The ethics of elephant tourism from Donna Haraway’s perspective

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.

In the village communities of Laos, elephants are not managed through distant control or standardized protocol. They are lived with—cared for, known by name, and treated as members of an extended social and spiritual community. This is not romanticism, but a mode of multispecies coexistence built on long histories of shared labor, mutual dependence, and intimate forms of knowledge. As ethnographer Nicolas Lainé documents, elephant health in this context is not a matter of biomedicine alone—it is a holistic, relational, and spiritually informed process.

In Western discourses on animal welfare, the health of elephants is often evaluated in terms of observable physiological conditions: foot lesions, body weight, workload, stress hormones. These are valid concerns, especially in poorly regulated tourist camps. But they are not the only ways health is understood. In the villages of Laos, healing emerges through the careful attention of humans who live alongside elephants, who notice changes in posture or appetite, and who have access to a vast pharmacopoeia of forest-based remedies—ethnoveterinary medicine rooted in generations of observation, experience, and co-presence.

Healing Through Relationship

According to Lainé (2020), healing an elephant begins not with diagnosis in the biomedical sense, but with noticing. A mahout may observe that the elephant has trouble walking, refuses food, or seems withdrawn. Such signs are not isolated from the animal’s social or spiritual life—they are interpreted within the broader field of relationships: with humans, with spirits, and with the landscape itself. Mahouts frequently say that “the elephant has lost its mind” (mot lathi) when it behaves erratically, a phrase that indicates both physical discomfort and emotional disorientation.

Here, healing is not merely a technical intervention—it is a process of re-establishing balance in a web of relations. Remedies may include compresses made from leaves, bark, or roots known to relieve swelling or infection. Some plants are burned and the smoke wafted over the elephant; others are infused and poured onto wounds or ingested. One example is the use of kheua hem (a vine) and phak van (a leafy plant), locally known for their antiseptic and anti-inflammatory properties. The application of such treatments depends not only on the symptoms but on the personal history of the elephant and its relationship with the caregiver.

As Lainé notes, knowledge of these remedies is not stored in written texts or laboratories, but in the memories and practices of mahouts, elders, and ritual specialists. It is transmitted orally, often within families, and tied to the spiritual landscape—the places where certain plants grow, the rituals that must accompany their use, and the spirits who must be appeased during healing. Healing thus takes place across domains: physical, emotional, spiritual, ecological.

Situated Knowledge and Relational Ethics

This approach reflects what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledge”—forms of knowing that are partial, embodied, and shaped by lived relationships. In When Species Meet, Haraway argues that understanding animals does not come from abstraction or detached observation, but from the shared touch, gaze, and rhythms of cohabitation. It is in the slow, mutual process of “becoming with” that ethical care is born.

In Laos, ethnoveterinary knowledge is an example of this kind of situated, relational epistemology. Mahouts know their elephants not through quantitative measures alone, but through a long history of co-living: feeding, bathing, walking, working, watching. They know what an elephant’s “normal” looks like not statistically, but personally. They also know when something is wrong—not just physically, but spiritually. In many cases, illness is understood as a disturbance in the animal’s relationship with its guardian spirit (phi), and healing may involve both plant-based medicine and ritual offerings.

The Problem with Welfare Universalism

Such relational healing practices are often devalued—or outright dismissed—by international organizations promoting animal welfare. These organizations, often headquartered in the Global North, emphasize standardized assessments and biomedical protocols. While these frameworks can identify important health issues, they frequently exclude or marginalize local knowledge systems that do not conform to Western scientific norms.

This exclusion has real consequences. As Lainé notes, many mahouts and elephant owners are reluctant to share their practices with outsiders, fearing judgment or accusation of abuse. The dominance of Western welfare standards creates a knowledge hierarchy in which local caregivers are treated as backward or unscientific, despite their deep practical experience and ethical investment in elephant wellbeing.

Haraway’s work helps us understand what is lost in this epistemic narrowing. If we only recognize animal health through universal metrics, we risk erasing the very relationships that sustain ethical care. What if healing means more than measurable recovery? What if it means rebuilding trust, rebalancing spiritual relations, or restoring the elephant’s place in a network of human and nonhuman actors?

