World
Elephants: Covid and ethics reshape Thailand’s tourism industry
Elephants are native to Thailand, but wild elephant populations have dwindled from around 100,000 a century ago, to perhaps just 3,000-4,000 today. In the past, large numbers have been captured and used in the logging industry, but when that was banned in the late 1980s to protect what was left of the country’s forests, they instead began to be used to entertain tourists.