For some reason I wasn't expecting to like this one either, but I thought it was quite good.
I thought it was fitting that elephants oppression would never have worked without the humans active participation--while elephants are powerful, they are at a long-term disadvantage to humans because lack of tool-making appendages. But as an individual human, if you rebel by yourself you are rising up against the whole system, not just the elephants, and if each person is just trying to survive they participate in the system to do so.
I can see why some were bothered by the fantasies of turning the tables on their oppressors, but I guess that made sense to me given where the story originated. I'm not saying it's right, or just, or that I think that new world would be any better really than the one that came before. But I think it's a realistic dream of a violent revolutionary. And I think it's an apt angle for the story to end with that fantasy of elephants being oppressed so that we might consider whether we are okay with that, and compare and contrast it to the treatment of elephants in our world--is it okay for elephants to be treated that way as revenge? In our world there wasn't even a revenge factor, so how can we forgive ourselves for that?