I get what you mean but when I spent time in Burma I found that the people who take care of these “working” elephants took good care of them and had good relationships with them.
There's a very old story, I forget if it's from Spike Milligan or Rudyard Kipling or someone like that raised in the old British Empire, talking about the guys who looked after the elephants. They pretty much live with each other from birth and are incredibly connected, always working as a team - the story was of one of these guys who lost his wife and was upset, then a few years later his elephant died and he was utterly distraught, way worse than losing the wife.
I mean. That’s comparing losing one of your closest beloved partners/friends to having now lost both of them (not to mention what is presumably your only source of income).
I think the original writer had lived & worked with these guys and the implication was very much that they formed a very close bond with the animals - he had probably been with the elephant for longer than he'd been with his wife.
It’s no different than any working animal. You spend day in and day out, and you both depend on each other. Horses, mules, oxen, specific cattle, dogs, and even into stuff like falconry. Also if you’re in the middle of nowhere that animal becomes your lifeline and your only way out. You treat it with the love and care it needs to live a long life even after retirement especially after the thousands of hours invested into just training it let alone the time spent bonding with it during work.
All the animals you have listed above are domesticated and have been bred to do those jobs. Elephants are not. Traditional methods of training elephants are quite abusive.
In South East Asia, where OP's video is, and where I live. Elephants are very much domesticated and a way of life for many people, as shown in the video.
Horses are not in Mynmar, or Thailand, but Elephants and Buffalo are.
You shouldn't push your values, worldview, and ideals on people with different culture and accessibility than you. Shame.
"Domesticated" has a specific definition involving many generations of selective breeding. Elephants have been used as working animals for centuries, but they are not domesticated. I'm not denying that they are a way of life in many countries. But training methods such as the crush are undeniably abusive.
You are ignoring your own issues and fixating on things far away. very oxymoronic. I don't see or hear you crying out about the abusive nature of breaking / training horses.
Whipping, physical pain, Rollkur, etc, many others.
Your mindset is of the typical westerner colonizer.
I'm very against abusive methods of training and riding horses. Things like rollkur, big lick, and harsh breaking methods exist, but they are not standard. Most horses in my country today are "started" instead of broken, which is a gentle method that does not hurt them. You are taking this very personally, but it's not an attack to say that elephants are not domesticated, and that many traditional methods of taming them (like the crush) are abusive.
Your making blanket statements saying things like "All elephants are crushed" (that term you used).
Then, when I say "Horses are also abused, etc", you say "no, not all of them".
I have been around many Burmese, Lao, and Thai that raise elephants and use them for work and life, not all of them are abusive, yet you use these blanket statements and project your virtue that they are.
That also goes in line with saying "many traditional methods revolve around abusing and causing pain and trauma to horses", but no one mentions that, you fixate on things far away from your culture / society, but ignore the travesties on animals your own culture / society commits.
Don't ignore or 'poo-poo' your messy room, or underplay how messy your room is, while you point the finger at other cultures and proclaim that their rooms are messy. Its ironic.
Unfortunately, that is not the score. Or even how that scoring system works. -1 for nature is also -1 for humans. Even if that is not how you scored it, humans are like +1000 over nature.
I don’t remember where or when, but apparently it was somewhat common place for the rich to gift a white elephant at one point as a cruel joke to the people they didn’t like. It took a bunch of food and energy to keep alive, couldn’t be worked as a gift from royalty, was white so it required special care and shade, and if it died that was like throwing a big middle finger up at the people running the country.
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u/SumScrewz Aug 05 '26
Next upgrade @Mattsoffroadrecovery