I have always been aware of elephant riding, but in all honesty, I thought it was something that was going out of fashion as people realised how cruel it was. I have only seen one physical example of this mistreatment of elephants and that was in Cambodia at Angkor Wat. I took a photo and then turned away I simply couldn’t watch those hideous laughing tourists sitting astride an elephant who had absolutely no choice in the matter.  When I moved to Zambia in 2020, I assumed that with it being a place of such natural wonderment and the land of the walking safari that people wouldn’t feel the need to ride elephants.

As I started following more tourism pages on Instagram, I began to become concerned that this really was something that tourists…