Toward a Plural Ethics of Elephant Health

To move forward, we must reject the false binary between tradition and science, and instead support a plural ethics that respects diverse ways of knowing and caring. Ethnoveterinary medicine, as practiced in Laos, is not a relic of the past—it is a living, adaptive system grounded in observation, experimentation, and long-term cohabitation. It deserves not just documentation, but recognition as a valid form of multispecies care.

This also means rethinking what counts as “ethical.” Rather than imposing abstract welfare norms from afar, we need to ask:

• How is health understood by those who live with elephants?
• What relationships are necessary for elephants to thrive?
• And how can international support enhance, rather than replace, these situated practices?

In the end, the health of elephants in Laos is not just about preventing disease. It is about sustaining relationships—between elephant and human, forest and village, knowledge and ritual. Healing is not just what is done to elephants, but what is done with them, in a shared world of care, attention, and multispecies respect.

Species Encounters, Cultural Difference, and the Ethics of Becoming-With

In When Species Meet, Donna Haraway writes about training dogs—not as an exercise in control, but as a mutual, embodied encounter. For her, training is not domination but a form of communication, a way of tuning oneself to another being with care, patience, and attentiveness. This is not an easy partnership. It involves risk, friction, failure, and reciprocity. It is, in Haraway’s words, “a practice of becoming-with”—a process by which both species are transformed in the act of learning to live together.

This insight offers a powerful way to rethink one of the most controversial aspects of elephant tourism in Southeast Asia: elephant training.

In the West, training elephants—especially young ones—is often associated with violence. Videos of brutal “crushing” rituals have circulated widely, and animal rights campaigns frequently argue that any form of elephant training is inherently abusive. But these representations flatten a diverse and complex field of practice into a single narrative of harm. They do not ask how people and elephants meet, live, and learn together in contexts vastly different from those in which Western animal ethics have developed.

Ethnographic accounts, such as Alexander M. Greene’s study of Karen communities in Northern Thailand, tell another story. Among the Karen and many Lao communities, elephants are not livestock or objects of display. They are companions, kin, and co-workers—beings who live alongside humans for decades. For the first three to five years of life, baby elephants stay with their mothers, learning through bodily proximity and emotional attachment. During this period, human interaction is gentle, affectionate, and playful.

When elephants reach a certain age—usually between three and five—they begin to show more independence. It is at this point that training begins. But what outsiders often fail to understand is that for the Karen, this process is not merely technical. It is sacred.

Training is initiated by spiritually recognized elders, not just anyone. Rituals are performed, guardian spirits are invoked, and offerings are made. The young elephant is placed in a wooden corral—not to be punished, but to begin a difficult and sensitive transition: forming new bonds with the human caretakers who will be part of its life for years to come.

Like Haraway’s dogs, these elephants must learn to interpret human signals, voices, and gestures. But just as importantly, humans must learn to read the elephant—its moods, reactions, fears, and needs. Mahouts spend days sleeping beside the young elephant, singing, feeding, soothing. There are struggles and setbacks. But over time, trust develops. Commands are taught. A shared language emerges. Eventually, the elephant rejoins its community—both elephant and human—transformed by this process.

This is not a story of domination, but of becoming-with. Just as Haraway argues that training a dog can be an ethical encounter across species lines, elephant training in its best forms is an act of relational care—an effort to forge communication, respect, and shared life. The moral difference lies not in whether training exists, but in how it is done, and with what ethical commitments.

De-centering Western Norms

Western observers, accustomed to dogs as domestic companions, often extend their moral expectations across species and cultures. But what Haraway’s own work reveals is that even dog training—a familiar, intimate practice in Western societies—is a form of power. The ethical challenge is not to eliminate power, but to navigate it with humility, responsiveness, and mutual transformation.

To reject elephant training wholesale, especially without understanding the cultural and spiritual significance it holds in Southeast Asia, risks reproducing a kind of ethical imperialism. It imposes a one-size-fits-all framework of morality based on assumptions rooted in Western histories—histories that often erase or ignore the deep knowledge systems of other societies.

Training, like care, is culturally shaped. It arises from particular cosmologies, economic conditions, and multispecies entanglements. In Laos and Thailand, elephants are not wild symbols to be admired from afar. They are integrated into the lifeworlds of people—living in villages, remembered in stories, honored in rituals. The training that enables this coexistence is not inherently abuse. It is, at its best, a gesture of welcome into a shared world.

