Conservation, Animal Wellbeing, and Indigenous Participation at an Elephant Sanctuary in Mondulkiri, Cambodia
Contribution to Society & Animals
by Liv Baker and Helen Kopnina
Dr. Liv Baker is a fellow and chair of the board of PAN Works, and an expert in animal wellbeing. In centralizing the wellbeing of individuals, Liv looks at the importance of individual animals in the health of their social groups, populations, cultures and environments. Along with teaching in the Department of Psychology at Hunter College in the US, Liv is the research director for the Mahouts Elephant Foundation and founding board member of the Compassionate Conservation Society, as well as scientific advisor for the Whale Sanctuary Project and Elephant Aid International. Dr. Baker also works with farmed animal sanctuaries to explore the lives of species outside of the sphere of industry.
Dr. Helen Kopnina is an anthropologist whose research focuses on biological conservation, environmental sustainability, and environmental education. She has taught at the Hague University of Applied Science in the Netherlands, and is a lecturer in Sustainable Business at Northumbria University in the UK. Helen centralizes environmental and animal ethics in her research and many writings.
We hope you enjoy this brief extract of their recent paper; the full article can be found here.
Human-Elephant Relationalities
As early as 4,000 years ago, cultures on the Indian subcontinent captured Asian elephants in attempts at domestication (Sukumar, 2003), beginning a long history of elephant captivity in rangelands (Campos-Arceiz, 2016). The history of Asian elephants throughout their rangeland shows that an animal can be at once venerated and exploited, as evidenced by iconography, texts, art, and architecture (Fennell, 2008; Sukumar, 2013). As Sukumar (2013) writes of the Asian elephant, “A species that at the same time … has been worshipped as a god and slaughtered for meat, ivory, carried us and our heaviest burdens” (p. 57). In Cambodia, for example, early depictions of elephants show their use as war transportation, as agricultural workers, and simultaneously as divine animals (Sukumar, 2003). The Terrace of the Elephants, part of the city of Angkor Thom, which flourished in the late 12th century AD during King Jayavarman VII’s reign, depicts the sculpture of Jayavarman’s returning army with elephants looking as glorious as people.
Antithetical to historical displays of veneration, the captive Asian elephant population was born of a brutal and oppressive history, as elephants were taken violently from their homes, subjected to “taming methods” and a life and legacy of incarceration (Larrson, 2017). The “conditioning” of juvenile elephants, for example, is a long-standing practice in this history. For many cultures, it has become a codified tradition entangling notions of domination, deification, and companionship (Locke, 2011). In many cases, this “conditioning” is known to be extremely harsh, breaking an elephant both physically and psychologically (Campos-Arceiz, 2016; see also Baker & Winkler, 2020a). Instruments used for conditioning and handling, such as the ankus (from Sanskrit aṅkuśa) are typically applied behind the ears, around the eyes or mouth where the skin is thin and well innervated. But, as Baker and Winkler (2020a) point out, “violence is not the complete picture of this relationship,” and the authors have personally witnessed “caring relations with elephants in certain Karen mahout communities [of Thailand]. … Such practices do exist even though they are poorly documented” (p. 3).
It has been long argued that elephants deserve moral consideration, in part because they are highly intelligent, eminently social, self-aware, and possessing advanced levels of self-reflexive consciousness and social organization (e.g., Fitzgerald, 2015). Importantly, these capabilities are true for elephants both captive and free (Baker & Winkler, 2020a). While there are recent attempts to decouple elephant lives and bodies from labor (Baker & Winkler, 2020a, b), an estimated 16,000 Asian elephants are used in logging, agriculture, for religious purposes, and primarily for the growing tourism industry (Dublin et al., 2006). Over recent decades, the estimated Asian elephant populations across 13 countries of South and Southeast Asia have been in steady decline (Alamgir et al., 2015; Steyn, 2016; Styles et al., 2004). Of the total Asian elephant population, captive elephants comprise about 25–35% (Leimgruber et al., 2008; Sukumar, 2003). Moreover, the boom of elephant tourism in certain countries has caused increased trafficking of wild elephants to serve the overall industry (Godfrey & Kongmuang, 2009; Nijman, 2014). In Cambodia alone, 2018 tourism statistics indicate an estimated six million international arrivals. Of these arrivals, regional visitors accounted for about 33%, largely from Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam; Chinese nationals accounted for another third, with visitors from Europe and North America accounting for the final third (ASEAN, 2019; Walter & Sen, 2018). While we do not have the statistics of visitors to elephant-specific tourist sites in Cambodia, visits to ecotourism-related sites were estimated to be about 75,000 (ASEAN, 2019).
