What does Phajaan mean?

Put simply, Phajaan is the process of breaking an elephant’s spirit and crushing their soul. Phajaan literally means crushing in Thai. It’s a form of sustained and endless torture designed to bend a baby elephant to the will of the humans who have captured them.

How an elephant is trained?

— Once trapped, the youngest, easiest to train, elephants, were lassoed and tied to stakes, and unsuitable animals freed. — Pulled into tight, wooden “crush” enclosures, the elephants were tamed into obedience by a method called the “phaajaan”, or breaking of the spirit, which is still used today.

Do bullhooks hurt elephants?

Yes, in two ways. Bullhooks physically harm elephants. An elephant’s skin ranges in thickness from one inch across the back and hindquarters, to paper-thin around the eyes and mouth, inside the ears, and at the anus. And these are precisely the same locations elephant handlers apply the bullhook.

How do you break a baby elephant?

The concept is simple. When an elephant is a baby, you tie them to chains or ropes that are too strong for a baby elephant to break through. As they struggle against the rope, it burns and tears into their skin, causing pain as they try to free themselves. To avoid that bad feeling, they stop trying to escape.

What is an elephant trainer called?

Mahouts, often known as elephant handlers, or by other terms, such as oozie in Myanmar, work closely with captive Asian elephants in elephant range countries. This work usually involves taking responsibility for just one elephant.

Can elephants crush humans?

You’re not being attacked and killed for food, and you’re less likely to be bitten and clawed to death. Instead, elephants are one of the few animals that can actually crush you. Even when having sex, elephants can hurt one other with their weight.

Do zoos use bullhooks?

The bullhook — a rod with a blunt or pointed hook at one end — has been used for centuries to get elephants to do humans’ bidding. And although the tool is now associated with some of the worst abuses of the hulking animals and prohibited in several cities and states, it has remained in use at top American zoos.

What is an elephant crush box?

The mahouts can then be seen using hooks, sticks, and nails to hurt the calves, who are often bound, isolated and left without food and water. One technique to get them to submit involves chaining them by the neck and ankles to a “crush box,” where the short ropes give them almost no mobility.

Can elephants be friends with humans?

Peachey stated that elephants are almost predisposed to cooperate and work with humans as long as they are treated with respect and sensitivity.

What is phajaan and how is it done?

Phajaan is the local term for the process of breaking an elephants spirit. This isn’t done easily or quickly and involves capturing and torturing baby elephants. Many elephants even commit suicides to escape this awful process by standing on their truck to suffocate themselves.

What is the phajaan ceremony?

The ‘ceremony’ of Phajaan is said to have originated from the belief that the tribe’s shaman can separate the spirit of an elephant from it’s body, in effect driving the willful and wild spirit out of an elephant and leaving it under the control of it’s handlers, or mahouts.

How can phajaan be stopped?

The only way phajaan and similar acts of abuse will ever be stopped is if we make an active choice to prevent them from happening.

Why does phajaan break the elephant?

Basically, Phajaan breaks the elephant so they become submissive and can be trained to serve in a profitable industry. Tourism and logging are two main types of work elephants are trained for. Without breaking an elephant first, training them would be much harder or even impossible.