Today’s blog post was written by the award-winning British lawyer and fierce elephant welfare champion, Mr. Duncan McNair. We invite you to grab a cup of coffee and your phone so that you can take some important steps today.
In 2000, Andrea Taylor, a student nurse aged 20, was sitting with her father and her sister Helen in the front row of an elephant rodeo show at Nong Nooch Village Garden in Thailand. Dozens of Asian elephants and their babies were being forced to perform endless tricks and games at the point of a bullhook, a wooden pole with a fierce hook and spike at the end, used to stab, rip and terrify the animals into all manner of unnatural acts. Just the same, 8 or even 10 times a day, day after day without end, were the creatures being driven to perform for tourism fun and profits, to the point of exhaustion and despair. One mighty tusker elephant was stabbed one time too many. Helen saw its eyes roll, it braced, then rushed the small group and tore its tusks several times into Andrea’s chest and Helen’s abdomen. Andrea died two hours later. Helen and her father just survived their injuries. He died three years later, broken in spirit.
Twenty five years later, in early 2015 22 year old Spanish student Blanca Ojanguren García was violently killed following an attack by an elephant at another notorious tourist resort, also in Thailand, the ill-named “Elephant Care Centre” at Koh Yao. Washing an elephant seems a benign activity. But elephants are wild animals and remain so when brutally taken as babies into tourism, their protective mothers killed in front of them. They live a life of isolation, violence, injury and despair. Constant pressure and a continual press of people and demands upon them, enforced with stabbing and screaming, snaps their patience.
Brutal training and exploitation: the reality of elephant tourism in Asia. Asian elephants suffer for tourism. Support organizations fighting against elephant abuse in tourism.
In the quarter century between these two violent and fatal tragedies endless more elephant attacks on humans have occurred. Yet the market in brutal animal tourism ever expands, the UK playing a disproportionately large and shameful role. Today Nong Nooch Village Garden is enormous and expanding. Elephants and extraordinarily rare tigers are brutally treated for tourism fun. And today 120 UK travel companies are advertising trips to that brutal place.
I founded Save The Asian Elephants (STAE) ten years ago this month to try to change things, above all by the compulsion of law replacing decades of broken promises by unscrupulous businesses profiting from the horrors. Every year millions of vulnerable animals suffer agonising harm and death in exploitative tourist venues. STAE has so far identified 1,200 travel businesses in the UK profiting from advertising of 300 brutal elephant venues abroad. 800 humans, mostly tourists, have been killed when captive abused elephants are provoked, a further 1,000 catastrophically injured. In addition to elephants, other species such as apes, lions, tigers, bears, horses, donkeys, dolphins are amongst those brutally beaten, stabbed and worked to death. Many of these are species driven now to the brink of extinction. All the legacy of a reckless, unregulated market.
Elephants don’t willingly ride people on their backs. It is something they are brutally trained for. This abuse starts as early as six months old and it lasts for a lifetime. Do you see why we greatly oppose elephant rides and elephant shows or any sort of performance?
Photo credit: Save the Asian Elephants
STAE has pioneered world-first new measures into law to replace brutal animal tourism with ethical practices and compassionate sanctuaries. The Animals (Low-Welfare Activities Abroad) Act has attracted overwhelming public and Parliamentary backing when becoming law in 2023. When implemented, the new law will prohibit the sale or advertising of venues abroad that harm vertebrate animals. Other countries are then likely to introduce similar bans. But despite passing into law nearly 18 months ago the Act is still to be implemented. Why the delay?
STAE has built a coalition of over100 animal protection organisations from the UK and across the globe. They have contributed to a comprehensive and compelling dossier of evidence of the abusive animal tourism practices happening daily abroad and that are being currently advertised in the UK. Despite this detailed evidence that we have submitted to the UK’s Environment Secretary Steve Reed early last year, Government has still not implemented the law. Why is this?
Powerful commercial travel groups are delaying Government’s process of listing the banned activities by lobbying Government for the law’s intended protection to be watered down and dissipated away. They have proved the greatest obstacle to real change for the animals, and the humans too who lose their lives when the animals can take no more and attack. They are not keen to publicly engage. This is shown by the only invitee to a recent session of the Children’s Parliament in Westminster convened to discuss these issues failing to attend being ABTA – the Association of British Travel Agents. It’s thousands of corporate members sell 90% of package holidays out of the UK. Members pay ABTA a subscription to look after their commercial interests. Yet today STAE identifies 84 ABTA members promoting brutal elephant holidays alone, aside from those harming many other species. Attempts to persuade and encourage ethical practices have been in vain. The compulsion of law is long overdue.
It is STAE’s mission to see these measures introduced as law in all nations fostering an unscrupulous market in abusive animal tourism.
STAE NEEDS YOUR HELP AT THIS CRITICAL TIME. Please visit stae.org/help-us and:
1. Donate to STAE (QR code attached). We are all volunteers. We take no pay but incur many expenses in keeping our work going;
2. Sign our world-record petition;
3. Contact STAE to help!
Thank you!
See this short guide to the Act, its meaning, scope and global importance: Landmark New Animal Protection Law Explained - STAE
Save the Asian Elephants, CEO, Duncan McNair is an award-winning lawyer helping end cruel abuse and exploitation of Asian elephants.
Duncan McNair is a practising lawyer and founder and CEO of Save The Asian Elephants. In 2023 and again in 2024 STAE was named amongst the world’s 10 greatest charities for the impact of its work for elephants. Duncan was recently awarded the prestigious “Legal Hero of the Year 2024” by the Law Society of England and Wales for his legal and charitable work, out of 220,000 eligible lawyers.