The Conservation Con
Incredibly, the zoos removed African elephants from the wild, where
populations are already threatened, in order to breed more elephants
who will spend the rest of their miserable lives in captivity. They
hope the young, imported elephants will produce crowd-pleasing babies
to boost zoo revenues. In fact, two of the Swaziland elephants who
were imported are already pregnant. Heavily marketed newborns can
easily bring in an additional 30,000 visitors.
Captive breeding, which has been a dismal failure, is not the solution
to extinction. The greatest threat to African elephants is loss of
habitat and poaching, and nothing being done in captivity will prevent
that. Zoos mislead the public by claiming to foster conservation education,
leaving the public with a false sense of security that the so-called
“experts” are handling the problem and that therefore
they need not concern themselves with supporting legitimate conservation
programs.
According to the AZA’s African Elephant Studbook, “Captive
breeding efforts have been met with little success. In the entire
history of African elephants in North America, only 79 calves have
been born with only 50 percent surviving to a year of age.”
Captivity Kills
Captivity itself is prematurely killing elephants. Lack of exercise,
long hours standing on hard substrates, and contamination resulting
from standing in their own feces and urine are major contributors
to elephant foot problems, the leading reason for euthanizing captive
elephants. At least 90 African elephants, most captured in the wild,
have died in North American facilities since 1990, and not a single
death was from old age. In fact, 92 percent never even reached age
40, far short of their 70-year life expectancy.
Even under the best of conditions, elephants “are actually
very poor candidates for life in captivity,” according to
David Hancocks, former director of the Woodland Park Zoo. Hancocks
doubts “if a dozen elephants worldwide are in truly good psychological,
behavioral, and social conditions. Their requirements are so substantial—it
is probably beyond the capabilities of most zoos to even begin to
resolve them.”
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