800, DOI 10.1038/s41598-017-13907-x. The paper connects the demographic future of domesticated elephants to interactions with wild bulls and to owners’ economic decisions. Some numerical estimates concerning wild paternity were based on information supplied to the researchers and should therefore be treated as reported estimates rather than a comprehensive genetic census.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5665948
[9] Elephant Adventures, French-language homepage and “Protection des éléphants,” archived December 2007. The latter states that five per cent of turnover supported the Sayaboury Mobile Elephant Clinic and describes veterinary training and the production of a mahout manual.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071207132223/http%3A//www.elephantadventures.com/index-10.html
[10] Florence Labatut and Ingrid Suter, “The Veterinary Care of Domesticated Elephants in Laos by a Mobile Veterinary Unit,” Gajah 32 (2010): 21–26. The authors report treatment of 347 elephants between December 2007 and July 2009: 78 per cent working in logging, 10 per cent in tourism and 12 per cent in village work or unemployed.
https://www.asesg.org/PDFfiles/Gajah/32-21-Labatut.pdf
[11] Nicolas Lainé, “Asian Elephant Conservation: Too Elephantocentric? Towards a Biocultural Approach of Conservation,” Asian Bioethics Review 10, no. 4 (2018): 279–293, DOI 10.1007/s41649-018-0070-z. Lainé contrasts the more frequent use of allopathic veterinary medicine in tourism camps with the reluctance of some village mahouts to seek veterinary treatment despite ElefantAsia’s free service.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7747420
[12] Labatut and Suter, “Veterinary Care,” especially the description of the Mobile Veterinary Unit’s training, translated materials, preventive-medicine education and interpretation of mahout distrust. The report also notes that some injected medication produced abscesses, which could itself cause distrust of modern treatment.
https://www.asesg.org/PDFfiles/Gajah/32-21-Labatut.pdf
[13] Green Discovery Laos, “Logistics/Conditions,” archived July 5, 2008. The staffing model included one elephant and mahout per guest, a chief mahout, guides, cooks and, for very small groups, an additional transport elephant.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080527152009/http%3A/www.greendiscoverylaos.com/elephant/ele-03.html
[14] Green Discovery Laos, “Advantages,” archived July 24, 2008. The page describes maximum group size, forest knowledge, mahout selection, village payments, veterinary contributions and the proposed conversion from logging into “quality and humane ecotourism activities.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20080527152009/http%3A/www.greendiscoverylaos.com/elephant/ele-02.html
[15] Green Discovery Laos listed prices of US$950, US$700 and US$600 for groups of two, three to four and five to six respectively in 2008. The Elephant Adventures website listed a similar five-day programme in December 2007 at US$990, US$700 and US$600.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080527152009/http%3A//www.greendiscoverylaos.com/elephant/ele-01.html
[16] Elephant Adventures, “Where Does Your Money Go?,” archived June 2011. The page states that mahouts were paid more than in logging, received payment for the return journey without guests, and that village funds and the Mobile Elephant Clinic received contributions.
[17] Labatut and Suter, “Veterinary Care,” 21. The paper states that elephant trekking was still in its infancy in Laos and that an ElefantAsia-sponsored sanctuary was “about to see the light.” This supports concurrent planning of Elephant Adventures and a fixed facility but does not demonstrate that the tourism project was intended to be temporary.
https://www.asesg.org/PDFfiles/Gajah/32-21-Labatut.pdf
[18] Elephant Adventures was advertising caravan dates for December 2011 and January 2012 on its archived site. Green Discovery’s itinerary, logistics, traveller-information and map pages show Wayback capture ranges extending to February 13, 2014. Archived availability is not evidence of actual tour operation.
[19] Elephant Conservation Center, “History.” The ECC’s current official account says that it was created and registered in 2010 and links its establishment to declining logging work and the professional conversion of mahouts towards ecotourism. It also states that the centre began purchasing elephants from owners wishing to sell. The page represents ECC’s institutional narrative and should ultimately be compared with contemporaneous incorporation records and ElefantAsia reports.
[20] Elephant Conservation Center, “Herding & Rewilding.” The ECC identifies release into Nam Pouy as its ultimate objective and describes behavioural research, social-group formation and mahout participation in the process.
[21] Elephant Conservation Center, “Rewilding.” The organisation states that elephants released in 2019 were microchipped and followed through direct observation and GPS by former mahouts and patrol teams. It also describes mahout knowledge as essential to the release process.
