ELEPHANTS NEED FREEDOM, NOT CAPTIVE BREEDING

Many people around the world have just celebrated Valentine’s Day — a holiday that honors love and relationships with friends, family and romantic partners. Unfortunately, for elephants in U.S. zoos, this day was marked by loneliness and separation from family and companions.

The story of one of these elephants began decades ago in Kenya.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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 elephant was sent to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, which named him Mabu. 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. 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. 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.

These transfers were not the only ones to happen late last year. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., received a mother and daughter elephant pair from a zoo in the Netherlands. The Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, in Ohio, announced the arrival of a male elephant from the Cincinnati Zoo. The Oklahoma City Zoo welcomed a male elephant from the Fort Worth Zoo where he’d lived with his brother and mother. 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.

Zoos in the United States celebrate such transfers and encourage members of the public to do the same. The grim reality deserves condemnation, not celebration.

Thanks to ethologists who have studied elephants in their natural habitats, we know social bonds are deeply important to this species. So is freedom of movement. Every transfer tears apart these bonds. Repeated transfers can cause abnormal behaviors indicative of stress and trauma, such as incessant bobbing and swaying, while zoo captivity itself can cause brain damage, similarly to humans who are confined.

And for what purpose?

Let’s be clear even if the Association of Zoos and Aquariums won’t: No elephant from a zoo in the United States has ever been reintegrated into a wild herd, nor is there any plan for them to be, as stated in a 2022 report from the Born Free Foundation, an international wildlife conservation organization. The birthrate of captive elephants is low. The infant mortality rate is high. Most captive elephants die at a much younger age than their free counterparts.

Far from promoting species survival, zoos destroy the lives of individual elephants. 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.

Instead, all zoos in the U.S. 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. In the meantime, we need to take as many elephants as possible to sanctuaries where they can live with peace, dignity and vastly greater freedom. They might even be able to reunite with long-lost companions.

One day, we’ll look back with horror at what zoos do to elephants under the guise of helping them. If we truly care about elephants, we need to recognize that they deserve freedom and family too.