@The Horse Boy If they could handle Hank and Sabu, they can handle Johnson, Frankie and Raja. Columbus didn't make the decision to use wooden retaining walls in a vacuum, this ended up increasing the usable space by 25%. Same deal with Bronx' wooden retaining walls in their offshow portion. Deductive reasoning, man.
@StoppableSan I also noticed the wooden walls have several strands of hot wire on the back which i'm very sure are intended to deter elephants from going near them. So they probably could zap the animals if they do touch let alone ram them. The reasons for my hopes are that I just personally feel a safer when elephants are housed using steel barriers rather than wood as steel is often more guaranteed to be so robust. That being said, i know several facilities use wooden fencing (esp for bulls) like Tampa uses very thick wooden stakes with pointed tops for their cable fencing, and Cameron Park does too except with a different appearance to their tops. Bham also has two areas with a wooden wall of thinner posts glued together and a pathway with cable fencing on one side with wooden support posts, and it definitely would have held up fine with their bachelor herds. Oregon's newer Elephant Lands complex also has a small area with wooden boards for fencing.
@The Horse Boy@StoppableSan
Steel is not inherently more stable than wood. It depends on the type of wood, the workmanship, the thickness, and also the suspension/fastening. Also with these gapless wooden barriers, an elephant can exert much less pressure on a single point than with steel bars.
