The ethical controversies surrounding elephant tourism—especially in Southeast Asia—often crystallize around two contrasting moral orientations. On one side are international animal rights NGOs, grounded in universalist principles that call for the complete liberation of animals from human use. On the other are local elephant handlers—mahouts—whose relationships with elephants are shaped by generations of mutual care, labor, and knowledge. This ethical tension is not only cultural but philosophical.
Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto offers a theoretical lens through which to better understand the mahouts’ position. Haraway critiques the dominant tradition of Western moral philosophy for assuming that ethics begins with principles—universal rules that can be applied to any situation. Instead, she proposes that ethics begins in response: not abstract rules, but the situated, embodied obligation to respond to another being, to their presence and needs, in specific, relational contexts. This ethics of “response-ability” (Haraway’s term) is not about control or liberation, but about co-constitution—becoming with others, human and nonhuman alike.
Response Ethics and the Mahout-Elephant Relationship
This ethical orientation is vividly illustrated in Nicolas Lainé’s ethnography of elephant-keeping communities in Laos. Mahouts do not imagine elephants as passive victims to be saved, nor as resources to be optimized, but as beings with whom one lives, works, and learns over time. The relationship is built on daily encounters—bodily, emotional, communicative—which demand attentiveness, adjustment, and care.
Lainé describes the rituals of elephant training, where young elephants are gradually separated from their mothers and guided into human-elephant communities. Far from an act of domination, this process is framed by ritual obligations, invocations of spirit protection, and a deep awareness of the emotional stress on both elephant and human. Mahouts remain close during this period—sometimes for days without rest—until trust begins to take root. This practice, Lainé argues, is a rite of relationship, not merely a technical procedure.
Moreover, in the domain of ethnoveterinary knowledge, mahouts observe elephants’ self-medicating behaviors and integrate these insights into their own herbal treatments. Care is not imposed from the outside; it is co-developed with the animal’s own behaviors and preferences, reinforcing the responsive, situated, and evolving nature of their bond.
Universalist Ethics and the Animal Rights Position
By contrast, many international animal rights NGOs operate from a universalist moral framework. Rooted in Enlightenment liberalism, this position presumes that moral agents are autonomous individuals with rights that must be protected, regardless of context. From this perspective, any form of captivity, labor, or training involving elephants is unethical. Organizations such as PETA and World Animal Protection advocate for the end of all human use of elephants, regardless of the quality of the human-animal relationship or the socio-ecological context.
While well-intentioned, this framework assumes a moral high ground based on a specific (Western) conception of justice and agency. In doing so, it risks rendering invisible the knowledge systems, lifeways, and responsibilities embedded in Indigenous and local practices. The mahout’s ethical labor becomes illegible—not because it is unethical, but because it does not conform to the language of rights and autonomy.
Ethics as Situated Response, Not Abstract Principle
Haraway’s insistence on response rather than principle illuminates this impasse. In her words, “to respond is not merely to react but to be answerable.” Mahouts are answerable to elephants not through abstract prohibitions or moral proclamations, but through the everydayness of life shared: feeding, walking, healing, mourning. These practices constitute a kind of moral realism, grounded not in theory but in the demands of lived interspecies relationships.
To adopt Haraway’s perspective is not to reject concern for animal suffering. Rather, it is to ask: What kinds of relationships are we cultivating? What histories do they carry? What mutual obligations emerge from them? Universalist ethics too often erase these questions in favor of moral clarity. But clarity can become blindness when it flattens cultural specificity and silences other ways of knowing and caring.
Conclusion
The conflict between animal rights NGOs and mahout communities is not merely about facts—about whether elephants suffer more or less in captivity—but about what counts as an ethical relationship, and who gets to define it. Haraway’s notion of response-based ethics urges us to attend to the relational, historical, and embodied nature of moral life. Nicolas Lainé’s ethnographic work shows that the mahout-elephant bond, far from being exploitative by default, is often an expression of this kind of ethical responsiveness.
In a global landscape shaped by postcolonial legacies and moral absolutism, Haraway reminds us that ethical life is complex, contingent, and fundamentally shared. Rather than impose a singular vision of animal liberation, we might begin—more modestly and more radically—by learning to respond.
