Elephant Question

N

northeast17

New Member
I have recently been reading about the captive poulation of both african and asian elephants and discovered that a lot of zoos are pohasing there elephant programs out.

Why is this?

I understand that elephants need a lot of room and shouldn't be kept alone but surely the phasing out doesn't have to be that drastic.

Does anyone know anything about the current captive population? Will it exsist in 50 years?

My dream is to become a curator and if my zoo didn't have elephants I would make it a 10 year project to try and create a herd which I know isn't easy and needs a lot of investment.

I also think that elephants are a good species to show the public. People are fascinated with them because of their size and power and I think they send out a fantastic conservation message.
Do you agree??

This is my first post on this forum,, hope we can get a good discussion going :)
 
Many zoos are phasing out keeping elephants.
The zoos that are phasing out keeping elephants have:
*too little space to keep the elephants
*cannot house the elephants in herds
*cannot house males and do not have the space or finances to start an AI programme

The problem has been that the captive elephant population has not been sustainable, if an individual died in the past it was usually replaced with a wild caught infant.
Furthermore male elephants go into musth which is a hormonal phase whereby they become very aggressive and difficult to house.
Most zoos focussed on keeping small single generation groups of unrelated females.
As a result the captive population is skewed towards females: out of 300 asian elephants in North American zoos only 50 are males.

Its been pretty much impossible for western zoos to get wild caught Asian elephants for 30 years.
Its possible that the situation could be the same for African elephants.
Anyway there isn't much conservation in going to catch new animals all the time.

All of this means that a paradigm shift is underway in the way we keep elephants. Zoos with the money and space are assembling multigenerational breeding herds out of the aging animals in captivity.
Artificial insemination techniques are improving by leaps and bounds.

So the animals are moving from many zoos to the few zoos that can keep them to ensure that there will be a captive population in 50 years.

I agree elephants send out a fantastic conservation message however zoos need to conserve them at home to help conserve them abroad. People's fascination sadly has lead to the abuse of animals in circuses and sadly in some zoos, hopefully these animals will only be kept in the zoos that can keep them properly and breed them. Hopefully they will continue to be the largest animals to tread the face of the earth.


Sam.
 
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