Why we will never ride on elephants - Travel with Salima & Timo

On our trip through Southeast Asia, we had often the opportunity to ride elephants. Why we never did this, we explain to you in this post.

By their size one assumes that elephants can carry enormous loads. This is wrong. It is true that elephants lift heavy things with their trunks and use their own body weight to move something. Have you ever seen wild elephants 200-300 kilos on their backs? We neither.

Can you see on the next picture this pointed hoes and the bright scars stains on the head?

How elephants are "educated"
With every animal, whether from the wild or growing up in captivity, the will is first broken. The elephant leader (Mahoud) always shows the animal who has the upper hand. To this end the sensitive elephants with pointed metal hooks are hit on their most sensitive body parts. Often wounds are created that leave scarring in the animal for a lifetime.

Where do the captive animals come from?
We have learned that by the imprisonment and the bad conditions, it rarely comes to offspring. For this reason the animals come from the wild. Unfortunately, most of the mother and young animals are caught, since the will is much easier to break with them than with male elephaphants

For these reasons, we have never rode an elephant and will not do it anywhere on our journey around the world. The less we use this "attraction", the faster the suffering comes to an end.

A video showing how young elephants the will is broken. We hope it could inspire you to think.
here is a video how the spirit is getting broken by humans