Rewriting the Relationship Between Elephant and Keeper
Length: • 10 mins
Annotated by Mark Isero
David Yesa is the keeper of Warunee, a 65-year-old elephant rescued from the forest logging business.
04.16.2025
Words by Nicola Sebastian
Photographs by Kin Chan Coedel
In Thailand, elephant welfare is often pitted against Thai culture and history. One Indigenous elephant keeper offers a glimpse of a third way.
Once upon a time, Human and Elephant lived in a house as siblings. One day, their Mother and Father told them they were going on a trip and warned them not to open a magical bamboo box. Unable to contain his curiosity, Elephant opened it anyway, and out flew a white fly, which went up his nose. Elephant sneezed and sneezed, and with every sneeze, his nose grew longer. It got so long that Elephant couldn’t fit in the house, and had to move outside, where the animals lived.
But Elephant still wanted to help his family. He asked his father to put a saddle on him so that he could help carry rice from the fields. Elephant worked and worked, until he grew so tired that he asked his father why he made him work so hard. Instead of giving him an answer, Father plucked out his tongue and turned it upside down, so that Elephant could never speak again.
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The symbol of the Thai monarchy, the fabled reincarnation of Buddha, and the ubiquitous motif printed on the Thai pants beloved by backpackers, the Asian elephant has become synonymous with Thailand. And yet the existence of these giants presents a paradox: revered and protected on one hand, commodified and abused on the other.
In 2019, before Covid-19 cratered international tourism, Thailand was the eighth-most-visited country in the world, its 39.8 million international visitors generating 20% of the country’s GDP. Elephants are Thailand’s biggest attraction: The World Animal Protection Agency estimates that, before the pandemic, elephant tourism brought in a revenue of $581-770 million USD every year.
The boom of elephant tourism has been accompanied by backlash, with reports surfacing of animal abuse and a glaring lack of government regulation. Since the 2000s, advocacy for better elephant welfare has been raised by international animal rights groups and local advocates such as Lek Chailert of Elephant Nature Park and Soraida Salwala of the Friends of the Asian Elephant Hospital, the first of its kind.
In response to the criticism, the Thai government passed its first animal welfare act in 2014, and effectively halted the illegal capture of wild elephants. Tourism companies stopped promoting elephant rides and shows; instead, they began to advertise “ethical” elephant experiences, promising “no hook, no chain, no riding.”
The debate around elephant tourism is deeply polarizing, pitting elephant welfare against Thai tradition. Thai law mirrors this duality, governing its wild and captive elephants as if they were entirely different creatures. Wild elephants are treated as an endangered species and have lived in Thailand’s national parks protected by strict conservation laws since 1921. Its captive elephants, on the other hand, are working animals, governed by the department in charge of livestock. Even though Thailand has more captive elephants than anywhere else in Asia, today, the country’s 3,837 captive elephants only slightly outnumber the wild ones, caught as they are between a fading tradition and a booming industry, between Thailand’s growing urban sprawl and its dwindling forests. Ensuring elephant welfare isn’t as simple as setting all of them free.
35-year-old elephant keeper Teerapong Sakdamrongsi (or Non Chai, as everyone calls him) has a perspective that pushes beyond the simple binary of elephant welfare versus Thai tradition. In 2019, he created Elephant Freedom Village, a community-based elephant camp in northern Thailand, where tourists can experience the way his people, the Karen, have been working with elephants for thousands of years. It was Non Chai who shared the myth about the elephant.
“The meaning of that fairytale,” he explained, “is that the elephant and the Karen people are siblings. The elephant is family.”
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As long as there have been elephants working in Thailand, mahouts, or elephant keepers, have been training and caring for them. Yet little has been heard from the mahouts themselves. Their relationship with elephants melds lifelong intimacy with ever-present danger, and it offers a more lived understanding of this long, entangled history by framing it in terms of labor.
Non Chai has been working with elephants since he was 15 years old. “My dream was to be a Muay Thai fighter,” he said. “But when I was little, I followed my uncle to work at the big camps, to take care of my grandfather’s elephants.” He didn’t finish secondary school, eager to do his part to help his family.
The working conditions at the riding camps were uneven at best. “I saw elephants ridden too much,” said Non Chai, but “we keepers also worked too hard.”