[22] Rosaleen Duffy and Lorraine Moore, “Global Regulations and Local Practices: The Politics and Governance of Animal Welfare in Elephant Tourism,” Journal of Sustainable Tourism 19, nos. 4–5 (2011): 589–604, DOI 10.1080/09669582.2011.566927.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09669582.2011.566927
[23] Jan Schmidt-Burbach, Taken for a Ride: The Conditions for Elephants Used in Tourism in Asia (London: World Animal Protection, 2017). The study surveyed 2,923 elephants at 220 venues in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and India. Its methodology section describes the instrument as a rapid welfare-conditions assessment and explicitly states that it did not directly measure the welfare of individual elephants. WAP’s current elephant-research page provides its summary and report archive.
https://www.worldanimalprotection.org/animals/elephants
[24] Pakkanut Bansiddhi, Janine L. Brown and Chatchote Thitaram, “Welfare Assessment and Activities of Captive Elephants in Thailand,” Animals 10, no. 6 (2020): 919, DOI 10.3390/ani10060919. The review distinguishes evidence-based welfare assessment from claims of universal brutality and concludes that tourist activities cannot be judged independently of the elephants’ total management.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/10/6/919
[25] Treepradab Norkaew et al., “Associations among Tourist Camp Management, High and Low Tourist Seasons, and Welfare Factors in Female Asian Elephants in Thailand,” PLOS ONE 14, no. 6 (2019): e0218579, DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0218579. The study relates exercise, work time, walking distance, tourist feeding, body condition, metabolic indicators and faecal glucocorticoid metabolites across five camps.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6576785
[26] Pakkanut Bansiddhi et al., “Management Factors Affecting Physical Health and Welfare of Tourist Camp Elephants in Thailand,” PeerJ 7 (2019): e6756, DOI 10.7717/peerj.6756. Among 122 elephants at fifteen camps, the study found saddle-related wounds to be rare, while identifying excessive body condition, hard substrates and wounds associated with improper equipment use as management concerns.
https://peerj.com/articles/6756
[27] Worapong Kosaruk et al., “Effect of Tourist Activities on Fecal and Salivary Glucocorticoids and Immunoglobulin A in Female Captive Asian Elephants in Thailand,” Animals 10, no. 10 (2020): 1928, DOI 10.3390/ani10101928. The year-long comparison of saddle-riding, bareback-riding and no-riding programmes found no clear indication that riding per se negatively affected the two physiological biomarkers examined.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/10/10/1928
[28] Raman Ghimire, Janine L. Brown, Chatchote Thitaram and Pakkanut Bansiddhi, “Comparison of Animal Welfare Assessment Tools and Methodologies: Need for an Effective Approach for Captive Elephants in Asia,” Frontiers in Veterinary Science 11 (2024): 1370909, DOI 10.3389/fvets.2024.1370909. The review identifies institutional-level focus, possible subjective assumptions and limited validation among the constraints of WAP’s assessment method, and recommends integrating animal- and resource-based indicators.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/veterinary-science/articles/10.3389/fvets.2024.1370909/full
[29] World Animal Protection, “TripAdvisor Ends Sale of Cruel Wildlife Tourist Attractions Following World Animal Protection Campaign,” October 12, 2016. WAP reported that more than 558,000 supporters had called on TripAdvisor to stop selling tickets to specified wildlife attractions. Taken for a Ride subsequently stated that more than 160 travel companies had committed to ending sales and promotion of elephant rides and shows by early 2017.
[30] Ingrid Suter, “Rewilding or Reviewing: Conservation and the Elephant-Based Tourism Industry,” Animal Sentience 5, no. 28 (2020), DOI 10.51291/2377-7478.1556.
https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/animsent/vol5/iss28/3
[31] Asian Captive Elephant Standards, “What Is an Elephant Camp Audit?” ACES describes more than 190 criteria covering elephant care, working conditions, veterinary records, human resources and institutional documentation, followed by corrective action and annual reassessment. These are ACES’s own descriptions of its system, not an independent validation of audit outcomes.
https://www.elephantstandards.com/post/what-is-an-elephant-camp-audit
[32] Manifa Elephant Camp management records and internal correspondence concerning the ACES/PATA-supported assessment opportunity, 2022–2023; author’s direct account. The records are not currently public.
[33] Nicolas Lainé, “Asian Elephant Conservation: Too Elephantocentric? Towards a Biocultural Approach of Conservation,” Asian Bioethics Review 10, no. 4 (2018): 279–293, DOI 10.1007/s41649-018-0070-z. Drawing on ethnographic research among Tai Lue elephant-keeping communities in Laos and on an ethno-ethological approach to human–animal relations, Lainé challenges the separation of elephants from the human, ecological and cosmological relations through which their lives have historically been constituted. The article discusses the ECC as a prominent example of the institutional tendency under criticism. For Lainé’s broader research profile, see PALOC, “Nicolas Lainé.”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7747420
https://www.paloc.fr/fr/annuaire/nicolas-laine-6810
[34] Sébastien Duffillot, “Re: Asian Elephant Conservation—Too Elephantocentric? Towards a Biocultural Approach of Conservation,” Asian Bioethics Review 11 (2019); Nicolas Lainé and Serge Morand, “Response to Duffillot: A Long Road Ahead,” Asian Bioethics Review 11, no. 2 (2019): 141–145.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7747251
[35] The three-part formulation is an analytical interpretation rather than a claim that Maurer, Suter and Duffillot understand themselves as members of opposing schools. It is based respectively on Maurer et al.’s social-ecological research, Suter’s welfare-centred defence of reforming elephant tourism and the ECC’s stated reherding and rewilding objectives.
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pan3.10247
[36] Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003); Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). These works develop a relational account of interspecies becoming, situated responsibility and the obligation to remain with, rather than purify away, difficult multispecies entanglements.
https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373780
