If you care to take a deeper look into their website 4 main issues come to mind:
* Elephants, well at least the Asian Elephas maximus, are endangered with a total population of only ca. 45,000 individuals across Southern and SE-Asia. Yet Hohenwald makes no effort to increase their numbers, neither in the wild nor in captivity (it even frowns upon zoos investing in captive-breeding or increasing their elephant habitats).
* Its main goal is to accomodate elderly elephants on animal welfare grounds (their policies in that respect are sometimes rather dubious and the method of pressurising individual zoos to send off their eles to them through the media I find particularly distateful), yet their management system does not replicate any natural elephant behaviour patterns nor their social structure (this happens when you put non-familiar elderly and sometimes socially mal-adapted eles into groups of non related elephants. I can not see the welfare aspect in that! It is just all about space, if that in itself would be significance (as even these sanctuaries cannot hope to provide the space sufficient to pretend they live in the wild, no they remain captive. So, if you are going to name it, then tell it like it is ... yes, CAPTIVE!).
* The Hohenwald Sanctuary and most other ele welfare institutions are off-show facilities and I cannot see what benefit the few ele adopters will have on the perceptions of the wider general public on elephant conservation. Besides, adoption is well overpriced and gives you the right to visit for a mere couple of 1,000's of dollars.
* The Hohenwald Sanctuary and most sanctuaries like her make no substantial financial or other contributions towards elephant conservation in situ. Zoos on the other hand, particularly in European and US zoos, do so substantially and also invest in methods and policies to improve in situ conservation and research important aspects of elephant biology and conflict resolution (if you exclude people from nature conservation you will end up with dead elephants only) and alternative income generation from generally poor populations in Third World nations living in close proximity of wild elephants (and they are not CUDDLY, I can tell you)!!!
Well on these grounds I find these places not worth looking into much. Besides the resident attitude to anthropomorphise the elephants in their care and provide them with names as if they were discardable cuddly toys "thingies", I find so demeaning for elephants as taxa representative of fascinating wild animals that they are!!!
K.B.
And apparently, Ned has too, according to Bunny's page on Ele Encyc, but I can't find any other mention on either the Hohenwald site or his page though 