He described a grueling daily schedule at one of the bigger camps: “We wake up early in the morning, feed the elephant, and the elephant starts work at 7-8 a.m. By 12 p.m. the elephant’s work is done, but the keeper’s work is not—every keeper has to go and cut the elephant’s food.” The 20 or so mahouts would then jump on a truck and head to a faraway field where they’d cut enough corn stalks to feed their elephants—somewhere between 441 to 661 pounds a day per elephant. Then, they would load all of it onto the truck, usually arriving back at the camp quite late. Non Chai’s monthly salary of 7,000 baht (around $196 US dollars) had to cover his expenses as well as the elephants’.
For decades, Non Chai’s grandfather and uncle worked with their elephants in logging camps in the mountain forests of northern Thailand. To keep Thailand from being colonized, the Thai king offered generous timber concessions to the foreign powers lurking at his borders, but this came at the expense of the Karen’s homeland. When floods and landslides pushed the Thai government to ban logging in 1989, less than 28% of Thailand’s original forests remained, and 2,000 mahouts and their elephants lost their jobs. Some resorted to begging on streets and in temples, others offered elephant rides to tourists. And when elephant tourism scaled into an industry, it reconfigured the way elephants and mahouts worked together. To keep up with the demand, business owners hired mahouts to work with elephants they didn’t own and hadn’t developed a relationship with, which made abuse more common.
Non Chai, on the other hand, was always fighting with his bosses on behalf of his elephants. When the riding chairs gave his elephants wounds, he brought them into the forest for weeks without pay so they could heal. Eventually he left to search for better working conditions. One place did bareback riding, but still overworked the elephants; another place didn’t give his elephants enough space nor exercise.
So in 2013, he decided to go home. “I went back to my village to keep my culture,” he said. “To create elephant habitat. To be the voice for the elephant keeper.” His dream was to start his own elephant camp—and to do it the Karen way.
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According to the oral history of Non Chai’s family, their elephants have been passed down for seven generations. Because elephants live as long as humans do—up to 80 years or more in captivity—their family trees are intertwined, generation to generation, so that he refers to the elephant his grandmother raised as simply Grandmother Elephant.
It took a few years and many challenges, but in 2019, Non Chai was able to bring five of his family’s elephants home to his camp, Elephant Freedom Village. There, the animals spend their days foraging in the village’s community forest and taking baths in the river, accompanied by their keepers. Visitors pay to “help” the mahouts feed, exercise, and bathe their elephants as they normally would, while learning about Karen culture. At night, the elephants are brought to a paddock, to keep them safe from pesticide-sprayed crops and disgruntled neighbors.
“The existence of these giants presents a paradox: revered and protected on one hand, commodified and abused on the other.”
Nicola Sebastian, writer
Non Chai and his family don’t identify with the term “mahout.” They interpret it to mean “ma-hook,” referring to the bullhook, or angkhut, traditionally used by mahouts, which has come to symbolize the exploitation and abuse of elephants. If you know and trust an elephant, Non Chai explained, then the bull hook is a last resort.
The bullhook also signals another form of oppression: the systemic discrimination experienced by the mahouts themselves. Being a mahout was once a respected vocation—although its English definition is elephant driver, “mahout” originally stems from the Sanskrit mahāmātra, or a man of high rank. Mahout is not a Karen word, anyway, so in English, Non Chai calls himself a “keeper.” In their tongue, he is a gutchaw gwah, an elephant watcher.
In Karen culture, elephants are working animals, but they’re also more than that. The community performs many of the same ceremonies for elephants as they do for people, bestowing on them family heirlooms like gold coins and traditional handwoven clothing. “The elephants have more heirlooms than the people!” Non Chai joked.
In response to Western media’s often negative portrayal of mahouts, he began making his own content on TikTok and YouTube. “In Thailand we have so many news about wild elephants,” he said in one, speaking directly to the camera. “They attack farmer, destroy farmland, or even kill people. And people attack them back...We have to find a way to live together.”
In one video, his cousin put out a big plate of fruit as thanks to a couple of elephants working at another elephant camp who came home for a visit. In another, a woman prepared an herbal medicine for an elephant that just gave birth. In a third, Non Chai explained how to isolate and care for a bull elephant in musth (an annual mating season that makes elephants aggressive and unpredictable, which is how most elephant-caused deaths happen).