Debate about the ethics of captivity, particularly in the context of elephant protection and conservation, involves complex issues of human rights, the protection of indigenous communities and nonhuman animals, as well as the distribution of benefits and burdens among different stakeholders. In regional conflicts, a need exists to balance the interests of humans and elephants (Baker & Winkler, 2020a; Parker et al., 2007; Wahed et al., 2016). These conflicts can involve crop loss, destruction of homes, human injury, and loss of life. Not dissimilarly, elephants can suffer harassment, loss of home, displacement, and injury or death (Parker et al., 2007; Wahed et al., 2016). The problematization of the human-elephant relationship is further complicated by specific region and context.
Any conflict between humans and wild animals is largely problematized exclusively to the needs and losses of local human communities, neglecting the scale of impact on the animals. Concerns about human rights expressed in connection to elephant protection and conservation (Baker & Winkler, 2020; Doak et al., 2015) include the murder of anti-poaching guards (Neme, 2014), the corporatization and militarization of conservation interventions, and infringement upon indigenous rights (Büscher, 2016; LeBaron, 2013). Simultaneously, many courageous local and indigenous communities protest environmental degradation caused by development projects with often deadly consequences (Global Witness, 2017; Kopnina, 2015; Shoreman-Ouimet & Kopnina, 2016).
Meanwhile, elephant numbers have been declining annually by thousands, slaughtered for their ivory (largely in Africa), skin (largely in Asia), and others hunted or culled to minimize human-elephant conflicts (Nijman, 2014; Steyn, 2016). As with other species, elephants are affected by climate disruption, dying of thirst in droughts (Chingono, 2019; Foley et al., 2008; Kopnina, 2016a), or because of habitat conversion (Boult et al., 2019).
In writing this article, our objective is not just understanding the situation on the ground in a particular context, but the need to further interrogate various — often clashing — ethical arguments involved in human-elephant relationalities. There is a robust literature on the history of human-elephant entanglement, including issues involving social and ecological justice (Baxter, 2005), as well as rights of humans and elephants within local contexts (Baker & Winkler 2020a,b; Barua, 2010; Hutchins & Keele, 2006; Kopnina, 2016a, 2016b). However, a need exists for general ethical frameworks that can guide decisions for elephant protection and conservation — not only in specific contexts such as the Cambodia case study presented here, but also more broadly in other regions of the world where human-elephant relationalities are found. Our article can be seen as a modest step toward an integrated ethical framework, based on principles that recognize elephant subjectivity and personhood, concerned with animal wellbeing and agency.
To aid the development of an ethical framework, the global community of stakeholders, including academics, ethicists, practitioners, and activists can look to examples and “lessons” from different localities that have found ways of resolving conflicts that provide at least some form of “justice” for both humans and nonhumans involved. Moreover, these case studies allow us to further explore the underlying ethics guiding human decisions towards elephants. We ask: Can win-win or at least good compromise solutions for local, indigenous livelihoods and animal wellbeing and protection be found?
The case study reported below presents a Cambodia-situated example of a locally driven elephant conservation initiative with potential for win-win scenarios for the local and indigenous people, the elephants, and their habitats. The case study focused on the Mondulkiri Project, a registered Cambodian NGO, which runs an elephant sanctuary in Mondulkiri province, supported by tourist activity. Through the case study we will touch upon the complexities of elephant protection, ownership, capture, and the complex challenge of linking traditional practices and cultural norms with pragmatic, modern-day necessities of income generation through tourism. We will addresss commonly raised ethical issues, considering possible areas of reconciliation between human and elephant interests in case of conflict or suffering. The discussion section focuses on what can be learned from in situ observations and interviews in terms of ways forward, toward human-elephant relationships of mutual or reciprocal wellbeing.
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