Elephant Tourism Business, The

Eric Laws, Noel Scott, Xavier Font, John Koldowski, Eric Laws, Noel Scott, Xavier Font, John Koldowski

• Publisher: CAB International
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789245882
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dell'ospitalità e del turismo
• Index: Business

Elephant tourism is a growing activity in many countries across Asia and Africa and is popular with tourists from all parts of the world. Elephant tourism has grown rapidly, providing the only viable way for elephants and their owners to survive since the banning of logging. Old logging camps have been developed into sanctuaries for some elephants, but many other camps were established as entertainment centres, resulting in serious welfare issues for the elephants and their mahouts. The profits from elephant tourism in Asia have encouraged African operators to follow a similar business model.This book draws attention to the need for a comprehensive and rigorous focus on local solutions to improve the welfare of captive elephants, their mahouts and local residents, and to enhance tourists' experiences of elephant tourism. It achieves this by: - Critically reviewing recent research into elephant tourism.- Providing contemporary analytical case studies of elephant tourism policy and practice.The Elephant Tourism Business will contribute to a better understanding of how elephant tourism is organised, regulated and promoted, both in elephant areas and tourist origin countries. It identifies priorities for future research into elephant tourism and provides a unique, authoritative resource for researchers, elephant managers and administrators, and tourism managers. The book will be of interest to academics and practitioners with backgrounds in conservation, the environment, tourism and veterinary sciences, and will appeal to tourists keen to experience elephants in person.

Section 1 Personal Experiences of
Elephant Tourism

1 Managing the Anantara Golden Triangle Elephant Camp: Eric Laws Interviews John Roberts

ERIC LAWS

Leshan Normal University, Sichuan Province, China

Introduction

This chapter is a record of interviews with John Roberts, director of the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation, previously the ­director of ­elephants at the Anantara Golden Triangle Resort. This series of ­interviews was conducted during February 2019 in Chiangmai, and in more depth at the Anantara Golden Triangle Resort in October 2019. The interviews had a casual and iterative style of discussion. The notes paraphrasing John’s views on the topics were collated and then sent to him for comment. The two major topics explored were, first, how John become interested in elephant welfare issues, and, second, the origins and development of the Anantara Golden Triangle Elephant Camp and related activities.

John’s Interest in Elephants

John worked in remote National Parks as a Ranger, enjoying the work, the lifestyle and the environments. In 1998 he joined ‘Tiger Tops’ in the Chitwan National Park, Nepal, where elephants were used for tourist transport and for safety in wildlife viewing. John became immersed in the mahouts’ lifestyle, which involved living with the elephants. Reflecting on his experiences in Nepal, John regarded some of the ­individual ­elephants as friends, but 20 years on he thinks it unlikely that the elephants recognized him as an individual character; rather, he was a fact of their life.

Each elephant displayed individual characteristics, and his understanding of this has become important in the way John now selects elephants for particular types of interaction with Anantara’s guests. He cautions that ­elephants have rather volatile moods: what one will tolerate on one day is not always a predictor of how it might behave the following day, either when interacting with conspecifics or, particularly, with humans to whom they are only loosely bonded.

John’s experiences also led to him consider that mahouts made a ­number of mistakes. They typically had unrealistically high expectations that an ­elephant could understand verbal or physical cues (Plotnik et al., 2013) and, as a result, mahouts punished the elephant rather than ­giving it sufficient time to work out in its own mind what it was ­expected to do in new situations. This was compounded by a tendency to use ­different cues for a ­specific behaviour, expecting an elephant to ‘just understand what is needed’. Mahouts also overestimated elephants’ eyesight, ­considering them stubborn, rather than understanding that an elephant’s thought processes and methods for processing its environments are ­different from their own (McLean, 2014). John added that most captive elephants can respond to no more than 70 spoken commands, or cues such as pressure on an ear to direct them in a particular direction, but to make use of this ability a mahout must be well bonded with his elephant and there has to be mutual trust.

Anantara’s Operations and its Interest in Elephants

Anantara’s range of luxury hotels and resorts is ‘each designed to ­enable guests to engage with the people, places and stories that make each ­destination unique’. The owners of Anantara, particularly Mr William E. Heinecke, founder and chairman of Minor International, parent company to Anantara, have a love for elephants. In 2003, when John joined Anantara, the company owned a hotel in Hua Hin where guests could interact with baby elephants on a private beach (this practice has since been ­discontinued), and the five-­star Baan Boran Hotel in the Golden Triangle north of Chiangrai. Historically, wandering mahouts occasionally brought captive elephants to the extensive forested land around the Baan Boran Hotel.

