These social animals deserve much better

Over the past 10 years, I have visited many elephant camps worldwide to study the elephants' welfare condition. In Thailand alone, my team identified 160 elephant venues and visited 150 of them in 2015.

In a camp, I saw a relatively young elephant, maybe 6 or 7 years old, chained to the ground with an extremely short chain, which allowed her to move for maybe just 50 centimeters on each side. She was moving back and forth in clear distress until an adult female elephant that was chained nearby reached out with her trunk. The adult elephant could just reach the younger one's head to provide comfort.

I do not know if the adult elephant was the younger one's mother, aunt or relative, but it revealed the stressful and unnatural conditions these complex, social animals are forced to live in.