Animals (PETA) launched the issue of animal welfare in Thailand’s tourism
industry when they received a video of a young elephant enduring the“paah jaan”
ceremony. After Thai officials did not act on the matter, PETA launched an
“Abusive Thailand: Elephant Cruelty”campaign in Australia (Cohen 2015 : 170)
and demanded that the practice be stopped. PETA then called for a total boycott of
tourism to Thailand until the Thai government enacted laws prohibiting the use of
elephants for commercial entertainment purposes. PETA claimed that the elephants
were tortured to make them perform tricks in circuses and shows as well as pro-
viding rides for tourists (Cohen 2015 ; Duffy and Moore 2011 ; Kontogeorgopoulos
2009a,b). Elephants had become an integral part of Thailand’s tourism industry by
2002, making PETA’s campaign a direct threat to the industry (Cohen 2015 ). Cohen
( 2015 : 176) explained that“when outsider activists introduced the discourse of
animal rights and welfare into the Thai public sphere, they met with incompre-
hension by the representatives of the elephant training establishments, who claimed
that the alleged‘cruelty’in taming young elephants is part of an ancient tradition,
even as the higher authorities sought, somewhat disingenuously, to deny the
exercise of any cruelty in the taming of young elephants and condemned the
allegations of cruelty as vicious recriminations.”
Kontogeorgopoulos (2009a,b: 16) argues that“Domestic and particularly for-
eign NGO’s interested in elephants or animal rights more generally have hurt their
cause by unnecessarily antagonizing elephant camps with the strident tone and
inflexibility of their criticisms,”while Cohen ( 2013 : 281) asserts that international
welfare NGOs must be careful in their impositions of Western ethical standards
upon a non-Western culture. Western animal rights and welfare NGOs view
Thailand’s captive elephants as having intrinsic value, whereas Thai culture views
captive elephants from a utilitarian perspective (Duffy and Moore 2011 ; Cohen
2008 ). Cohen ( 2013 : 278) argued that“the concept of‘animal abuse,’as broadly
conceived in the contemporary West, is external to Buddhist attitudes to animals in
present-day Thailand; hence the criticism that animals are‘abused’is incompre-
hensible to many Thais.”
Western NGOs call for tourists not to support any forms of animal entertainment
in the form of shows or riding opportunities with the end goal that captive wildlife
will be released back into the wild where“they belong”or to be kept in sanctuaries,
free from their work in entertaining tourists. The problem with this is that captive
elephants are not“wild,”and the great majority would not be able to adapt to a wild
habitat. Additionally, there is insufficient space to accommodate all of Thailand’s
captive elephants in its existing national (Duffy and Moore 2011 : 294). Thailand’s
forest land reduced from 80% in 1957 to less than 20% in 1992, effectively
destroying wild elephant habitat (Schliesinger 2010 : 19). This is a barrier, among
several others, that many animal welfare NGOs fail to acknowledge in their“keep
animals in the wild”rhetoric (Duffy and Moore 2011 ). Duffy and Moore ( 2011 :
598) argue against the idea that all elephants should be in the wild because“it fails
to constructively engage with the everyday realities of elephant conservation in
Thailand.”
9.6 Role of Western NGOs 133