I've been putting off writing about this for months, mainly because I didn't want to relive the experience or even think about it, but a part of me kept nagging, saying, "If you care anything about elephants at all, or about nature, you should write about it."
So I thought about it and realized that I do care about elephants and nature and hopefully talking about my experience can make a difference, however small.
Back in June I visited Thailand for about a week, partially because I love the country and partially because I needed to do a visa run to stay in Taiwan. Since I had already been to Bangkok, I decided this time to head up north to Chiang-Mai, an area well-known for, along with great food, fabulous hiking, rafting, and numerous other outdoor activities. Since I consider myself an outdoors activity kind of gal, I was very much looking forward to the adventuring that was sure to take place.
While trying to book one of the many trekking tours available in Chiang-Mai, I found one that promised a full day of hiking, rafting, waterfall-watching, and...elephant-riding. Being the young, naive girl that I was, the itinerary presented to me seemed nothing short of awesome and I quickly put down my name and paid the deposit.
I have already forgotten the name of the tour company I used, but believe me when I say that there are dozens like it all over Chiang-Mai, probably attracting hundreds of tourists every year. Since I went on a weekday, there were only five people in my group, including me, all Westerners. Our tour guide was late that morning because there had been some mix-up with two of the guests, so he had the driver take us to a random paper-making farm for free in order to pass the time. There was nothing extraordinary about the paper-making farm other than the fact that besides the three of us, there seemed to be no one else there.
After waiting for about 20 minutes, 10 minutes longer than the guide had initially promised, the other two guests arrived and we were off. Our first stop was elephant-riding.
I had never ridden an elephant before. I don't think I have ever so much as expressed a desire to ride an elephant before, so I'm not sure why I had been looking forward to it, other than maybe sometime in the recent past I had clicked through some friend's pictures on Facebook and thought it looked like something I might do. You can't get any more outdoorsy than riding an elephant in a forest in Thailand, right? Once we got to the "elephant camp," which is what they called the place where the elephants were kept, however, I began to harbor some serious doubts about the whole thing.
First off, the actual camp itself was tiny. It was located on a field next to a river lined with some trees. There were about three or four men standing atop a wooden structure, on which guests would be loaded on and off the elephants. One bigger, older-looking elephant was tied to a post, his ears flapping back and forth as he tried to keep the flies away. He didn't look particularly happy to be there, but then again, having never been in close proximity to a real elephant before, I certainly wasn't an expert on elephant happiness. The other elephants were on their way back from an earlier expedition and would arrive shortly, we were told.
After three elephants had returned, the people at the camp told us to climb up the wooden structure so they could start loading us onto the elephants. Since there were five of us, and each elephant could hold up to two people, including one "driver," I would be on one by myself. The elephant I got on wasn't big or small. It looked neither happy nor unhappy to be there. There was a bench attached to its back, held up by two thick ropes, one looped around its torso and another that came up from under its tail. The driver sat on the elephant's head to steer. I remember it seemed like the drivers weren't really present; they didn't speak to us, smile at us, or acknowledge us in any way, which I found a little strange. After everyone was sitting on a bench, the elephants, prompted by the drivers, started moving forward.
The drivers had two ways of controlling the elephant. One was to nudge the elephant just behind its ear with their foot (all the drivers were wearing shoes). The other was to use a wooden instrument with a hook attached to prod the elephant. Neither method looked very comfortable for the elephant.
Once I was actually on top of the elephant, I started feeling strange. What was I doing sitting on an elephant anyway? In retrospect, riding an elephant didn't seem outdoorsy at all - if anything, it was the very opposite, being a rather passive and lazy thing to do. It was like riding in a car, except that the vehicle was a living, moving being. I wasn't doing anything but sit there, watching as the elephant first moved through the trees; then moved through thick, muddy water; above all moved primarily because there were two strangers sitting on its back and one of them poked at it with a very inhumane-looking stick.
If I were the elephant, I thought, I would be really pissed. But the worst part was, nobody there seemed pissed. Not the drivers, not the guests, not even the elephants. Everyone there was simply compliant, everyone including me. Some people laughed and pointed at things in the distance. Almost everyone was taking pictures. The drivers sat quietly and grunted out commands whenever they felt the elephants were moving too slowly or not obeying them. The whole process just seemed so natural, just another part of idyllic life in Southeast Asia. Except it shouldn't have been.
The ride felt long and short at the same time. It was supposed to last an hour, but no one complained, not me especially, when the elephants arrived back at the wooden structure 40 minutes later and were tied to it once more, as a new group of elephant riders started to mount themselves onto their backs. The drivers didn't get off. I wondered how many groups each elephant was required to carry in a single day. The older elephant that had been tied to a pole earlier was no longer there. I didn't ask where it went.
Later that night, when I was back in my hotel room, I googled elephant riding in Thailand and saw, with a sinking feeling in my stomach, reviews for the tour I had just come back from. Most of them were poor reviews, complaining that the tour guides hadn't seemed to know what they were doing; that the rafting had been shorter than promised; that smaller companies like this were much more likely to rip off inexperienced tourists, etc. Not many of them mentioned elephant riding.
One review, however, stood out. Like some of the others, it had given the tour one star out of five. Unlike the others, it was a highly charged, emotional piece of writing, less review than judgment. Besides lambasting elephant riding as a whole, this reviewer said that upon arriving at the camp and seeing the "traumatic state of the elephants," he and his family decided not to ride after all. They were not emotionally prepared to deal with the ramifications of seeing the elephants in such a sad and cruel environment. They wanted to leave the tour and go back to their hotel immediately, but the tour guide refused to take them. So during the entirety of the trip, which consisted of hiking, rafting, and finally, a visit to a traditional village (also a tourist scam, according to many reviews), all they could think about were the elephants suffering direct abuse at the hands of greedy tourist companies.
Because of tourists like myself.
To be honest, it hadn't even crossed my mind to research elephant riding before I signed up to do it. It just seemed like a fun, once-in-a-lifetime thing to do. I didn't know that tour companies like the one I had used thrived on people like me: curious, unassuming foreigners who view elephant riding as simply one way to pass time in a foreign country known for its exotic adventures, adventures that could perhaps garner a few dozen likes on a social networking site after they had been had.
I didn't know that in Southeast Asia, in order to make elephants safe for humans to ride, they have to be tamed in such a way that their bodies and spirits are visibly broken, for days at a time, practically from birth. I didn't know that baby elephants are often wrenched from their mothers and put into cages so small that they can't even turn around. I didn't know that such elephants are continually beaten and deprived of sleep or that eventually, their tormented cries give way to resignation as they come to accept their fates, the light going out of their eyes as though they're already dead, the flinch present in their bodies even before they're whipped.
I didn't know that elephants are smuggled into Thailand every year to support the growing tourism industry, where people like me pay a small amount of money to ride elephants who have been trained to withstand humans on their backs, at the expense of their own emotional and physical well-beings.
In essence, I didn't know much. And I'm guessing a lot of other people don't either.
If I had, I wouldn't have considered elephant riding at all. Instead, maybe I would have visited the Elephant Nature Park instead, also located in Chiang-Mai, which gives tourists a chance to interact with elephants without actually harming them.
I didn't make that choice, but maybe others can.
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