Noah's Ark Zoo Farm Elephants

I'll keep out of any religious debate, but will say I think zoos should follow a scientific view.
 
Yup, I've got into religious debates on another forum that I visit, and they are never pretty :D
 
lol, I have impartial views and try and be open minded to every idea, but there is always one stubborn Christian or Athiest that says you have to be one or the other :(.
 
Lol, here we go again :rolleyes:
Seriously, my own opinion is athiest but I'm open minded and think anything's possible.

Anyway, let's steer away from this and get back to the discussion in hand. Can Noah's Ark pull this elephant plan off? If they are rescue ones maybe they will be ones rescued from the circus, maybe try and claw back a better reputation ;p
 
Yes, rescued from the circus.

I would acutally like to see the plans if anyone could find them for me, its an interesting prospect and I guess we will just have to see how it plays out.
 
Agreed, I hope they can pull it off and be successful with this project. The zoo may not sound be so brilliant, but if it has to happen I would rather it happened well for the welfare of the species.
 
Surely any elephants in need of 'rescue' should be going to a recognised EAZA collection? Asians could go to collections like Chester, Whipsnade and Twycross who are doing well breeding elephants and have improved standards of husbandry no end in the last 10 years. Woburn has a fantastic facility but hardly any elephants to benefit from it! If they really have moved on from 'hot shots' and circus tricks then Woburn could be first class (lots of space and money!). Africans could go to Port Lympne now that they only have three elephants there and all of that space. I don't see the need for an elephant rescue centre in the UK. And as we all know elephants can be dangerous. Even people with decades of experience have been killed working with them. This NAFP idea really is a bad one.
 
I am not sure where Noah's Ark are expecting to get their 'rescue' elephants from nowadays anyway?
 
Hexaprotodon said:
Surely any elephants in need of 'rescue' should be going to a recognised EAZA collection? Asians could go to collections like Chester, Whipsnade and Twycross who are doing well breeding elephants and have improved standards of husbandry no end in the last 10 years. Woburn has a fantastic facility but hardly any elephants to benefit from it! If they really have moved on from 'hot shots' and circus tricks then Woburn could be first class (lots of space and money!). Africans could go to Port Lympne now that they only have three elephants there and all of that space. I don't see the need for an elephant rescue centre in the UK. And as we all know elephants can be dangerous. Even people with decades of experience have been killed working with them. This NAFP idea really is a bad one.
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Space isn't in such great supply - you might think there are large paddocks at Woburn and Port Lympne, but its the indoor space that really matters for the majority of the time (I mean that literally - in terms of percentage of time spent indoors - obviously decent outside space is essential on a daily basis IMHO).

Collections wishing to create a breeding group are unlikely to want post-reproductive, often socially compromised, older cow elephants, let alone bulls. There are a couple of UK zoos acting as 'retirement facilities', such as Belfast (although I don't know to what extent Blackpool or Blair Drummond collection planning in terms of their elephants is EAZA-mandated), but these are not vast facilties either.

While I am extremely wary of farm diversification scheme-type collections, owned by people without extensive prior wild animal experience, the proposal itself, to me, sounds good. I can't actually believe I'm saying that about a zoo I dislike so much. What I wouldn' trust is the idea that, once they get elephants, that they will stick to housing older animals. The flip side of that is that, at some point, the European population will have assembled itself into mostly small breeding herds, and there may only be a need to house surplus, captive-bred bulls. Whether this collection will then support that, or attempt to establish a breeding herd, I don't know.

I think the UK would benefit from a 12-acre facility for non-breeding elephants. Maybe Blackpool would do the right thing and send its elephants there, given that they seem unwilling or unable to create a corridor to fields and woods their elephant cows used to enjoy before they switched (IMO rightfully so) to protected contact.

I do hope they construct a proper barrier though, flimsy hotwire is fine for ponies, not so much pachyderms.
 
zoogiraffe said:
Well the RSPCA do have alot of experience in Elephant welfare and husbandry:rolleyes:I would take BIAZA or EAZA saying they had concerns more seriously than the RSPCA having concerns.Personnaly I think the RSPCA should stick to what they know which is Domestic Animals.
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I respect this report:

http://www.rspca.org.uk/servlet/Sat...PCABlob&blobwhere=1024473726597&ssbinary=true

It is far less shrill and emotive that some of the loudpeaker organisations. I think it is their responsibility to commission research into UK animal welfare practices, and I don't believe RSPCA HQ needs to have kept elephants itself order to do so. That is not to say I agree with all the findings of this study. While I respect EAZA and BIAZA, I don't believe they can be impartial even though they might aim to be.
 
zoogiraffe said:
Well the RSPCA do have alot of experience in Elephant welfare and husbandry:rolleyes:I would take BIAZA or EAZA saying they had concerns more seriously than the RSPCA having concerns.Personnaly I think the RSPCA should stick to what they know which is Domestic Animals.
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As someone who works with a few different rescues, I think they know as much about elephants as they do about domestic animals, which is bugger all. The RSPCA work for publicity, publicity pulls in the donations and higher pay for the management, a great deal of which earn around £100,000.
If getting involved in Noahs Ark gets them in the papers then they'd happily do it.
 
I don't think the RSPCA would be taken seriously if they just assembled a panel of their own staff and wrote a report about captive elephants....whatever you may think of the RSPCA, to rubbish their research on Captive elephants is to rubbish the actual researchers who ran the study. They are not the same people as the management of the RSPCA, there is a distinction.
 
johnstoni said:
I don't think the RSPCA would be taken seriously if they just assembled a panel of their own staff and wrote a report about captive elephants....whatever you may think of the RSPCA, to rubbish their research on Captive elephants is to rubbish the actual researchers who ran the study. They are not the same people as the management of the RSPCA, there is a distinction.
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It should be remembered though that the RSPCA will very quickly "rubbish" it's own researchers if their impartial findings aren't in line with the RSPCA's dogma.
 
true...the report may have therefore only been published because the findings were the ones the RSPCA wanted. However, I am unaware of any conflicting studies on UK elephants not carried out by those within the zoo industry, maybe you know of some?
 
No ...... my comment was motivated by the RSPCA's treatment of Dr Marthe Kiley-Worthington, the ethologist that they commissioned to research the lives of circus animals.

They paid her some fifty thousand pounds to conduct an exhaustive study over eighteen months. When her findings did not concur with their preconceived notions they did their level best to trash her reputation - even to the point of accusing her of sleeping with animal trainers.

This is not an honourable Society.
 
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