Toward a Relational Ethics of Elephant Training

To rethink elephant training ethically, we must begin by asking different questions. Not: Is training wrong? But: What kinds of relationships does it produce? What care structures support it? How is the elephant’s voice—or silence—attended to? Who defines cruelty, and from where?

Haraway teaches us that species meet not in purity, but in the mud, mess, and friction of contact zones. The encounter between human and elephant is always political, always situated. It deserves analysis that is careful, relational, and open to learning from others.

If we are to truly “stay with the trouble,” as Haraway encourages, then we must make room for ethical practices that do not mirror our own. We must listen, not judge. We must learn how others train, care, and become-with—not as a form of dominance, but as a living tradition shaped by centuries of experience. In doing so, we might find not only new ways of thinking about elephants, but about ourselves.

The ethics of elephant riding have become a flashpoint in global conservation and animal welfare discourse. For many Western advocacy organizations and tourists, the answer appears obvious: riding is exploitation, and therefore must be banned. Yet, recent scientific research from Southeast Asia, alongside critical philosophical perspectives from Michel Foucault and Donna Haraway, complicates this narrative. A more just and nuanced conversation must ask not simply, “Is elephant riding ethical?” but “How did this question come to be framed in this way? Who defines these norms? And whose voices have been left out of the conversation?”

Scientific Evidence: Rethinking Welfare Assumptions

Recent empirical studies conducted in Thailand—far from the influence of Western zoos and animal welfare charities—suggest that the realities of elephant welfare are not so easily captured by ideological opposition to riding.

Bansiddhi et al. (2019) found that elephants in camps that allowed structured, moderate interaction, including riding, showed lower stress hormone levels and fewer signs of poor health than those in “hands-off” sanctuaries. These hands-off models, while ideologically appealing to Western tourists, often led to unintended consequences: obesity, boredom, and even stress-related behavioral problems due to lack of stimulation. Similarly, Kongsawasdi et al. (2021) demonstrated that elephants carrying moderate loads did not experience biomechanical stress, countering the widespread belief that all forms of riding are physically damaging.

These studies underscore a simple yet powerful point: good welfare depends not on the presence or absence of riding, but on how human–elephant interactions are managed. They remind us that ethics cannot be disentangled from empirical realities—and that well-intentioned policies can sometimes undermine the very welfare they aim to protect.

Foucault and the Politics of Ethical Knowledge

Michel Foucault’s work on the relationship between knowledge and power provides an incisive framework for analyzing how elephant tourism ethics are constructed. Ethical norms, Foucault reminds us, do not exist in a vacuum; they are shaped by institutions, discourses, and networks of authority. What we consider “ethical” often reflects dominant worldviews rather than objective truth.

The global anti-riding movement illustrates this dynamic. Predominantly driven by Western NGOs, media, and celebrity influencers, the movement has positioned itself as the moral authority on elephant welfare. In doing so, it has marginalised local voices—mahouts, camp operators, researchers, and communities with centuries of experience living and working with elephants. Rather than ask how elephants and humans can flourish together, these movements often impose abstract standards that reflect urban Western anxieties more than the lived realities of rural Laos, Thailand, or Cambodia.

This is not a rejection of ethical concern, but a call for epistemic humility. Foucault would urge us to question the “regimes of truth” that make some forms of care visible while obscuring others. Why is it that a visitor taking a selfie at a “sanctuary” is viewed as ethical, while a Lao mahout riding bareback to the river is seen as cruel? What discourses produce these interpretations, and whose interests do they serve?

Haraway’s Relational Ethics: Staying with the Trouble

Donna Haraway’s concept of “staying with the trouble” challenges us to resist simplistic binaries—wild/domestic, free/captive, good/bad—and instead embrace the messy, entangled nature of human–animal relationships. In her framework, ethics arise not from abstract moral imperatives but from attentiveness to situated relationships, histories, and mutual responsibilities.

From this perspective, the goal is not to purify human–elephant interactions but to make them more accountable, more thoughtful, more reciprocal. A mahout who rides an elephant without coercion, who knows her moods and movements, and who lives in daily proximity to her, is engaged in a form of ethical world-making. Haraway would argue that such relationships—dense with care, tradition, and negotiation—offer a richer model of interspecies ethics than remote forms of advocacy that treat elephants as symbols rather than beings-in-relation.