PETA has circulated a viral video of baby elephants being tied and beaten by a group of men, describing it as the traditional Karen approach to elephant training, stoking opposition to elephant keeping. But such methods are unnecessary for captive-born elephants accustomed to human touch in Non Chai’s experience. Most of his videos show him and other villagers playing with baby elephants, especially one named Sierra. Born during the pandemic, Sierra followed Non Chai around like a puppy, and in the years after, the two grew inseparable. “Even when I go swimming,” he remembered, “when I put on my clothing, she waits for me. And when I walk, she follows.” In another video, he showed the camera how he taught her to lie down: He would lie down himself and give her sunflower seeds as a reward when she copied him.
“The first [reason for training] is to let the elephants enjoy their life,” he said, and the second is health care. He likens it to how training a dog affords it greater freedom. “After you train the elephant, you can hike, do activity without a chain, and... you can tell them to follow you back home.” Non Chai’s use of mostly positive and limited negative reinforcement sounds a lot like the method recommended by humane training organizations.
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In his book Elephants and Kings, historian Thomas R. Trautmann makes the case that humans putting elephants to work rewrote the relationship between the two species. Previously, they clashed over shared territory: Elephants raided crops, and humans hunted elephants for meat and ivory. But with the “invention of the war elephant” in India in 1000-500 BC, elephants came under the protection of kings. Trautmann notes that, paradoxically, the Asian elephant has gone extinct in regions where they weren’t put to work and that many protected forests in which wild elephants now roam were originally preserved for war elephants.
But multi-species ethnographies such as those by social anthropologist Nicolas Lainé argue that some Indigenous peoples have very likely been working with elephants since before elephants became instruments of war. Their concept of labor, though, looked nothing like today’s capital-driven system. More communal than commodified, the elephants’ work was integrated with daily life: farming, bringing in the harvest, pulling logs, transporting people.
The elephant myth that Non Chai shared suggests that the elephantine dilemma is not new: Elephants have always presented a paradox to the people who’ve lived alongside them. In trying to explain their hardships as working animals, the myth contends with the reality that elephants are intelligent, even if they cannot speak our language; that they are family, even if they are not human.
In leaving Elephant’s question to his Father unanswered, the fable leaves the paradox of human-elephant relationships unresolved. Yet after generations of synchronizing their lives through lore and labor, the Karen people and their elephants have created what amounts to an entangled culture, a system through which they have learned to coexist.
In many ways, they share struggles, too. Thanks to the U.S.-imported idea that wilderness should be “pure,” when logging was banned, the Royal Forestry Department relocated many Indigenous forest-dwelling communities, demonizing them as squatters. As long as Indigenous tongues are kept upside down, their knowledge and practices will continue to be erased—under-valued and under-utilized. Today, they live in a legal limbo, unable to start businesses like elephant camps on their own land, and more than half a million Indigenous people are still waiting to be recognized as Thai citizens.
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In early 2024, Baby Sierra passed away from a double infection of elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus, a disease that’s highly fatal to young elephants. She got it from her older brother Valentino despite being separated from him after he got sick. Non Chai rushed her to the free government elephant hospital several hours away. While her brother survived, she didn’t make it. Sierra was 4 years old.
Non Chai fell quiet when asked to talk more about her. He has been pouring himself into camp improvements so that something like that never happens again. He made a memorial video for her, too, filled with clips of their last days, and their best ones: Non Chai and Sierra wrestling, Sierra plopping herself on his lap, Sierra trying to “rescue” him when a fellow keeper pretended to kidnap him, Non Chai gathering fruit for her to eat in the forest.
She died during a full moon, on the Buddhist Day of the Dead. “My parents say that when elephant die on [that day], that means someone took her soul,” explained Non Chai. The Karen believe that humans and elephants have 32 souls, or kla.
After death, souls can become trapped, so the village performed a ceremony with incense and candles to guide Sierra’s soul to heaven, Non Chai explained. “We say sorry, if we did something wrong...because we are human...and hopefully we have good memory of each other, and we can be born again.”
In this final ceremony, the ritual cycle of Karen stewardship is completed: Having begun with permission and sustained with thanksgiving, it settles, for the time being, with forgiveness.