Pippa:

I agree, and I wonder how much income the Elephant Tourism Association gets from anti-conservationsts and money greedy people like Mr. Allen Roberts!

When you look at the Shearwater website they do everything including helicopter rides, bunji jumping, etc so you know he must be making money hands over fists so it is hard to understand that he feels the need to capture elephants and do elephant rides also.

I caught the tail end of program last night "Hunter and Hunted" that you would have like. Several instances of "big white hunters" on foot stalking buffalo and in both parties the parties were charged. One man was killed and a woman hunter in another party seriously injured. It was good to see the tables turned for once.

Per Greg Vogt's letter "A perfectly wild elephant joined there elephants a number of years ago. It chose to do this at it's free will." Can you just see a wild elephant walking up to someone and saying I want someone to ride me????? Yes, it might have wandered up to the "slave" elephants to sniff them out, but no elephant would willingly want humans to touch it and ride on it. Mr. Vogt apparently has already been brain-
washed. This whole thing is infuriating. Yes, they cannot return the elephants to their families because they don't know where they are and at the age of 5 - 10 they are not mature enough to let out on their own. But at the very least this man should do serious time for what he has illegally done so that other people won't try to get away with the same despicable thing.

Do any of you know if they show these "documentaries" here in Europe (Italy)? I have Satelite etc and although I really do live in the country side - in the Tuscan bush, I can nearly pick up all chanals to keep up to date with what is happening. I would really like to see this as well.

Nico:

I would have seen it on either Animal Planet or National Geographic channel - two that I watch most. Hope you'll find that you can get them because they do both have some good programming (though repeated every once in awhile).

Yes - I get them both in English and Italian. Great - thank you.

My goodness! This thread is full of narrow-minded comments and wrongful accusations. The below paragraph alone deserves comment IMO;

Jan wrote: Per Greg Vogt's letter "A perfectly wild elephant joined there elephants a number of years ago. It chose to do this at it's free will." Can you just see a wild elephant walking up to someone and saying I want someone to ride me????? Yes, it might have wandered up to the "slave" elephants to sniff them out, but no elephant would willingly want humans to touch it and ride on it.

Jan, there was no mention of the wild elephant allowing humans to ride on them, just that it occasionally joined the "tame" herd during free time. And yes, i can see the latter happening as it has been reported elsewhere (eg Tsavo ele Orphans often mingle with wild individuals) and it is no harder to believe than stories of wild elephants "communicating" with humans as Dame Sheldrick seems to report every so often.

Jan wrote: Mr. Vogt apparently has already been brain-washed.

Do not mean any disrespect and i am not looking for a fight but can the same not be said of you disbelievers who just won't accept any reasonable explanation other than your own?

Jan wrote: But at the very least this man should do serious time for what he has illegally done so that other people won't try to get away with the same despicable thing.

This man has done nothing illegal or he would be behind bars. What he has done is legal in the country it occurred.

Pippa wrote: i won't give too much for this statement as the elephant tourism organisation has got the right to exists in itself means in elephant tourism and of course they have to sustaine that kind of tourism in order to sustain its very own existance!!

So you are basically saying that any Photographic Association is equally bogus and biased because they only represent their own interest? The elephant tourism association may not necessarily be influenced by the elephant operators themselves. It can be made up of both the stakeholders and conservationists whose main purpose is to make sure that if it happens, it happens in a suitable manner - sort of like a "watchdog organisation".

Pippa wrote: because these safari operators make a huge amount of money of this cruelty they can only be stopped if casualties happen! so let's cross our fingers that we hear of such incidents which involve human deaths and it will be stopped!

People died from car crashes but they didn't stop the manufacture of cars. However, it will be stopped if it is proven that the industry or its methods are cruel and unreasonable. so far that has not occured.