The complexities of elephant tourism in Thailand

(CNN) — An Asian elephant struts into the pool and dips its head beneath the surface, using the tip of its trunk like a snorkel.

Standing on its hind legs as the water relieves the gravitational burden of its body, the animal wades between two men offering bananas at either end of the pool.

In a room down below, awestruck children watch through wide glass windows.

Some of the people who have attended this elephant swimming exhibition at Khao Kheow Open Zoo southeast of Bangkok are surprised that it has been criticized as an example of animal cruelty and exploitation.

The thorny debate touches on issues of animal welfare, media representation and what some see as cultural bias.

‘Elephant in the room’

Taken at Khao Kheow and titled “Elephant in the Room,” Oswell’s photo shows an elephant with its head and body submerged while a trainer, or mahout, swims above in what looks to be a relatively small tank. People of various ages, all with Asian features, are pictured watching the elephant.

Some reactions to the photo on social media were harsher, often deploying adjectives like “sickening,” “vile” and “barbaric.”

“Care was taken in the drafting of the captions not to single out this particular attraction nor the individuals watching but to provide wider context to this industry from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on tourist enterprises to the international demand for animal tourism from international tourists,” an NHM spokesperson told CNN Travel.

“For example,” they continued, “in the online caption Judge Staffan Widstrand says, ‘It could have been any one of us there in the audience, from anywhere in the world, at pretty much any zoo.'”

Khao Kheow has been certified by the South East Asian Zoos Association (SEAZA), which is a member of the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA). The ZPO maintains that all of its zoos are guided by the principles of conservation, research, education and recreation.

Plunging into controversy

Oswell’s photo was not the first case of media documentation sparking outrage over Khao Kheow’s elephant swimming exhibition.

Elephants are natural-born swimmers, but critics view Khao Kheow’s swimming exhibition as a forced performance. More broadly, they see it as an example of how animals are exploited for the amusement of humans.

“We don’t use any hooks or any type of force to get the elephants to enter the pool,” Dr. Visit Arsaithamkul, a veterinarian who works at Khao Kheow as an assistant director under the ZPO, told CNN Travel. “We say, ‘it’s feeding time, you get a bucket of bananas,’ and they voluntarily get into the pool.”

Visit said the elephants are trained through reward-based positive reinforcement, not fear and pain. Unlike at many of Thailand’s elephant facilities, tourists cannot ride or swim with elephants at Khao Kheow.

The zoo’s lab analyzes elephant feces for cortisol levels, potentially alerting staff to mental stress that the elephants might be experiencing. Visit said he can gauge how the elephants are feeling as they swim through observation alone.

“They don’t show any stress,” he said. “They look happy.”

When CNN Travel anonymously observed the exhibition from above and below the water in November 2021, the elephant entered the pool alone after a word from a mahout. Once in the water, it ate many bananas. No tricks were performed, and no humans went in the pool.

One of Khao Kheow’s eight elephants enters the pool for 30 minutes at set times twice per day. At other times, all of the elephants dwell in an eight-acre enclosure with a pond and a hillside dotted with trees.

The elephants are only chained, said Visit, when males become aggressive due to a rise in reproductive hormones, a natural state known as musth.

“Wild Welfare believes that Khao Kheow Open Zoo is committed to allowing the animals in their care the opportunity to live a full and meaningful life in captivity by providing good animal welfare,” Marsh told CNN Travel. The charity deems “animal demonstrations that are detrimental to the physical or psychological well-being of the animals” unacceptable, he added.

‘Always a negative thing’

“Forcing an animal to do an act, whatever act that may be, is always a negative thing,” he told CNN Travel. “To say that the animal does it out of free choice is absolutely not true.”

But Wiek’s two decades of experience in wildlife rescue have given him a broad perspective on Thailand’s captive elephant situation.

“I’m not saying (the elephant swimming show) is okay. But if I measure the harm done on the elephants, when you look at it from an animal welfare perspective, I think those elephants probably have better care and are under better living conditions than most of the elephants at the camps around the country.”

‘We may end up losing our Thai-ness’

“Whilst the (WPY) competition received entries from 95 countries, there is more work to do in encouraging more entries from photographers in the Global South,” explained the NHM spokesperson. “As a step to further encourage entries from around the world, entry fees for the 58th competition will be waived for photographers who live in 50 selected countries.”

Some Thailand-based animal rights activists think that Western criticism of the treatment of captive elephants in Thailand, while often warranted and usually rooted in compassionate intentions, can come across as arrogant, inflexible and lacking a contextual understanding of the country.

For example, some Westerners insist that all of Thailand’s roughly 3,800 captive elephants should be moved to sanctuaries where interaction with humans is limited to veterinary care and observation from a distance. Enacting a shift of this stature would likely require changes to multiple Thai laws and huge amounts of funding, making it unrealistic in the foreseeable future.

In a country where people have been living with elephants for many centuries, some Thais interpret calls for fundamental changes to captive elephant training and management as threats to Thai traditions and sensitive notions of cultural identity.

But some Thais agree with the Westerners who want to see more fundamental shifts in captive elephant welfare. As they see it, Thai nationalistic views are being used to justify and perpetuate cruelty towards elephants.

‘Where do you draw the line?’

Historically, Westerners have played pivotal, if indirect, roles in expanding Thailand’s captive elephant market.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Colonial entities like the British Bombay Burmah Trading Co. fueled a logging boom that forced many elephants into hard labor.

Later in the 20th century, demand among Western tourists for elephant riding provided a new financial incentive for wild elephant poaching.

As awareness of cruelty towards captive elephants has spread among Westerners more recently, many Thai elephant camps shifted to focusing on tourists from emerging markets, such as China and India.

According to Wiek, these standards are “way too high” for most of Thailand’s captive elephant facilities to meet. Though he supports long-term shifts favoring the sanctuary model, he worries that without a “step by step” approach, good intentions can inadvertently cause more suffering.

“Some camps stopped riding elephants, but they were still (letting tourists) feed and bathe them, and immediately these animal organizations said, ‘You can’t do that either!’ We did not create an alternative and the elephants in the camps are worse off now than they were before. Where do you draw the line?”

Top image: Elephants stand on a hillside near the Mae Sapok Village on July 21, 2020 in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Credit: Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images