I must have been four or five when an old family album left me with a question I would carry for years.

I was sitting with my grandfather, looking through photographs from one of his trips to Assam. He had been posted in Badarpur, in southern Assam, close to the borders of Tripura and Meghalaya. From there, he travelled to Kaziranga several times.

My grandfather would return to those trips in conversation for years. There had been an elephant safari too, something that was considered a fairly ordinary part of a wildlife holiday at the time.

I remember being fascinated by the photographs. But one thing puzzled me.

My grandfather had told me that Kaziranga was the elephants’ home and that visitors were only guests there. In my four-year-old logic, that raised another question: if we were entering their home and riding another elephant to see them, would the elephants know we were guests? And if we were guests in their home, who was supposed to look after us?

I did not have the vocabulary to understand animal behaviour or captive-elephant welfare then. I only knew that the question would not leave me, and I kept asking about it.

Eventually, I somehow convinced my grandfather to stop taking elephant safaris.

He continued visiting Kaziranga, drawn by his love for photographing wildlife, a fascination that was not nearly as common among the people around us then. But the rides stopped.

Years later, that childhood question feels even more relevant: what does a tourist experience look like from the elephant’s side?

That question sits at the centre of Wildlife SOS’s RefuseToRide campaign, which asks travellers to reconsider one of the most familiar wildlife-tourism experiences in India: sitting on an elephant for a ride.

The Better India recently spoke to Dr Kartick Satyanarayan, co-founder and CEO of Wildlife SOS, to understand why the organisation believes refusing that ride matters.

What happens before an elephant becomes ‘rideable’? 

For the person climbing onto an elephant, the experience may last only a short while. Wildlife SOS asks tourists to consider everything that may have happened before that moment.

According to the organisation, many elephants used in tourism are captured from the wild as calves and separated from their mothers and herds. The young elephant is restrained, isolated and subjected to deprivation and beatings until fear makes it submit to human commands.

The tourist’s few minutes on the animal form one part of a much longer story. There is the process that makes an elephant “rideable”, followed by the conditions in which the animal lives and works after tourists leave.

Understanding those parts of the elephant’s life changes the question from whether a ride looks enjoyable to what the experience demands from the animal carrying it.

What a tourist ride asks of an elephant’s body 

An elephant’s body is........

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