Yet the fact stands that most elephants to ever leave those facilities were post-reproductive females being retired at zoos like Little Rock. The circuses while they existed were focused on keeping up reproduction to have a substantial enough herd to tour, now that’s obviously not the case for Ringling anymore.
Riddles should not be lumped with the others in my opinion. First of all its elephants came to zoos like the NC Zoo and Maryland zoo more than a decade ago, as part of an effort to reduce the size of their collection. Right now they are done to 2 elephants I believe. So for them it was simply downsizing at their facility, which led to these zoos reaping the benefits of reproductive age elephants.
I can speak for the NC Zoo, in saying that the zoo has tried hard to successfully breed its younger animals. First of all they keep the females with both bulls pretty much around the clock, and one of the bulls pretty regularly tries to breed the females. The other has not, yet the zoo has attempted AI in the past. Now they are planning on bringing in a new bull at some point this year. This is far more than most zoos have done. Baltimore has also tried to breed their female for a while now with their resident bull, although that obviously has not worked out so far. Luckily Samson is approaching breeding age and will hopefully be able to carry the genetic line on.
I'm not sure this gives enough credit to the donors or the animals donated. Ringling has contributed quite a few breeding specimens to AZA facilities. Granted there seem to have been some males like Casey and Colonel who never seemed to produce in Texas, but the fact is that at the very least, Ringling has given breeding age Romeo to Fort Worth, Doc to Syracuse, Sunny and Rudy to Columbus, and sent Asha on a breeding trip to Tulsa in an attempt to utilize Sneezy's under-represented genes. They offered cows of reproductive age to NZP, but were rebuffed because the Smithsonian didn't think that a national zoo should be enmeshed in controversy. Certainly parent company Feld Entertainment has no more financial reason to invest in its elephant program, but they had cooperated extensively with AZA institutions with both research and actual animals well before Ringling's demise. And I wouldn't be so quick to minimize Riddles' donation, either. The earlier donations of Africans came at a time when the AZA was recommending that institutions keep only one species; I thank that's the real reason for Riddles' donations, not that they needed to downsize. Why would an elephant sanctuary need to downsize to two elephants?! I think they made an incredible contribution to Columbus by loaning the magnificent Hank at a time when the SSP was having difficulty even getting a fertile bull for all 11 breeding zoos.
Many of us watching may be impatient and frustrated by the silence shrouding the Ringling herd. There should still be a significant number of breeding-age specimens at Ringling, but we've herd precious little except the loss of Nate and Mike to EEHV and the loss of the elderly cow who accompanied Asha to Tulsa (Tonka?) and died there. They don't publicize births or deaths, so we truly don't have any idea whether there have been births--four cows from the Blue Tour were AI'd in 2017 right before the elephants came off your. In addition, quite a few of the older girls could now be gone. Mysore would be the second oldest elephant in America at 74, but we simply have no way of knowing. By the time we do discover what the current population is, it could differ drastically from what we last knew four years ago. This is THE huge wildcard in the state of US captive breeding success.
But let's not minimize in any way the very significant contributions Ringling has made to our SSP zoos. As a profiting-driven corporation, Feld certainly could have sold its animals off to the highest bidder--and I'm sure there are circuses, individuals, and zoos abroad that would have snapped them up at prices our zoos may not have been able to afford. Both with indefinite loans and a great deal of reproductive technology and personnel they shared over the 20 years of their successful breeding program, Ringling has contributed a LOT to the future of the NA Asian population.
Yes it's taken a lot of time to get suitable animals in the right places--and it's indeed frustrating that years and years of potential breeding have been wasted. But however bad this situation is, we owe a lot to Riddle's and Ringling or we would have had fewer than half of our US births in recent years.