Elephants provided a unique selling proposition for Baan Boran, ­enabling the owners to combine their love of elephants with a commercial ­venture. Anantara began by renting four mature elephants from Lampang’s Thai Elephant Conservation Centre (TECC). John was recruited in 2003 as the elephant manager, responsible for the elephants’ welfare and for developing the hotel guests’ enjoyment and experience of elephant tourism.

Anantara introduced a 3-­day mahout training package (the Mahout Experience) to allow guests to have the experience of working with an ­elephant without having to undergo the strenuous labour or time ­investment of an alternative 30-­day course offered in the TECC, Lampang. Other ­advantages of deriving their elephant experience from an internationally ­operating ­hotel brand were confidence in such things as public ­liability ­insurance, staff welfare and human resource training, compliance with health and safety ­regulations, as well as, of course, a comfortable bed, good food and hot showers. Tourists enjoyed this and most were able to pass a simple ‘driving test’ with their elephant and receive a certificate. A shorter
(1 1/2 h) version of the mahout training was later introduced.

In 2013, Anantara began the ‘Elephant Learning’ guest experience and in 2016 a ‘Walking with Giants’ activity. The latter is now the most popular with guests from Western Europe, the USA and Australia. Walking with Giants is not harmful to the elephants and provides vital exercise that even free ­roaming does not (Bansiddhi et al., 2019), along with a chance to interact with conspecifics in varied natural habitats. John is monitoring the popularity of the mahout experiences. If it becomes truly unpopular he will have to replace it with a similar exercise (Norkaew et al., 2018) for those elephants who don’t like strangers walking alongside them.

How Does Anantara Differ from Other Elephant Tourism Venues?

The leisurely and elephant-­focused Mahout Experience, Walking with Giants and Elephant Learning Experience contrast with visits to a typical large ­elephant camp, where there could be 3000 visitors per day. Visitors to those camps are shepherded in groups between the various elephant shows, ­spectacles, rides and other activities such as shopping and dining. These camps do not facilitate any bonding between visitors and elephants. In such camps elephants are busy most of the day, or kept waiting for their next ­activity, sometimes on hard surfaces or in direct sunlight.

Anantara limits an elephant to two or three short activities spaced out over a day, with a maximum of five hours of walking, and with only a few guests to optimize stress-­free interaction. Elephant contact hours, basic health and behaviour are recorded daily and entered into a central ­database, which is monitored by the veterinary team. The shorter guest contact time has to generate the income to support the elephant for 24 hours and ­during Thailand’s lower guest seasons. John points out that, from a ­business ­perspective, ­elephants and mahouts are fixed costs, requiring the same ­financial input whether or not they are interacting with guests.

The three distinct activities provided at Anantara allow elephants to ­participate according to their character rather than being forced into a ­riding, walking or purely passive activity against that elephant’s specific needs. John is keen to point out that they also have elephants on site that do not take part in any activity and that guests never meet because they have shown ­dislike for all activities – it is their funding model and support from Anantara’s other income streams, however, that allows them to do this ­despite the extra costs.

Anantara offers close interaction with an elephant at a scale of ­operation of only a few people a day. In their increasingly popular Walking with Giants activity, guests accompanied by a mahout walk beside an elephant along ­jungle trails slowly, enabling the elephant to forage. The activity, as with the Mahout Experience, has built-­in periods for the elephants to ­interact with each other in their environment but the guests retreat to a suitable distance for safety and to observe natural elephant behaviour. This delights and ­fascinates guests. The setup also allows John to keep elephants that do not like guest interaction in areas of forest where guests either will not ­encounter them, or can watch them from the safety of a very long distance such as ­during the Elephant Learning Experience, during which guests are ­accompanied by a member of the veterinary team.

Many guests enjoy elephant-­hugging, but some elephants do not want to be hugged by people – they are averse to noise, crowds and being touched other than by an experienced mahout. Hugging an elephant can quickly ­become dangerous, particularly as few tourists can read an elephant’s body language. When necessary, a mahout uses his hook to separate an elephant from humans before any threat escalates.

A hook is effective in controlling the elephant as an extension of the ­mahout’s arm rather than as a weapon, but even this is discouraged to ­prevent mahouts relying on it. However, John insists mahouts carry a hook in their backpack because its true value is in controlling unforeseen dangerous situations without harming the elephant, and for the safety of all ­concerned (Bansiddhi et al., 2019).

How ‘Natural’ is Life for an Elephant at Anantara?

Both Thailand’s provisional Draft Elephant Act (Part 2, Section 47) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Asian Elephant Specialist Group Guidelines (IUCN Asian Elephant Specialist Group, 2019) require captive elephants to be kept chained at night, or contained in strongly fenced enclosures. At Anantara most elephants are secured on 30-­metre long chains attached to stout trees spaced so that they can choose to have contact with each other, or to be alone. John considers this preferable to enclosures as it provides more space each night and elephants can be moved to different areas of the forest when one area is depleted by browsing. John feels chaining in this fashion allows the provision of welfare without increasing elephants’ stress levels (Bansiddhi et al., 2019). However, in an effort to conform, they are experimenting with enclosures for a group of elephants that are friendly with each other (Veasey, 2019).

