Ethics from Different Perspectives: Animal Welfare, Animal Rights, and Elephant Mahout Practices”
The ethics of using chains on elephants—especially in the context of tourist elephant camps—sits at the intersection of complex frameworks of human–animal relationships: animal welfare, animal rights, and the ethics of care practiced by mahouts. Each framework not only proposes different answers to the question of whether chains are acceptable, but also reframes the very terms of the debate: What constitutes ethical treatment? Who has the authority to decide? And how should power over animals be exercised?
In addressing the ethics of chaining and the increasingly popular call to ban chains entirely, we uncover deep tensions between universalism and contextualism, between moral ideals and lived realities, and between symbolic gestures and material outcomes.
1. Animal Welfare: Pragmatic Ethics and Conditional Use of Chains
From the animal welfare perspective, the ethical use of chains is contingent on their impact on the elephant’s physical and psychological well-being. This framework emphasizes measurable outcomes: Are chains causing wounds? Are they restricting movement excessively? Are they used in ways that cause chronic stress?
Recent studies from Southeast Asia (e.g., Bansiddhi et al., 2019; Kongsawasdi et al., 2021) suggest that chains, when used briefly and responsibly—for example, at night to prevent injury or while managing potentially dangerous social interactions—do not necessarily compromise welfare. Indeed, banning chains without adequate alternative management infrastructure may lead to greater harm, including social isolation, stress, or dangerous encounters between elephants and people. Elephants confined to small enclosures to meet anti-chaining guidelines may suffer from stress, boredom, and musculoskeletal issues due to inactivity.
Welfare science sees chains as tools, not moral signifiers. Their ethical acceptability depends not on their presence or absence, but on how they are used, monitored, and integrated into a larger system of care.
2. Animal Rights: Chains as Symbols of Oppression
In contrast, animal rights theorists view the use of chains not as a welfare issue, but as a moral wrong—a violation of the elephant’s autonomy and dignity. Here, the chain becomes more than a tool: it is a symbol of domination, a visible marker of an unethical human–elephant relationship grounded in coercion and control.
From this rights-based view, tourist elephant camps themselves are inherently problematic, and chaining is part of a broader system of exploitation. The goal is not better welfare within camps, but the dismantling of captivity as such. Banning chains becomes a moral imperative, a first step toward recognizing elephants as beings with rights—including the right to live free from human-imposed restraint.
Power, in this framework, is inherently illegitimate when used to control sentient, autonomous beings for human purposes—even if harm is minimized.
3. Mahouts’ Ethics of Care: Situated Knowledge and Relational Judgment
The ethics of care, especially as practiced by mahouts in Laos, Thailand, and other parts of Southeast Asia, does not start from principles or rights, but from relationships. Care is not defined in abstract terms but emerges through daily practices of attunement, trust, and cohabitation between individual humans and elephants.
Within this relational framework, chains can have multiple meanings. A chain used at night, under shade, with free movement and water access, may be seen not as oppression, but as a form of stewardship—ensuring safety and preventing harm. Mahouts often use chains as part of a broader repertoire of care that includes verbal communication, non-verbal bonding, and deep knowledge of the elephant’s behavior and personality.
Importantly, care ethics foregrounds context. A blanket ban on chains, imposed by foreign NGOs or tourist expectations, may be experienced by mahouts as disempowering—a denial of their knowledge, a dismissal of their traditions, and a disruption of relationships built over generations. Rather than reducing power over animals, such bans may centralize power in global institutions and remote authorities who are far removed from the elephants themselves.
4. Banning Chains: Power, Visibility, and the Politics of Ethics
The push to ban chains in tourist camps must be examined not just as a welfare policy, but as a political act that reflects particular norms, values, and aesthetics. Chains are highly visible, and their presence evokes strong emotional responses—especially from tourists who equate “no chains” with “freedom.” Yet such judgments often rely on surface appearances rather than an understanding of the full ethical and ecological context.
In many cases, bans are driven by Western-centric narratives that privilege a visual language of animal freedom (open spaces, no restraints) over deeper questions of ecological embeddedness, interspecies dependency, and local authority. They reproduce power asymmetries in global conservation, where distant observers define what counts as ethical, while local practitioners—mahouts, communities, and even the elephants themselves—are rendered passive.
From a Foucauldian lens, banning chains may be seen as an example of disciplinary power masquerading as liberation: the regulation of bodies and relationships according to a standardized vision of ethical care.
5. Conclusion: Beyond Bans—Toward Plural Ethics of Coexistence
The use of chains on elephants in tourist camps cannot be ethically resolved through a single framework. Each approach—animal welfare, animal rights, and ethics of care—asks different questions and foregrounds different values:
- Welfare asks: Does it cause harm, and how can we reduce it?
- Rights asks: Does it violate autonomy, and must it be abolished?
- Care asks: How is it used, and what does it mean in this relationship?
A ban on chains may align with rights-based ideals and appeal to public sentiment, but risks undermining the pragmatic adaptability of welfare science and the relational wisdom of mahout traditions. It risks turning ethical complexity into moral spectacle, prioritizing tourist comfort over interspecies understanding.
Ultimately, ethical elephant care in tourism contexts must move beyond binary thinking—chained/unchained, ethical/unethical—toward context-sensitive, dialogical, and relational ethics. Chains, like all tools, are not inherently good or bad; their meaning and impact depend on how they are used, by whom, for what purpose, and in what ecological and cultural setting.
To address the ethics of chaining is not simply to ask “Should we ban chains?” but to ask: How can humans and elephants live well together, in relationships marked by responsibility, care, and mutual flourishing?
