Visit Responsible Elephant Camps in Thailand

14-Mar-2022
The elephant tourism industry in Thailand and the rest of SE Asia has transformed over the years to become more ethical in how elephants are treated while still using them to generate income for the mahouts, the camp owners, land owners and tour companies.
There are literally hundreds of elephant camps in Thailand. The most ethical camps don’t allow rides, don’t use bull hooks or chains (except perhaps at night to prevent them from escaping the camp and ransacking farms and villages). They also limit the level of interaction between tourists and the elephants, with the strictest allowing only observation. However, most camps allow some interaction like feeding and bathing with them in a river. The best ones also provide some level of education about the life of elephants and their mahouts.
The worst camps cater to Chinese and Thai domestic tourists who are ignorant about these issues and want to see elephants paint, play soccer, ride them–all for the purpose of being entertained and getting that selfie to post on social media. We avoid these kinds of camps for our clients.

To be truly ethical, it would be necessary to trace the history of an elephant so that we know whether it was illegally captured as a wild elephant or transported across the border from Myanmar. It would also help to know that babies are not separated from their mothers and sold unnecessarily from camp to camp. To accomplish this, laws in Thailand will have to change to close the loopholes available to traffickers and there is international and domestic pressure to make that happen.

During the Covid pandemic and loss of tourism for 2+ years, all elephant camps in Thailand have suffered as well as many of the elephants. Some camps were forced to have the mahouts take their elephants into the national forests where it is legal to let them forage for food because the camp owners and mahouts could no long afford to feed them. In one case, a camp that did this lost 3 elephants (1 baby and its mother and father) when a large tree fell on them during a violent storm.
We at Red Lantern Journeys do our best to educate ourselves about the issues around elephant camps and support those that we feel truly want to change things for the better and lead by example. However, we also know that, as a foreign organization, it’s difficult to always know the truth–we don’t always know what we don’t know! As a result, we don’t tout ourselves as being the most responsible or eco-friendly…just as having an ethos to educate ourselves and our clients about the issues and to do our best in those areas.
We work with a local partner in Northern Thailand called Mae Wang Elephant Care that arranges only private experiences for our clients. You can’t book them online–just through us. As a result, you’re not being herded through a camp with dozens or hundreds of other tourists, but get a private and personalized experience that aims to truly educate you about these great beasts and their history in SE Asia…and, yes, gives you some ability to interact with them. Our experiences are in the rural and scenic Mae Wang Valley, about a 1.5-hour drive outside of Chiang Mai. They include a feeding them bananas from behind a barrier, a walk through the forest to watch them forage, an amazing lunch, a walk to their favorite watering hole or mud bath, and some personal time with the camp manager and mahouts.
