Jacada Travel Confirms End to Elephant Treks After PETA Appeal

For Immediate Release:
27 July 2016

Contact:
Olivia Jordan +44 (0) 20 7837 6327, ext 229; [email protected]

JACADA TRAVEL CONFIRMS END TO ELEPHANT TREKS AFTER PETA APPEAL

Luxury Holiday Planner Will Stop Offering Cruel and Dangerous Elephant Rides 

London – After learning from PETA that elephants are beaten into giving rides, the holiday planners at bespoke travel agency Jacada confirmed their plans to stop promoting elephant tours. In an e-mail to PETA, founder and Managing Director Alex Malcolm announced, “I’m pleased to say that Jacada Travel are no longer promoting elephant back riding”.

“There’s only one way to force elephants to give rides, and that’s through beatings and the constant threat of violence”, says PETA Director Mimi Bekhechi. “Jacada’s kind decision to stop offering elephant treks will ensure that well-meaning tourists don’t accidentally support cruelty to animals.”

In its initial letter to Jacada, PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment” – pointed out that still-nursing baby elephants are forcibly separated from their mothers, immobilised, beaten, and gouged with nails, sometimes for days at a time, in a process called phajaan. Those who survive this process spend the rest of their lives in chains, lugging tourists around and being beaten with bullhooks – weapons that resemble fireplace pokers with a sharp metal hook on one end.

A lifetime of stress and deprivation can cause elephants to lash out. Earlier this year, a Scottish tourist was killed by an elephant during a trekking tour. Elephant tours also present a disease risk: tuberculosis, one of the deadliest diseases in the world, is transmissible from elephants to humans and has been documented in elephants throughout Asia.

Jacada joins TUI Group – the world’s largest travel and tourism company, which owns Thomson Holidays and First Choice – as well as STA Travel, Intrepid Travel, and G Adventures in pledging to end the promotion of cruel elephant rides.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk.

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