It involves a lot of psychological injury in the form of stealing the baby from its mother. Elephants are dependent on their moms until approximately the age of 7. By then, males begin to drift away and go their own way; females stay with their female relatives for life. When you see herds of elephants in the wild, they are female family members along with juvenile males.
What happens to the babies afterwards is utterly brutal. There is a lot of stress posturing, beatings, and deprivation. The process is called "breaking,' to break their spirit. There are videos of this, but I can't bring myself to think about it, much less post it.
Lek Chaillert of Elephant Nature Park rescues elephants from these horrific conditions. About a year ago, she rescued a baby who was so traumatized by the "breaking" process that he was catatonic. She was able to rescue him because he was no good to his human captors. It took months for him to even start acting normal, and he is slowly healing.
I don't mean to be a wet blanket or a Debby Downer, but I am so passionate about this. Animals are not here for our amusement and it's high time we stop exploiting them. Websites like Trip Advisor are finally coming around and steering people away from places that exploit elephants like riding them and other "amusements." This quote from Henry Beston in his book The Outermost House is so eloquent:
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
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