'shocking cruelty' towards elephants at Jungle Book
According to a charity, some travel agencies have been booking trips for UK tourists to a resort in India. The resort is based on The Jungle Book, but the treatment of elephants there is really bad and counts as animal cruelty. A video from The Independent shows a big elephant being made to shower tourists with its trunk, and a handler with a big stick making it repeat it over and over again. Elephants at the resort are always chained by the front and back legs and tourists can also ride them – up to three people at a time. The resort is in Kulem, Goa.
Recently, a video captured by The Independent showed the repeated poking of an elephant with a bullhook, which has caused shock and outrage from the founder of Wildlife SOS. This heartbreaking footage reaffirms the importance of raising awareness about the cruelty involved in training captive elephants for tourism, rides, and manual labor. Unfortunately, beatings and restraints are often used to break the spirit of the animal, in order to train them to submit to their handlers. The Jungle Book resort, where the elephant in the video was under the care of TUI (formerly Thompson’s), has not taken any action to address these concerns. Despite their introduction of a ban on sales for attractions involving elephant rides and other forms of physical contact with wild animals in 2016, the resort still offers stays to tourists. Kartick Satyanarayan, the founder of Wildlife SOS, emphasized that commercially successful elephant attractions only increase the demand for elephant trafficking, poaching, and brutality.