Manifa Elephant Camp offers activities like walking, feeding, bathing, and gentle riding—not as entertainment, but as forms of responsible engagement. Every activity is carefully managed with elephant welfare as the priority. Ethical interaction also means listening to mahouts, respecting the elephants’ cues, and ensuring tourism supports, rather than disrupts, elephant lives.
In recent years, many animal rights organizations have campaigned vigorously to ban elephant riding and close off opportunities for human-elephant interaction in tourism. Their motivation is often sincere: to prevent cruelty and restore freedom to captive elephants. However, emerging research from within Southeast Asia reveals a different, more complex reality—one in which good intentions have led to troubling consequences.
When riding and interaction programs were restricted at some camps, elephants were left with little to do. Deprived of physical activity and mental stimulation, they spent their days largely idle, consuming pre-cut food provided by caretakers. As Bansiddhi et al. (2019) found in a broad study of Thai tourist camps, this lack of engagement led to increased levels of physiological stress, as measured by elevated fecal glucocorticoid metabolites (FGMs), and in many cases, obesity. Surprisingly, elephants in “observation-only” camps—where no direct interaction or riding was allowed—showed higher stress levels than those in programs that included controlled riding or work.
A study by Kongsawasdi et al. (2021) examined the impact of weight on joint kinematics in elephants used for riding. The findings indicate that carrying up to 15% of an elephant’s body weight does not cause significant changes in gait patterns or physical distress. For instance, two average-sized adults riding an elephant equate to approximately 2.6% of the animal’s body weight, well within safe limits. They found that well-managed interaction programs—especially those involving walking and moderate riding—can promote physical exercise, reduce stress, and support the psychological health of elephants. In other words, a complete ban on activity does not automatically result in greater welfare. On the contrary, removing elephants from all forms of work may sever them from the rhythms of life they have long known.
These findings invite us to move beyond simplistic binaries of cruelty versus freedom, or work versus rescue. The idea that captivity is always harmful, and that non-intervention is always humane, fails to take into account the actual needs of elephants living in human care. In many regions like Laos or Thailand, elephants have been raised in close contact with people for centuries, and their well-being is deeply connected to the quality of those relationships.
This doesn’t mean all interaction is good. Poorly regulated tourism can exploit both elephants and humans. But ethical engagement, grounded in traditional knowledge, proper training, and scientific monitoring, offers an alternative—one where elephants are not used for spectacle, but meaningfully integrated into responsible tourism.
If we are truly committed to the welfare of elephants, we must ask harder questions and be open to answers that challenge ideology. Controlled riding and interaction, when done responsibly, may not only be acceptable—they may be essential for the physical and emotional health of elephants in tourism contexts.
The Complexities of Elephant Riding: A Balanced Perspective
