Friends of Woodland Park Zoo Elephants

Alyne Fortgang of Seattle, wrote a great response to an article in Seattle Weekly by Damon Agnos, called “New Zoo Review”:

Keeping the planet’s largest land mammal in Woodland Park Zoo’s tiny barn room up to 17 hours a day and in a section of a one-acre yard is blatantly inhumane. Whether looking for food or energized by food, elephants are born with bodies that need to walk great distances for their mental and physical health. Experts have presented decades of research that bears this out.

Since 2000, half of the 63 elephants that have died in AZA-accredited zoos never reached the age of 40. The natural lifespan of elephants is 60–70 years. It is the zoo environment that is killing them prematurely, just as poachers and loss of habitat are doing in the wild—it is the same crime with the same result.

The zoo claims displaying elephants makes people care about them, and then they will donate to conserve them. If this were true, Asian elephants wouldn’t be as endangered today, since people have been seeing them in zoos for more than 200 years. As zoos have adopted their “conservation” ethic to justify incarcerating elephants, numbers have continued to decline.

Conservation of elephants needs to take place in the wild—the ONLY place they should be—not in a “cage” with Olmsted landscaping, to which they have no access.

View this and other letters on seattleweekly.com.

Tied for 7th place, Woodland Park Zoo makes it onto In Defense of Animals’ Ten Worst Zoos List. This year, the decision focused mainly around the zoo’s obsessive breeding program:

WPZ Artifical Insemination

These zoos tied for the No. 6 spot because of their repeated efforts to artificially inseminate two breeding-age females, Woodland Park Zoo’s Chai, age 30, and Shanthi, age 33, at the National Zoo, despite the known risks to mother and calf. Both elephants have lost calves to the deadly elephant herpesvirus, and the Woodland Park Zoo acknowledges that there is a greater than one-in-five chance that any calf produced by Chai would also be stricken with the fatal disease. In addition, both elephants are very near the age when female elephants in zoos are no longer bred due to a higher risk of birth complications. Since 2001, at least 21 elephant pregnancies in U.S. zoos have ended in stillbirths or other complications, resulting in 17 dead babies and six dead mothers. Zoos won’t turn the tide on elephant welfare as long as they continue to treat these intelligent and complex individuals as little more than breeding machines to produce baby elephants at any cost. Both zoos are appearing on IDA’s Ten Worst Zoos list for the third time. The Woodland Park Zoo also appeared once as a Dishonorable Mention.

Nancy Farnam’s recent guest commentary in the HeraldNet, about the elephants at Woodland Park Zoo, inspired two supportive letters in response:

Danielle Noel from Vancouver writes about how her family has canceled their annual trips to WPZ after the elephant exhibit just became too depressing for them.

Our family has driven down to the Woodland Park Zoo every year for many years. The most depressing exhibit by far is the elephant exhibit. I cannot, for the life of me, understand how the world’s largest land mammal has ended up stuck in a small, 1-acre yard and even at that, the yard is broken up into smaller yards because two of the elephants can’t get along.

Glenda T. Berg from Des Moines writes that even her 6-year-old daughter was able to recognize the elephants’ “tortured swaying and neurotic responses to stress” and will not return to the zoo again.

I, and other parents, have not set foot in the zoo since my daughter and I witnessed their tortured swaying and neurotic responses to stress. (My daughter noticed it at age 6, and hasn’t forgotten it since). I have heard similar sentiments from other concerned former zoo-goers over the years, and still nothing is done to change the horrific conditions these magnificent animals have to endure.

If you see an article about WPZ or zoo elephants, help keep the public dialog going by writing a letter to the editor!

On CBS Evening News, Steve Hartman gets an inside look at the relationships the elephants form with each other, and in one case, with one of the sanctuary’s many dogs. Click this link to read the full story or watch the video. It’s a must-see that will lift the spirits.

“Every elephant that comes here searches out someone that she then spends most all of her time with,” says sanctuary co-founder Carol Buckley.

It’s like having a best girlfriend, Buckley says – “Somebody they can relate to, they have something in common with.”

Debbie has Ronnie. Misty can’t live without Dulary.

Those are pachyderm-pachyderm pairs. But perhaps the closest friends of all are Tarra and Bella.

That would be Tarra the 8,700 pound Asian elephant. And Bella. The dog.