![]() ![]() need to close their elephant exhibits, as other zoos in the country and the world have done, and we need to support the many organizations dedicated to protecting elephants in their natural habitats without holding them captive. It’s shameful to separate elephants, transport them around the country every few years to meet zoos’ needs, compel them to undergo unnecessary medical procedures for captive breeding, and more, all for the opportunity to produce baby elephants who will, if they are lucky enough to survive their early years, spend their lives in a zoo. The grim reality deserves condemnation, not celebration.įar from promoting species survival, zoos destroy the lives of individual elephants. Zoos in the United States celebrate such transfers and encourage members of the public to do the same. And finally, an elephant named Vus’musi was transferred from the Fresno Chaffee Zoo to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park where he was born to an elephant who was pregnant with him when she was imported to the United States. The Oklahoma City Zoo welcomed a male elephant from the Fort Worth Zoo where he’d lived with his brother and mother. The Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, in Ohio, announced the arrival of a male elephant from the Cincinnati Zoo. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., received a mother and daughter elephant pair from a zoo in the Netherlands. These transfers were not the only ones to happen late last year. In Fresno, he’ll again be used for breeding, this time with an elephant named Nolwazi and her daughter Amahle, who were imported to the United States in 2016, despite more opposition from animal rights organizations, scientists and conservationists. This past November, the Fresno Chaffee Zoo - against which my organization, the Nonhuman Rights Project, has filed a lawsuit seeking the release to a sanctuary of the elephants held there - announced Mabu’s arrival from a Tucson zoo. Since 2003, Mabu has fathered 15 elephants, and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums has moved him four times between zoos in Escondido, Tucson, Arizona, and Fresno. The elephant was sent to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, which named him Mabu. The elephants were then entered into the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ “Species Survival Plan,” a captive breeding program that seeks to grow and maintain a genetically diverse North American population of elephants - not to be released into the wild, but to live on display. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which accredits zoos in the U.S., claimed to be rescuing them from culling, the practice of population reduction by slaughter. His life changed in 2003 when he and 10 other elephants were loaded into crates and imported to the United States, despite an outcry from animal rights organizations and elephant researchers. He was not only free, he was also enriching the ecosystem he was meant to be part of by creating waterholes for other species and clearing brush as he migrated with his herd. In 1990, an elephant was born in Kruger National Park in South Africa, where he would’ve spent his early years under the care of his mother and herd, roaming his natural habitat, playing with other young elephants, and bonding with and learning from the older ones. The story of one of these elephants began decades ago in Kenya. ![]()
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