A wildlife park in South Africa is no longer allowing tourists to touch elephants after research showed that the animals were stressed by human visitors.
When the park closed due to the covid-19 pandemic, researchers saw a sharp fall in behaviours newly identified as likely signs of anxiety in elephants. Once the park reopened to tourists, the elephants exhibited anxious behaviours even more than before the lockdown, prompting the decision to prohibit physical contact by visitors, says , who worked on the research at the African Elephant Research Unit in Plettenberg Bay, South Africa.
“These are generally very happy elephants with good welfare, but we still want to minimise the effects of tourism as much as possible,” she says. “So just stopping [tourists from] touching the elephants was really a huge win and [represents] great progress.”
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The 10 African elephants (Loxodonta africana) at at the time of the study were mostly orphans and rescues that couldn’t have adapted to life in the wild. They freely roamed parts of the 60-hectare park during daytime hours and outside of guided tourist activities, which included walks, feeding and photo shoots with up to 767 tourists per day, 365 days per year. Prior to the covid-19 pandemic, tourists could touch and pet the animals during activities.
In 2016, Manning and her colleagues noticed that, despite the generally good welfare in the sanctuary, the elephants frequently performed repetitive movements – somewhat resembling a nervous tic – during their more intense interactions with tourists. Mainly, the animals would touch their bodies with their trunks or curl their trunks out to the side, or they would shake their legs or heads or swish their tails.
In primates, self-directed behaviours such as touching and scratching are recognised as an indicator of stress and anxiety, and the team’s observations suggest this is the case for elephants too. “In humans, it would be the equivalent of fidgeting or biting our nails,” says Manning.
During the covid-19 pandemic, the researchers took advantage of the park’s closure to study the elephants’ behaviour in the total absence of tourists. They observed each of the eight females and two males for an hour a day over three two-month periods: just before, during and just after lockdown.
The team found that the elephants touched or shook themselves about three times less often during lockdown than before. When the park opened to tourists again, the elephants showed these self-directed behaviours nearly five times more often than during lockdown.
“Perhaps they had gotten used to this new normal,” says Manning. “So then the return of tourists appeared to elicit higher rates of stress-related behaviour than before.”
The actual number of tourists had no effect on the elephants’ anxious behaviour, however: they were affected by the close presence of unfamiliar people in general, rather than large crowds, says Manning. “Tourists can still enjoy watching the elephants, but the elephants also [need] to enjoy their space as well,” she says.
, director of the Human Elephant Learning Programs foundation in Australia, says he is “very happy” to see this study. He has noticed Asian elephants touching themselves in similar ways during tourist activities. “With that trunk, they’re just so tactile,” he says. “They touch everything, and they touch their own bodies a lot – all over the place when they’re very stressed – and there’s a lot of head nodding.”
Now that we understand these behaviours, they can provide caretakers with immediate feedback about situations that are compromising the elephants’ welfare, and parks can react by changing their tourism programmes and policies, he says.
Closing such parks completely would eliminate the funding needed to support the rescued elephants, however. “Tourism brings in revenues, but we want the elephants to be happy and healthy and have good welfare,” says Manning. “There’s a constant need to find a balance.”
Unlike the tourists, the handlers didn’t appear to make the elephants anxious, says Manning. “They have very strong bonds and really amazing relationships.”
Applied Animal Behaviour Science
