Thoughts for would-be Mahouts
It begins the night before, thumb grazing a cracked phone screen from a hostel bunk that still smells of last week's bug spray. Photo after photo: bananas offered to grinning trunks, tourists in cheap disposable elephant pants, all smiling Instagram influencers. You open five tabs, close three, reopen two, and end up no closer to booking - or not booking - than when you started.
Sleep is thin, it's far too early for a backpacker. It's the first time you've been cold in Asia as you hold on to the outside benches of a jeep, the driver's radio playing Thai love songs. Outside the windows, the world slips from neon hotel signs to shanty farmhouses. At the camp gate a handmade sign - SANCTUARY painted in jungle-green, glistens in the morning dew.
The kid who welcomes you calls it a "rescue sanctuary", his boss later calls it a "camp", and the ad you finally chose after that late-night scroll still insists on "ethical experience". Different words for what is, physically, the same patch of earth: an open arena of dried mud, two feeding platforms, a shallow creek, and a bare-bones house.
You have paid good money to stand here, shoes covered in dirt already, waiting for a creature the size of a truck to decide whether you're worth meeting.
And here she comes, morning sun flashes through the trees as Dao emerges, her head bigger than a yoga ball, ears freckled like old maps. Her mahout perched on her neck sings foreign syllables to her, riding her towards you.
The camp brochure called you "mahout for a day", said you would learn ancient commands, maybe even ride bare-necked the way the professionals do. But the pamphlet forgot to answer some lingering doubts sitting with you now.
By even being here do we risk adding weight to a long history of burdens to these creatures?
The word mahout comes from Sanskrit roots; it names a lineage more than a job, a pact that often begins when a boy and a calf are both small enough to fit under the same thatched roof. A true mahout is a life companion - a keeper, pilot, medic, older brother, and sometimes jailer. It's a bond that can last fifty years, long after the tourist return home.
History surrounds these elephants. Up until 1989 she'd have hauled teak logs down steep Thai mountains. The nationwide logging ban pushed families like this mahout's from forests into desperate tourism. Then came 2020, borders slammed shut, buses rusted in parking lots, and mahouts begged on the streets for fruit to keep them alive. At least 85 "sanctuaries" in northern Thailand shut down, thousands lost work, and elephants risked literal starvation. The pandemic underlined the fragile bits with a thick, black marker.
When the tourists returned, the marketplace looked the same on the surface - same khaki uniforms, same "sanctuary" signs hand-painted in English - but something underneath had soured. An audit of venues between 2010 and 2020 clocked a 135% jump in elephants kept in the worst conditions.
And therein lies the challenge, no doubt most tourists will do anything to avoid contributing to inhumane treatment of elephants, but how do we have a hope of telling the difference across hundreds of near identical experiences?
Maybe start with the hardware and do the math. A red flag is a rust-flecked steel howdah (saddle) bolted square onto a spine, or a chain coiled around one ankle at night. Can you see a metal hook blunted by age on the belt of the mahout? How many tour groups get packed through here each day? And if the entry fee costs less than a plate of Pad Kra Pao, ask yourself who's eating the discount - because it won't be you.
In the end, you may still climb aboard. You may stay on the ground instead just to watch these animals rumble through a river and demolish sugarcane with uncanny dexterity. Your single choice won't rewrite centuries of commerce and culture - but perhaps multiply that choice by a few thousand backpackers and the balance starts to shift.
The elephant you came to meet now stops before you, skin dusty and wrinkly, eyes the colour of burnt sugar. The mahout murmurs a low command, dances up with the muscle memory of someone who's done it since before he could shave, and climbs aboard Dao. Then he looks at you, eyebrows raised: your turn?
The forest holds its breath, your shoes are still muddy, your doubts clouded by the lack of sleep, but the decision is yours, and that at least feels honest.
