Tourists planning to ride elephants in Thailand are being urged to think again as photos of the alleged abuse towards the animals have gone viral on Twitter this week.
While the Thai government discourages elephant rides, these attractions reportedly persist in some tourist locations across the country, subjecting the animals to unimaginable torture from a young age.
The images show the elephants with gut-wrenching wounds on their heads and bodies, presumably inflicted by keepers training them for business with sharp metal canes.
The photos have since shocked both tourists and local authorities, who claimed that several initiatives are underway to combat the problem.
Such initiatives reportedly include policies, research, rehabilitation of injured animals and prosecution of illegal wildlife trade.
“We never support tourists riding the elephants,” a spokesperson from the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) told Yahoo News Australia.
“Please don’t ride the elephants and don’t support this business.”
Since 2011, nonprofit People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has exposed the horrors elephants in Thailand endure in the hands of cruel keepers.
“Baby elephants are taken from their mothers, tied down and beaten so severely that they bleed and scream, all in order to force them to perform ridiculous tricks for tourists.”
Subscribe to
NextShark's Newsletter
A daily dose of Asian America's essential stories, in under 5 minutes.
Get our collection of Asian America's most essential stories to your inbox daily for free.
Unsure? Check out our Newsletter Archive.
In 2014, international watchdog Traffic reported that some of the elephants come from Myanmar. Young elephants are “mentally broken and prepared for training” before being put on the market.
“In Myanmar, domesticated elephants are used to corral wild animals into pits where older protective members of herds are often killed and the higher value, younger animals taken. The young are then transported to Thai-Myanmar border areas and then mentally broken and prepared for training before being sold into the tourism industry in Thailand where they are put to work at tourist camps or hotels.”
Twitter user @faizalghazaly, who shared the photos, wrote, “You can stop inhumanity tortured on elephants by stop riding an elephant!”
The post has since received more than 18,000 retweets and 7,000 likes, with users condemning “humans” for the horrifying evidence of cruelty.