Critiquing Western-Centrism in Animal Welfare

The dominance of Western norms in global animal welfare raises critical postcolonial concerns. Practices like elephant riding are not merely economic activities; they are embedded in cultural, historical, and spiritual frameworks. To reject them wholesale is to enact a kind of epistemic violence—disregarding local knowledge, livelihoods, and values in the name of a universalized (and often unexamined) morality.

This critique is not a defense of all practices in all forms; abuse exists, and should be named and addressed. But blanket bans on riding, pushed through global campaigns and tourism regulations, often flatten complexity. They risk reducing Southeast Asian cultures to caricatures of cruelty and positioning Western tourists as enlightened saviors. In doing so, they repeat colonial patterns of domination—this time under the banner of ethical concern.

As Haraway and postcolonial theorists alike remind us, ethics must be situated. They must emerge from the ground up, not be imposed from afar.

Toward an Ethics of Entanglement

If elephant riding is to be evaluated ethically, it must be done in context. Ethical riding—low-impact, limited by the elephant’s health and temperament—can be part of a broader strategy of care that includes habitat conservation, mahout training, intergenerational cultural transmission, and community-based tourism.

Such an approach is being taken at Manifa Elephant Camp. There, elephants live in forested habitats, form long-term bonds with mahouts, and engage in structured interaction that respects both tradition and welfare. Tourists are not encouraged to dominate but to witness—to join in a relationship already underway, shaped by centuries of coexistence.

This is not a pure or easy path. It requires discomfort, patience, and the willingness to question deeply held assumptions. But it is a path that affirms both elephants and people as participants in a shared, evolving world—a world that is not built by retreating from contact, but by learning to live within it, responsibly and respectfully.

Conclusion

The question “Is elephant riding ethical?” cannot be answered without first asking: who gets to decide? By integrating Southeast Asian scientific research, Foucauldian critique, Haraway’s relational ethics, and postcolonial awareness, we uncover a more complex and compassionate picture—one that resists moral absolutism in favor of grounded, situated care.

Ethics, like conservation, must be practiced with humility. And sometimes, the most ethical act is not to walk away, but to walk alongside—to stay with the trouble.

In the dense forests and riverbanks of Laos, elephants have long been more than animals. They have been kin, workers, companions—part of a shared world shaped over generations. In recent years, however, this relationship has come under strain, caught in the shifting currents of conservation policy, global tourism, economic development, and cultural change. To understand where we are and where we might go, we must, as Donna Haraway urges, learn to “stay with the trouble.”

This means not seeking quick fixes or pure solutions, but instead learning to live within the complexity of human–elephant entanglement. It means resisting fantasies of pristine wilderness or total separation between people and animals. And it means recognizing the lived realities of those who still care for elephants—not from a distance, but through daily labor, bodily presence, and enduring cultural ties.

Maurer et al. (2021) provide a powerful lens into this reality. In their study of Laos, they describe a “social–ecological system” in which elephants have historically moved between wild and human-managed spaces, often roaming freely during parts of the year while returning to their mahouts for food, care, and work. This flexible arrangement is now under pressure. The decline of logging, the rise and fall of tourism, and the import of externally-driven conservation ideologies are destabilizing this delicate balance.

What emerges is not a simple story of loss, but a deeply relational problem. Elephants are not just disappearing—they are becoming disconnected from the systems that once gave their lives meaning and structure. Mahouts, too, face an uncertain future. Younger generations are leaving the profession. Cultural knowledge is fading. And the moral authority to define “good” elephant care is increasingly claimed by distant institutions rather than local communities.

Against this backdrop, Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble” becomes a plea for situated thinking and ethical imagination. It asks us to recognize that elephants in Laos are not best served by models that idealize untouched nature or propose total separation from humans. Instead, we need practices of care that are rooted in local ecologies and social relationships.

This future does not lie in turning elephants into isolated symbols of wilderness or commodities for spectacle. Nor does it lie in imposing abstract welfare standards divorced from local realities. Rather, it lies in supporting hybrid, adaptive models that honor the shared histories of people and elephants and make space for those relationships to evolve.

To stay with the trouble is to accept that we are entangled—and to act from that place of entanglement. It is to walk beside elephants, not in front or behind, and to imagine a future in which humans and animals can flourish not in spite of one another, but because of the care, respect, and creativity that connect them.

In Laos, this path is still open. But it will take listening, humility, and a willingness to learn from those who have long lived with elephants—not as abstractions, but as living, thinking beings in a shared and troubled world.

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