A: Through structured methods that range from positive reinforcement to inherited forms of embodied knowledge—but the ethics of training depend on both method and meaning.
Elephants who live and work in human environments—whether in tourism, logging, conservation, or ceremonial life—must undergo some form of training. This includes elephants who carry tourists, bathe with guests, walk in the forest, or even receive routine medical care. Without some level of habituation and learned response, it would be unsafe for both elephants and people to interact in close proximity.
But training is not a neutral term. It raises difficult ethical questions about power, control, pain, consent, and cultural legitimacy. Whether training is acceptable—and how it should be done—depends on one’s ethical framework.
Let us consider how animal welfare, animal rights, and Lao cultural ethics of care differently assess the practice of elephant training.
1. Animal Welfare: Training as a Welfare Tool
From an animal welfare perspective, the question is not whether elephants should be trained, but how the training is conducted and what purpose it serves. Training is judged by its impact on the elephant’s physical and psychological wellbeing.
Today, most elephants in tourism are born in captivity and raised in close proximity to humans. This changes the nature of training significantly from older eras, when elephants were taken from the forest as juveniles and “broken in” through coercive methods.
Modern welfare-oriented camps increasingly use positive reinforcement techniques, such as target training or clicker-based conditioning, adapted from horse and dog training. These involve:
- Teaching elephants to respond to verbal or visual cues
- Using rewards (e.g., treats, praise) to reinforce desired behaviors
- Training elephants to voluntarily cooperate with veterinary care, such as lifting feet, opening mouths, or allowing injections—potentially reducing the need for sedation or restraint
Welfare experts stress that ethical training is gradual, non-punitive, and predictable, allowing elephants to develop trust and confidence. It is especially important for managing health and safety in contexts where elephants cannot roam freely or must live near people.
However, the legacy of older training practices—sometimes involving fear-based techniques or physical punishment—continues to shape public opinion, especially when graphic videos circulate online without context. This history cannot be denied, but it should not be used to dismiss all forms of training outright, especially when alternatives are demonstrably better for the animal’s welfare.
2. Animal Rights: Training as Coercion and Violation
For animal rights advocates, the issue is not how training is done, but what it represents. From this viewpoint, any form of elephant training—whether “gentle” or not—rests on an underlying assumption: that animals exist to serve human goals.
Even positive reinforcement involves conditioning behavior in ways that limit the animal’s autonomy and subject it to a human-defined purpose. Training is thus seen as a moral violation, not merely a technical process. Whether the elephant is trained to kneel for medical care or to perform in a show, the rights perspective interprets the relationship as one of domination and control.
This view is especially sensitive to the origins of training in violence. The so-called phajaan or “crush” method—used historically to break wild elephants’ spirits—is often cited as a paradigmatic example of how deeply coercion is embedded in the human-elephant relationship. Even if such methods are no longer used in most places, the memory of that violence continues to shape critiques of elephant tourism more broadly.
Animal rights discourse also rejects the notion that training is necessary because the elephant is captive. For rights advocates, the root problem is captivity itself. If elephants were not kept in camps, there would be no need for training. The goal, then, is not to improve training techniques but to end the system that makes training necessary in the first place.
3. Mahouts: Training as a Living, Relational Practice
From the perspective of many Lao and other Southeast Asian mahouts, elephant training is not simply about behavior control, nor is it an abstract moral problem to be debated from afar. It is, rather, a relational and spiritual process embedded in centuries of interspecies cohabitation. Here, training is less a technique than a form of becoming-with, a concept articulated by Donna Haraway to describe ethical, situated encounters between species grounded in care, risk, and mutual transformation.
In her book When Species Meet, Haraway reframes training—not as domination, but as an effort to communicate across species lines, where both parties change through the process of learning to live together. Her insights resonate deeply with ethnographic studies of elephant-human relations in Laos and neighboring regions, such as those by Alexander M. Greene and other anthropologists who document elephant care among Karen and Lao communities.
In these contexts, elephants are not tools or trophies. They are companions, kin, and moral persons. Calves remain with their mothers for years, absorbing the rhythms of human-elephant village life through emotional and physical closeness. When they are old enough—typically between three and five years of age—training begins, but this process is not merely physical. It is ritualized, embodied, and sacred.
A spiritually recognized elder—never a novice—initiates the young elephant’s training with ceremonies to invite protective spirits and affirm the human-elephant relationship. The elephant is placed in a corral, not to be broken, but to gently transition into a new phase of life in which it learns to trust its human caretakers. Mahouts spend days or weeks at the elephant’s side—singing, feeding, calming, and slowly introducing verbal commands and tactile cues. As in Haraway’s vision, this is not one-sided obedience. The human, too, must learn the elephant’s language: moods, fears, signals, and silences.
Over time, this shared language forms the foundation of a relationship built on trust, familiarity, and emotional attunement. This is not to romanticize the process—there are struggles, setbacks, and asymmetries—but it is fundamentally different from the coercive “breaking” model often projected by Western critics. In many cases, elephants are free to leave during training, and they often return willingly. Their agency is real, if not total.
Importantly, this ethic of care does not erase power—it reframes it. Where animal rights perspectives often interpret training as a zero-sum exercise of dominance, the ethics of care emphasizes mutual responsibility. The elephant’s ability to learn and respond is honored, but so too is the mahout’s lifelong commitment to stewardship, often marked by spiritual obligations and familial pride.
To collapse all training into abuse, as some animal rights narratives do, is to flatten a deeply plural moral landscape. It overlooks the cultural specificity of elephant-keeping in Laos, where elephants are woven into the social fabric—not as wild others to be admired from a distance, but as co-workers, ceremonial beings, and extended family. It also risks perpetuating a form of ethical imperialism, where moral judgments developed in Western animal advocacy circles are imposed without regard for local cosmologies or historical experience.
Instead, what this ethic asks us to consider is:
- What kind of relationship is being cultivated through training?
- Is the training embedded in a broader system of care, attention, and moral responsibility?
- Does the elephant show signs of trust, willingness, and safety?
Such questions shift the ethical conversation away from abstract binaries and toward a more grounded, plural, and relational ethics—one that can hold space for difference without dismissal.
Conclusion: Toward a Situated, Ethical Pluralism
The training of elephants, especially in Lao and other Southeast Asian traditions, cannot be understood solely in terms of cruelty or kindness, obedience or freedom. It is better understood as a co-shaped practice of living together, one that requires time, trust, and the navigation of asymmetrical but meaningful bonds.
In Haraway’s words, to “stay with the trouble” is to refuse simple answers, to acknowledge the friction and uncertainty of interspecies life, and to learn from traditions that don’t mirror our own. In this light, elephant training is not inherently abusive—it is a living tradition, with many possible forms, shaped by cosmology, care, and historical intimacy.
Rather than asking whether elephants should be trained, we might better ask:
How can training become a site of ethical encounter, rather than ethical compromise?
How do elephants and humans shape each other in this process—and to what ends?
These are not easy questions. But they are the questions that move us beyond condemnation and toward genuine ethical engagement.
Training is not the end of freedom. It is the beginning of a shared life—sometimes messy, often uneven, but capable of bearing witness to centuries of multispecies co-existence.
