Among the Elephants

Of the 4,000 Asian elephants in captivity in Thailand, only a dozen or so live in their natural forest habitat, able to interact with their wild peers. These select few are tamed by an Indigenous group called the Karen (pronounced kuh-REN), for whom the animals were a form of transportation through the dense, nearly impassable forest.

It’s the Karen’s complex, social relationships with the elephants that enable the two species to live together, says Rebecca Winkler, a sixth-year doctoral student in sociocultural anthropology who has spent the past decade observing the ways people and elephants co-exist.

Much of the research on the interactions between humans and elephants centers around what’s often called “human-elephant conflict,” a phrase Winkler dislikes. It describes incidents where elephants and people cross paths—an elephant wandering across a road, for example, or munching on a farmer’s crops—and someone winds up injured or dead.

Researchers and governments often assume such conflict is inevitable when people and elephants share land, Winkler says, a view that, in various parts of the world, has led to one or both species being forcibly removed from their homes. But Winkler’s work shows that social relationships between the two matter and can lead to them living together peacefully, even cooperatively. “I’m trying to document that knowledge,” Winkler says, “to push back on this idea that it’s impossible to cohabitate with elephants.”

Seeing Elephants as Individuals

Winkler first went to Thailand in 2015 as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, where she majored in biology with a focus on conservation biology. She connected with the Mahouts Elephant Foundation—named for the Karen people who care for their elephants—which rescues these animals from the tourism industry and forges partnerships between the Karen and researchers like Winkler.

After graduating, Winkler returned to Thailand several times through work with conservation nonprofits, often observing other researchers along with the elephants. On her visits, she saw firsthand how a project’s success often hinged more on cultural and social dynamics than on academic elements such as study design.

“The research tools used to study elephants were coming from a biological, natural sciences background and not engaging with things like history and social science,” Winkler says. “If you were trying to understand complicated conflict happening in a human society, you wouldn’t just ignore history.”

Conservation biology methods often work best at the species level, meaning they’re not well-suited to tracking the nuances of individual elephant behavior. So, when Winkler decided to pursue her doctorate degree, she realized she wanted to study elephants differently: the way researchers typically study people.

I’m trying to document that knowledge to push back on this idea that it’s impossible to cohabitate with elephants.

Winkler argues there’s much to learn from looking at, for instance, how elephants, much like humans, rely heavily on their relationships and information passed between generations, or how their brain develops after birth in response to their social interactions and environment. Elephants can also remember specific events from their lives—called “episodic memory,” something uncommon in the animal kingdom—even as they live into their 80s. A long-running study of wild elephants in Kenya, for example, found that older elephants tended to react aggressively to colors that matched clothes worn by hunters years prior.

Like the African elephants haunted by the past, many of the Thai elephants have also lived through difficult experiences that affect their behavior. The past 60 years have seen armed fighting, bombings, and environmental destruction associated with mining. The elephants and the Karen people have gone through all of this together.

Winkler wanted to look at all such facets. This led her to anthropology, and to Penn, where she started her PhD degree in 2019. In 2022, she received a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, which came with funding she used to spend 14 months in Thailand, where she lived with the Karen, following the mahouts to observe the elephants near their village. She also learned the Karen and Thai languages so she could understand and document how they work with the elephants.

“Because people have lived for many generations in this forest,” Winkler says, “they have developed ways of observing the forest and picking up on the signs that elephants are around.”

‘Intertwined and Codependent’

Observing Asian elephants that make their home in the mountains of Thailand is much more difficult than observing African elephants that roam open savannahs in easy view of a safe, enclosed vehicle. No Asian elephant families have been observed by researchers for generations like there have been for African elephants.  

The Karen are among the few groups of people with complex knowledge of wild Asian elephants. Through her fieldwork, Winkler has observed how the relationships between humans and elephants are not transferable—it matters which individuals, both human and elephant, are interacting.

Winkler has also found that the relationships are not one-way. Though the Karen have tamed some elephants, benefits flow back and forth between the species. There are gahsawgwạ—a Karen word for “one who watches over elephants”—who observe the elephants’ behaviors to assess the state of the forest. The elephants’ sharp hearing can pick up on faraway disturbances much sooner than a person could.

“If there was more of an understanding of both the elephants in this region and Karen people’s futures as intertwined and codependent,” she says, “ideas about policy and conservation might look a little bit different.” Case in point: By law, people aren’t supposed to live in areas designated as national parks in Thailand, which has resulted in many Indigenous people—including Karen—being pushed to leave the forest and resettle closer to urban areas.

Preserving History

About 300 Karen families now live in Philadelphia. They began arriving about 20 years ago, forced to leave Thailand because of the conflict at home. That means even when Winkler is in Philly, she still has an opportunity to work closely with Karen families. When Winkler asks them what’s important for researchers like her to study, they generally agree: history.

The Karen’s relationships with elephants have largely not been written down, meaning their history isn’t shared or recognized. Karen kids won’t learn about their own history in school. Winkler’s dissertation tries to address some of that gap.

She’s also helping the recently formed Karen Community Association of Philadelphia with day-to-day tasks like applying for grants. Through a Netter Center Academically Based Community Service course at Penn scheduled for next spring, Winkler will advise undergraduate students who will assist the families in learning to use a computer and other skills necessary for navigating life in the United States.

Winkler is aiming to finish her doctoral degree next year and is applying for teaching jobs that will enable her to continue her research with the Karen and their elephant kin.

“I do really see and am making the argument that the Karen people and elephants are in a kinship relationship,” Winkler says. “It’s not paternalistic, humans managing wildlife, or a pet relationship, but real interdependency and shared experiences of vulnerability.”