Elephant Training Camps

This is where violence towards elephants begins. "Domestication" is a fancy term to describe how elephants are abused to make them give up their instincts and family ties and become dependent on humans. The training process consists of first trapping them to isolate them from their families, then starving and physically abusing them for an extended period of time (often months) until they're too weak to fight.

Capture

Elephants are captured in one of several ways:

  • With nooses: elephants are made to trip and are caught in nooses hidden in the ground, or simply lassoed.
  • Pits: Deep pits (taller than an elephant's height) are dug and covered with leaves and branches. Elephants are driven towards and made to fall into these.
  • Using tame elephants to lure wild ones: in elephant communities the females are the matriarchs; herds implicitly trust them. This makes it easy to trick wild elephants into following a tame female elephant.
  • Similar to pits, elephants are driven towards stockades (holding pens) where they are held unable to escape.
Baby elephant captured in pit
Captured elephant being led to camp by domesticated elephant

Domestication

After capture comes domestication, which is really a synonym for forcing the elephants into submission. Methods used include a combination of:

  • Food deprivation: starvation, malnutrition and mono-diet (which deprives elephants of the nutrients they get from their varied forest diet), all result in weakening the body and psyche of the elephant, including causing limb and skin abnormalities that stay with them for the rest of their lives.
  • Torture: elephants are beaten with hooks and sticks, hosed with pressurized water, and so on, to make them submissive.
  • Confinement in small spaces: sometimes enclosures as small as a 12 feet x 12 feet are used, with no space for an elephant to even turn around.

As a result of frequent poor quality of diets, several of the elephants also die during captivity due to health and digestive problems.

Elephant being trained
An elephant being broken

Transportation

Elephants are transported from the forest to the training schools, training schools to markets, and markets to their final destination (temples, tourist entertainment companies, etc.). Often the transport is inhumane, violently forcing the elephants into trucks and lorries or being herded, pulled and dragged by other elephants.

Captured elephant loaded into a lorry
Elephant chained and transported

List of Elephant Training Camps

Here are some elephant capturing and training schools. Each page enables you to communicate your concerns to the training school.

The list is not exhaustive. If you know of other organizations involved in elephant training that are not mentioned here, please help us add it to the list.

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