The forests around the hotel provide many types of food required by elephants but are degraded, so supplementary feeding is provided. Each ­elephant has an individual diet plan. Bananas, sugarcane and various types of grass are bought from local farmers and brought in fresh daily by small trucks that the elephants recognize. It costs about US$12,000 per year to feed an elephant, which consumes 250 kg of food per day (that figure increases to $18,000 when John factors in feeding and paying the mahout and his ­family). Elephants also drink a lot of water; they like to spray it over themselves and to bathe in pools or streams. The hotel is situated above the banks of the Ruak River, about 500 metres from its confluence with the Mekong, so water is plentiful, but some elephants seem to enjoy taking purified water from hosepipes, both to drink and to spray over themselves. Also absent in this area are salt licks, so mineral blocks are placed in the grazing areas for the elephants.

What is Happening to Elephant Populations in Thailand?

Recent changes in elephant registration (Thailand Director of CITES, 2017) mean that the captive elephant population in Thailand is known fairly ­accurately. In 2018 there were 3783 with detailed ‘pink book’ registration documents, which give identifying information to include DNA-­based script. These certificates have to be shown by the owner when an ­inspection is conducted by the authorities or by auditors, and are required when an ­elephant is moved to a different administrative area within Thailand. However, ­sometimes elephants are brought in for specialized veterinarian care from neighbouring countries such as Myanmar. These elephants are microchipped and recorded when crossing the frontier, but have no legal Thai standing and could not legally join an elephant camp or move out of the border area.

In addition to captive elephants, Thailand also has a population of ­between 3126 and 3341 wild elephants (IUCN Asian Elephant Specialist Group, 2019) living in protected areas of the National Parks, with some herds as large as 100 individuals. These can be difficult to manage because of the mountainous forest terrain, and they often stray on to neighbouring farms, damaging crops and causing violent conflict, sometimes resulting in the death of both humans and elephants. In Asia alone an average of 600 humans and 450 wild elephants die each year as a result of conflicts ­between humans and elephants (IUCN Asian Elephant Specialist Group, 2019). There is no compensation scheme for farmers in Thailand, although other ­countries such as China have a formal government-­funded scheme. Groups of wild ­elephants also seek contact with each other, causing them to stray across roads and ­enter villages. John suggests a focus is needed on projects to ­establish elephant corridors between the wild elephant populations.

Official figures show both the Thai wild and captive elephant populations are increasing. Captive elephants are sought because they generate ­income for their owners and camp operators. There is a legal market for them among camp owners and so breeding at this point in time is large-­scale and successful; a mature elephant is currently valued at around $56,000 (Schmidt-­Burbach, 2017), with anecdotal conversations mentioning prices sometimes in excess of $100,000. The Chiangmai Chamber of Commerce has calculated that an elephant can generate almost $50,000 per year for the local economy (including camp revenue, transportation, travel agent fees, etc.), also including the purchase of elephant fodder (few camps have land to grow their own) and other supplies.

There is no agreement on elephant breeding control due to strong ­demand from camp owners, interest by Western zoos in elephant ­breeding and the importance of captive elephants in Thai culture. Population ­increase is ­often presented as conservation of the species despite their current ­apparent ­fecundity in the wild, however unfounded. John feels this argument is the one most often made when he debates these issues with the elephant ­community at large.

Has Concern about Captive Elephant Welfare Increased?

Around 2010, awareness of poor conditions for captive animals at many tourist locations led to moves by Western origin country tour operators to introduce guidelines and monitoring for their management, with ­sanctions against those camps that did not accept or implement them. Soon the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) undertook a similar project for its many member companies with technical advice from the Born Free Foundation. Separate books of standards were published for particular ­animal species, including one for elephants. These early control systems, and in particular the monitoring of them, were not entirely based on elephant experience and needs, but reflected popular concerns; for example, about potential harm from riding on elephants or the cruelty thought to be entailed in training elephants to perform humanistic acts such as painting, which had attracted adverse media attention.

Sanctions were to exclude non-­compliant camps from the major tour ­operators’ lists of approved destination activities (this was partly in response to EU regulations, which had recently made tour operators legally liable for their clients’ welfare and have recently been updated (Commissioner for Justice Consumers and Gender Equality, 2018), and sustainability ­auditing companies such as Travelife for Tour Operators that began to hold ­operators liable for the sustainability of their own supply chain. The result was the ­unintended creation of a further set of unemployed elephants and ­elephant owners as visitor numbers to these camps began to fall off. Some less ­compliant camp operators responded by turning to the newly ­developing outb...