GetYourGuide, a global travel company, is selling tickets to tourist attractions like Amer Fort in India, profiting from the abuse of elephants. Approximately 81 elephants are currently suffering for entertainment at Amer Fort, facing unimaginable cruelty every day.
(This blog post is part of a series that draws from World Animal Protection’s recent Making Memories Misery report.)
Amer Fort is a popular tourist destination in Rajasthan, where 81 elephants are forced to carry tourists on their backs in extreme temperatures. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Amer Fort is a former palace and military base in Jaipur, where more than 5,000 people visit to admire its architecture daily.
The elephants forced to interact with tourists through elephant rides receive severely inadequate veterinary care, are often beaten with weapons called bullhooks, and are forced to work all day with very little rest. It’s devastatingly common for these elephants to suffer from health issues, including untreated wounds on their backs, abscesses, and foot problems—which is one of the leading causes of euthanasia in captive elephants worldwide.
Further exacerbating health issues, the elephants at Amer Fort are fed an inappropriate diet and visitors have reported inadequate amounts of water—or no water at all—were made available to the elephants forced to give rides.
These elephants have also been known to display abnormal behavior, called stereotyping, such as head-bobbing and repetitive swaying. Stereotypical behavior is a sign of extreme mental distress and has not been observed in elephants living in the wild, meaning it’s unique to captive populations.
Stereotypical behavior—repetitive, abnormal behavior—has only been observed in captive animals – wild animals have not been shown to develop these, making captivity the direct cause of these abnormal behaviors. pic.twitter.com/dxmqtlTmRT
— World Animal Protection US (@MoveTheWorldUS) April 29, 2024
At night, the elephants are forced to sleep chained in enclosures filled with urine and feces. Some of these elephants are forced to walk 2.5 miles to Amer Fort—a dangerous, chaotic, and loud commute on hot concrete roads—before their workdays even begin.
World Animal Protection India has been working to end the cruelty at Amer Fort since 2016, including supporting petitions filed to the Supreme Court of India to help stop the suffering these elephants endure.
Places like Amer Fort continue to thrive despite animal cruelty for one simple reason: tourism operators continue to promote them as fun and appealing activities, encouraging visitors who are likely unaware of the cruelty animals are forced to endure to see these attractions as acceptable.
One of those tourism operators that continues to promote animal abuse is GetYourGuide, which sells guided travel tours, tickets to tourist attractions, and excursions around the world. Our survey of GetYourGuide’s offerings, exposed in our Making Memories Misery report, found that the company continues to sell some of the worst captive wildlife venues in the world, exploiting a wide range of species, including dolphins, alligators, budgies, non-human primates, turtles, and sloths in addition to elephants.
GetYourGuide is no stranger to profiting from cruelty, as the venue continues to rake in profits from Miami Seaquarium—a venue so cruel that the county of Miami-Dade recently terminated Miami Seaquarium’s lease due to animal welfare concerns—and other venues that have ties to the cruel and heinous Taiji dolphin hunts.
World Animal Protection, along with PETA and Welttierschutzgesellschaft (WTG) recently protested GetYourGuide in Berlin, where the company is headquartered, with over a dozen supporters joining us.
In addition to the protest, World Animal Protection launched a billboard near the company’s headquarters calling out GetYourGuide, and a mobile LED billboard vehicle circulated throughout Berlin as GetYourGuide employees arrived for the company’s flagship Summer Summit’s all-staff gathering.
Both consumers and the travel industry have the power to stop the wild capture and exploitation of animals for entertainment venues. It’s up to us as consumers to boycott GetYourGuide until it removes cruel wildlife entertainment venues and implements a progressive animal welfare policy.
Take action now and demand that GetYourGuide remove its sales of wildlife entertainment venues and sign our petition to help give freedom to working elephants at Amer Fort.