I'm not holding my breath unfortunately. I can already see the lawsuits against Tulsa for "violating Billy's free will" with the collection
Actually if I’m not mistaken, Tina is still owned by San Diego zoo? So I mean if that’s true, they get the ultimate say on where she goes and the ARA’s can’t do anything about it.
Some of aza facilities have already done that. Dallas now has 3 young adults and simultaneously has 4 of their geriatric cows from when it first opened. And San Diego was originally a retirement home for older animals and now they're starting to go full-blown bachelor with Africans. Smithsonian was also soley for geriatrics until 2 years ago when the mother daugther pair from Rotterdam came, and was already built to has multigenerational herds and Cleveland's the same with Africans as they publicly said they can house breeding groups. Atlanta is prob starting to phase out geriatrics with Titan there now. I assume Maryland and Milwaukee and maybe Cheyenne Mountain and Audubon will become bachelor holders. I'm sure some of the Cheyenne girls could be old enough to relocate to TES as I don't think any of them are related and may not socialize strongly with eachother. Then they can rebuild their herd with a more species appropriate structure.
If LA decided to do bachelors, then maybe the young dublin boys could move there when it's time for them to leave their moms at Cincy, then Colonel Tusk Tucker or Kandula could join as mentor bulls. Tucker is also a good breeding male candidate if they did breeding herds after Billy and Tina leave as he should prob leave Houston in the near future.
Audubon holds Asians. Dickerson Park is another option for Asian bachelors as well. I forgot to list that one lol
Many of the geriatric facilities did phase out because of that. I worry if cheyenne mountain and Audubon are on the phase out list for the future. Their public outdoor spaces are still smaller than most enclosures built around their time period. They also never publicly announced if these two are capable of hokding bulls.
Whether or not they can hold bulls at present time is moot. Almost any facility hoping to keep the species will need to rennovate to some degree, even if it's minor changes like fencing upgrades and such!
IG it's not always time consuming to make a habitat that could originally only hold cows more durable for bulls depending on how the enclsoure was designed were builts as i mentioned on the asian thread back in March. I think Fresno did a smaller update to accomodate Mabu by just adding more rectangular posts to the cable fencing based on some YouTube vids. If Dallas was originally only cow proof when Giants of the Savannah first opened, then I'm sure it did not take very much to galvanize the gates and barriers in order to safely house Tendaji since the swazis arrived. I know hogle phased out their elephant program bc the barn and outdoor space wasn't large, let alone sturdy enough for them to bring in a breeding male for Christie and Zuri and they confirmed bull proofing it would take too long.
Odds are no. Pretty much all the viable real estate is taken by exhibits and whatever space there is isn't enough for a proper elephant exhibit, even for a small bull group
And it may be for the best ethically speaking. Before they sent their elephants to okc in 2015 they were incessantly bombarded by activists for housing elephants. The outdoor enclosure never looked too bad considering is was heavily planted like an Asian rainforest around it and it was fairly sizeable.
Yeah the outdoor enclosure was ok, if a bit small, but the real nail in the coffin was that the barn was incapable of rotating and managing a proper group so it killed any opportunity to meaningfully have elephants
I saw youtube vids of their 3 cows head bobbing and swaying in that enclosure, so I guess it still reinforced these behaviors due to it being relatively older and smaller. I also read the barn substrate caused a lot of foot and joint problems for the elephants.
