This posted originally by Jim Francis:
Last night I had the misfortune of watching Toronto City Council betray three of their most admired citizens. For over three decades Toronto has been home to Toka, Iringa and Thika. Anyone who would take the time to read this probably doesn’t need me to explain that these three amazing elephants have once again had their future health and safety put on the backburner to accommodate the pride and politics of the vast majority of our elected officials.
Fool me once, shame on you. Council made a rash decision a year ago that probably seemed like the right thing to do. Very little information was available to them at the time, I can empathize and see how the decision they made then could have seemed logical if they took it at face value and refused to look deeper into some of the issues at hand. Fool me twice... Last night was inexcusable. We watched helplessly as council voted to send the elephants to a colder, less natural, distant facility that has serious infectious disease problems where these elephants will likely never be able to experience the multi-generation herd dynamics that they require for their psychological well being... and for what? Political favours on a more important issue? To save face and not have to admit they were wrong a year ago? Because they didn’t want to admit that the professionals who were hired by the city and had dedicated decades of their lives to caring for these animals knew more than council does about elephant care?
Even though keeping the elephants at the Toronto Zoo was never even a possibility it didn’t stop officials from muddying the waters by attacking their own city employees for no apparent reason. Surely the hypocrisy couldn’t have been lost on these councillors as they criticized the Toronto Zoo for having small enclosures where the animals are kept for long periods of time in the winter, for saying that they have no place in such a cold climate, for arguing that the ‘experts’ say PAWS is good. These very criticisms came from councillors who are in fact members of the zoo board who decided not to expand and improve the very facilities they pointlessly criticized. They were well aware that the facility they chose is in northern California and gets significant amounts of snow, unlike Florida. That the facility in California locks their elephants up in barns smaller than the facility at the Toronto zoo for 12 hours at a time because it is too cold for them outside and unlike here in Toronto has no enrichment program in place to keep the animals occupied during such periods of time. They must have realized that every expert present at that meeting said PAWS was dangerous and that it puts our elephants at risk, in fact the only people endorsing it were represented by year old correspondence that dated back to before any of the concerns about infectious disease were raised at PAWS. Most if not all of these experts were also fortunate enough to receive regular sizable donations from PAWS. No one on council seemed to find this suspicious.
The National Elephant Centre was criticized because council theorized that TB could at some point be an issue, despite the fact that the professionals at the meeting not only said this would not be the case but went into detail as to how such things would be avoided. How do you rule out a facility because your gut tells you that (contrary to logic) they will have to deal with a TB infection at some point in the distant future, and then turn around and vote to send them to a further away, colder, smaller facility that is undergoing an TB epidemic.
It has been said in the scientific community that every person will eventually get cancer if they don’t die of something else first. If I were to apply council’s logic then I might as well take up smoking today.
Council was not done with that however. They then went on to vote down a simple amendment that asked that if the elephants go by plane they are sent in crates that they fit in and go in a plane that is pressurized and temperature controlled, essentially so they can have enough oxygen to survive such an arduous and unnecessary journey. How it is legal to vote for something which in my opinion amounts to animal abuse is beyond me.
The citizens of Toronto should be ashamed of this. The politicians did what bad politicians do. They lied, embellished, misconstrued, and spun the evidence and all of this came at the expense of the elephants.
All hope is not lost though. In their blatant disregard of scientific evidence and facts they also chose to ignore several very important issues. The elephants still don’t fit in their crates, and the paperwork isn’t in place to get them over the border. No amount of ignorance will make those issues go away. One councillor was put on the spot was asked why PAWS hadn’t fulfilled these very basic requirements that they were responsible for? She simply pleaded that it didn’t make any sense because PAWS wanted the elephants. Normal people when confronted with incontrovertible evidence that proves their ideas false will generally (either begrudgingly or not) correct themselves. However we citizens of Toronto are fortunate enough to have councillors not encumbered with such shortcoming as being convinced by facts, but rather they take the more innocent child-like approach of sticking their fingers in their ears and refusing to listen. It would be humorous if it didn’t result in the needless potential abuse of innocent animals.
These councillors still answer to us, the people of Toronto. Please help me and the countless others who fight to right the wrongs done on ‘our behalf’ by our elected officials. I remain confident that the scientific evidence speaks for itself and while the people who run the city may put aside the welfare of these animals for their own means or ignorance, the citizens of Toronto, who run them, will not sit idly by as such atrocities are committed.
