A Custom Under Active Animal Welfare Scrutiny

The custom has become the subject of sustained and genuinely serious animal welfare concern and campaigning in recent decades, with documented reports of poor living conditions, restrictive chaining, and physical and psychological stress among captive temple elephants, particularly during the demanding conditions of major festival processions held in intense heat and large crowds, concerns raised by Indian and international animal welfare organisations and, at points, addressed through Kerala state regulation attempting to set minimum welfare standards for captive elephant care and festival participation. Temple authorities and many devotees defend the tradition as a longstanding and religiously significant practice that, properly conducted, honours rather than harms the animals involved, while welfare advocates and a growing number of former temple elephant keepers and veterinarians have argued for significant reform or, in the more strongly stated positions, an end to the practice of captive temple elephant keeping altogether, a genuine and currently unresolved tension between religious tradition and documented animal welfare concern that Kerala's state government and temple authorities continue to negotiate through incremental regulation rather than through any single settled resolution.