Elephants in tourism camps across Asia are subjected to training methods and conditions that cause lasting psychological damage and fail to meet their complex welfare needs.
Captive tourism elephants experience multi-layered welfare harms: initial trauma from taming, chronic stress from unnatural living conditions, physical damage from over-work, social isolation from conspecifics, and denial of natural foraging and migratory behaviours. The scale of cognitive and emotional life denied to these animals — who in the wild travel 50+ km daily in complex family units — represents profound suffering.