Following up on my last article, ‘Elephants and Humans: Changing the Way We Think About Using Animals for Entertainment’, I would like to offer some additional thoughts and insights on positive ways we can move towards the elephant species charity.

I am an artist and that tends to place me well within the shop of the romantics and idealists. And if so, I humbly feel in good company; Much of the way the world changes comes from idealists like Siddhartha [Buddha]Aldous Huxley, Margaret Mead, Martin Luther King, Jr., Paul Robeson, Jane Goodall, and Soren Kierkegaard, to name just a few from a very long list.

But still, being an idealist does not mean that one cannot be a pragmatist.

Here is an example of what I mean when I say that we should not train elephants, we should train tourists, that is, of course, ourselves. Not far from my home in northern Thailand is an extremely successful elephant camp; Thousands of tourists flock every day to watch the elephants perform: paint, play soccer, and intermittently do silly little bows, all for the paying tourists, each capturing vast amounts of digital images on their I phones. to send home.

As an idealist, yes, I believe that ‘forcing’ elephants to entertain us is cruel and demeaning…both to them and to us.

The problem is that most people who come to Thailand want to see an elephant, no matter what, whether they play football or not. Most people are happy to pay money to see the elephant. This creates a very specific “supply and demand” situation. The camp owners provide a desired product whereby they not only earn enough to house and feed the captive elephants, pay their staff, but also enjoy a fairly comfortable life. They want what most of us want.

Imaginary scenario: I buy a large tract of land next to the elephant camp, get about thirty elephants, and create what I hypothetically call the Panom Temporary Elephant Sanctuary or PIES, where captive elephants just do what elephants do natural way: eat slowly. during most of the day and night. They don’t dance. They don’t play football and they never paint pictures. They do not bow or carry humans on their backs. They eat. They desert. They swim. They sleep for a few hours and start again. They also communicate with each other, love each other, argue, set boundaries, break things, test and tease, and contemplate the things we do…and some things we don’t do.

At PIES, I charge essentially the same entrance fee as at the other camp. A few humans begin to visit…then more and still more. They discover that PIES is much more interesting, attractive and educational. In a short time, all the tourists are coming to my house and less and less to the other place.

What do you imagine happens?

Because the other place has no intrinsic desire to force elephants to do things that elephants have no interest in doing, and because the other place is in business to make money, of course, and out of necessity. , they will remodel their offer to satisfy the demand. public desire. It is a trading cycle as old as human culture.

Before I ask you to jump into my next what-if scenario, please keep these facts in mind.

1. Captive elephants are not domesticated. They have not been genetically altered like, for example, horses.

2. Once an elephant is made captive, that is, its natural spirit is broken and attached to a human being, it cannot be released back into the wild. It doesn’t work that way. The elephant will gravitate towards human habitation with great danger to itself and humans.

3. The natural habitat of Asian and African elephants is declining at an almost irreversible rate.

4. Poaching of elephants for ivory or the entertainment industry is not abating.

A few years ago, when I started working on my elephant documentary, ‘Panom, a story of elephants and humans’, I interviewed Soraida Salwala, founder and director of Friends of the Asian Elephant Organization and FAE elephant hospital. Soraida Salwala is also an idealist with a pragmatic vision of what is possible and what is not. For several decades, she has dedicated her life to the benefit of the Asian elephant in general and, in particular, to the humane task of caring for a few maimed elephants, mostly as a result of injuries caused by land mines.

Imagine: if all the captive elephants in Thailand were congregated in one or several large sanctuaries in close proximity to areas of wild populations so that captive and wild elephants would interbreed. Such a sanctuary would need strict control and international cooperation. As young elephants are born, they would, by necessity, have less and less contact with humans, until eventually, over time, the captive elephant generations would die out and the elephants’ decline would be reversed. This would require strict governance of protected areas and international monitoring and funding, part of which could be generated through a very small tax on visitors entering any country that provides the elephants’ native habitat.

As idealistic…as romantic…as it seems, it’s an opportunity waiting to happen. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the entire world for the specific loss of natural habitat and the decimation of a species due to human greed. We cannot claim to be at the top of the intelligence ladder if we continue to destroy everything that supports the ladder. One of the first ways we can do this is to change the way we think about our place in the world. We are too many on a planet under the harshness of too many human needs. We must begin to educate both our children and ourselves. We can start by not expecting other creatures to entertain us.