1. Animal Welfare Perspective: Risks of Rewilding Without Long-Term Care
From an animal welfare perspective, rewilding elephants is not inherently unethical, but it raises serious concerns if long-term care, habitat quality, and survival monitoring are not guaranteed. Welfare experts caution against projects that prioritize symbolic “freedom” over practical well-being, particularly when reintroduction is poorly funded or inadequately supervised.
Ingrid Suter (2020) highlights that rewilding projects can be driven more by political pressure and public sentiment—especially from Western animal rights discourses—than by science-based welfare planning. In such cases, reintroduction may appear ethical but fails to ensure the health, safety, or future of the elephants involved. Some projects have been launched without adequate ecological capacity, funding, or post-release monitoring, leading to higher mortality rates, social isolation, or conflict with wild herds.
Captive elephants—especially those born in camps or villages—are often accustomed to humans, habituated to regular feeding, and lack the behavioral skills needed to forage, protect themselves, or navigate territorial dynamics. Releasing them without preparing for these realities puts their lives at risk. In some cases, elephants have approached human settlements, triggering new cycles of conflict, capture, or even lethal retaliation.
Suter argues that “rewilding is not a welfare panacea.” Rather, it must be judged against whether it actually improves the life of the individual elephant, not just satisfies public expectations. Welfare, in this context, is about quality of life—not abstract ideals of naturalness. Instead of assuming rewilding is the goal, Suter calls for a review of in-situ care practices, including ethical tourism and semi-wild sanctuaries that provide enrichment, space, and protection without severing elephants from the human networks that have sustained them.
2. Animal Rights Perspective: The Moral Ideal of Freedom from Human Use
From an animal rights position, elephants should not be used for labor, entertainment, or tourism—regardless of how well they are treated. Rewilding is seen as a way to end captivity altogether and restore elephants’ moral right to autonomy.
This position is guided by the principle that no sentient being should be owned, trained, or used by another species. Elephants, in this view, should live in self-determined conditions, free from human intervention. Captive elephants are thus often portrayed as victims of oppression, and any form of work—no matter how gentle—is seen as an extension of that harm.
However, critics point out that such blanket views can overlook the practical dangers of reintroduction, especially when elephants are released into fragmented forests where resources are scarce and poaching and human-elephant conflict are escalating. Elephants raised in human care may fail to reintegrate with wild populations, suffer injury or malnutrition, or become dangerously habituated to settlements.
While the ideal of freedom is ethically compelling, the path to that freedom must be carefully evaluated. Uncritically pushing for rewilding without considering the actual conditions on the ground can lead to new forms of suffering. Liberation must not come at the expense of life itself.
3. Mahout’s perspective: Shared Lives, Local Knowledge, and Multispecies Futures
In Lao and other Southeast Asian cultures, elephants are not simply property or wildlife. They are co-inhabitants of shared landscapes, woven into village life through practices of care, ritual, and kinship. From this perspective, the ethics of elephant care is not focused solely on freedom from humans, but on responsibility to the specific elephant, in its specific context.
Mahouts and their families often have deep, multigenerational relationships with the elephants in their care. These elephants are neither fully wild nor fully domesticated, but live in a hybrid space—working part of the day, resting in the forest at night, and forming strong bonds with their human companions. To remove them from this world is not a simple act of liberation—it is a rupture in a web of relations built over years, even decades.
From this perspective, the call to “return elephants to the wild” can be seen as a cultural imposition, driven more by Western ideals of autonomy and nature than by local understandings of coexistence. Mahouts, in contrast, tend to focus on well-being, attachment, and continuity—ensuring that the elephant is cared for, fed, and treated with respect in an environment they know.
In such contexts, rewilding is not always seen as desirable or kind. Instead, ethical care is understood as ensuring that elephants have meaningful, safe, and socially embedded lives—with opportunities to walk, forage, play, and rest, while also receiving regular food, medical attention, and affection. Many mahouts emphasize that their goal is not control, but companionship and mutual adjustment.
Conclusion: Rethinking Rewilding as a Relational Question
The ethics of reintroducing elephants into the wild cannot be answered in absolutes. It must be rooted in situated knowledge, long-term care planning, and an honest account of the risks and responsibilities involved.
- From an animal welfare perspective, rewilding must not be symbolic. It must tangibly improve the life of the elephant.
- From an animal rights view, the call for freedom must not ignore the possibility that such freedom could lead to harm.
- From a Mahouts view, the focus shifts to what makes a good life for a particular elephant, in relation with its human and ecological community.
As Ingrid Suter reminds us, the real task may not be rewilding, but rethinking our assumptions about what counts as ethical care, and learning from the people and animals who have long coexisted in shared, complex environments.
Rewilding may be one path among many—but it should not be a litmus test for morality. Instead, we should ask:
What kind of future allows this elephant to flourish?
And who is prepared to care for that future—every step of the way?
