Then why aren’t they set free in the jungle?

We would love to set the animals free, but this poses some difficulties. First of all, they are domesticated, which means they don’t know how to survive in the wild. On the long run, we could be able to reintegrate them in the wild, but then we come to the second difficulty, namely that the domesticated elephants are the main income for the elephant owners and the mahouts, to provide them and their families with means of living. Taking the elephants away from them and back to the wild would mean a huge loss of income for them and making it impossible to provide for food and shelter.