The Animal Manifesto (20 page)

Or, as Terry Maple, renowned director of Zoo Atlanta, has noted, “Any zoo that sits around and tells you that the strength of zoos is the SSP is blowing smoke.”

Keeping elephants in captivity, then, fails two of a zoo’s stated goals: humane care and conservation. For example, Piper said that the zoo might be able to house perhaps six bull elephants and use them for breeding and also for sending around to other zoos. Redecorating zoos with any animal raises serious ethical questions. Yet elephant groups are particularly important; if, in order to maintain Denver’s elephant park, individuals will be shipped in and out, then the strong and enduring social bonds elephants create will be broken repeatedly. Elephants are highly emotional, sentient beings, and they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and psychological flashbacks. They grieve, often irreversibly, when life-long friendships are broken. Elephants have thick skins, but tender hearts.

Officials at the Denver Zoo already know this, since they’ve had experience with what can go wrong. In spring 2001, Dolly, a thirty-two-year-old female Asian elephant at the Denver Zoo, was removed from her friends, Mimi and Candy, and sent to Missouri on her “honeymoon,” as the zoo called it,
to breed. A few months later, Hope, a mature female, and Amigo, a two-year-old male (who had been taken from his mother), were sent to the Denver Zoo, where they lived next door to Mimi and Candy.

In the following months, Mimi got increasingly agitated. In June 2001, Mimi pushed Candy over; when Candy couldn’t get up, she had to be euthanized (the zoo didn’t have a proper elephant hoist). Two days after Candy died, Hope got angry, escaped from her keepers, and rampaged through the zoo. Miraculously, no one was seriously injured. Hope was then transferred out of the zoo, and a new elephant, Rosie, was brought in. When the social order of elephants is severely disrupted, individuals get very upset. I’ve seen this firsthand among wild elephants in Kenya, and not surprisingly, this is what happened at the Denver Zoo. Playing “musical chairs” with animals is a serious business that can have dire consequences.

All of which raises a larger question: if the Denver Zoo, or any zoo, wants to spend tens of millions of dollars helping to conserve Asian elephants, why don’t they spend it helping wild elephants? If captive Asian elephants aren’t likely to help conserve the species, then why not put our efforts into preserving habitat that’s useful to wild elephants? There’s no reason the zoos can’t publicize their efforts and educate the public (and make money doing so), but why not act in ways that actually help the animals, rather than just help the zoo?

Georgia Mason, a professor in the Animal Science Department at the University of Guelph in Canada, and an acknowledged expert on the behavior of animals in captivity, has made exactly this case: “In the past 10 years Western zoos have spent or committed something like$500 million improving the
enclosures of something like just over 200 elephants — all of it evidence-free. These sums are worrying because they are staggering compared with what it would take to conserve these animals better in Africa and Asia. . . . The Oklahoma City zoo has announced plans to create a$23 million enclosure that would keep a handful of elephants. . . . That sum is about the same as the annual budget of the Kenya Wildlife Service or the South African National Parks Authority.”

Zoos are no place for elephants. The purposes zoos serve, and the animals we keep in them, are up to us to decide, so let’s make the correct choice — phase out the elephant exhibit and send these amazing animals to sanctuaries where they can live out their lives with social and emotional stability, respect, and dignity. The Denver Zoo should use its money to improve the lives of the residents it already has, or to help preserve the habitats of wild animals so they will never know a cage.

Most people come to zoos to be entertained, to be amazed by exotic creatures, and to experience a rare interaction and connection with our fellow animals. These same desires often inspire our adventures into the wilderness. But as we saw with Tatiana, the Siberian tiger, for a minority of visitors (but perhaps as many as a quarter), the interaction they most enjoy is the power zoos give them to mock and antagonize otherwise fearsome predators.

However, I’m told that zoos do indeed also educate, and I find this to be a reasonable claim. Yet there is only scant evidence that this results in any attitude and behavior changes concerning conservation, or that it leads to improved animal
welfare. If zoos want to claim that they are conducting
conservation
education, they need to find a way to prove that their efforts are resulting in behavior changes that preserve biodiversity. However, until we have proof, it is more fair to say that zoos are conducting what Sarah Bexell calls “wildlife natural history education” that has yet to be shown to engender humane attitudes and biodiversity preservation.

A recent study conducted by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums attempted to quantify the educational impact of zoos and aquariums. The assessment was titled “Groundbreaking Study Identifies Impact of Zoo and Aquarium Visits,” and it surveyed 5,500 out of about 157,000 visitors to twelve zoos. The results showed that about 60 percent of visitors said they had their values and attitudes toward conservation reinforced, 42 percent believed that zoos and aquariums played an important role in conservation education and animal care, and 57 percent said that their visit strengthened their connection to nature.

From this, the AZA concluded, “zoos and aquariums all over this country are making a difference for wildlife and wild places.” In fact, this survey only confirms what visitors say about how a zoo influences their attitudes, not whether zoos improve the lives of animals. Actually, only about 11 percent of animals confined in zoos are threatened or endangered, animals are rarely if ever reintroduced to the wild, and animals in zoos do not have healthier lives. When a report was published that captive Asian elephants show higher mortality rates than their wild relatives, Paul Boyle, a conservation official with the AZA, became very upset and extolled the virtues of zoos by claiming: “When you get a seventh-grader next to an elephant, there’s that hay smell. It’s huge. They look up and see these
eyelashes that are 4 inches long. . . . And they begin to ask questions.”

But do they? Or do they just look in amazement and move on to the next animal? There is no empirical evidence that the experiences zoos provide, as warm as they can be, actually inspire lasting action or changes in attitudes. Sarah Bexell, an expert on the educational role of zoos, has noted that even seeing animals such as pandas playing doesn’t motivate people to ask questions about the conservation of these charismatic animals. In one study conducted at the Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland, only 4 percent of zoo visitors said they went to the zoo to be educated. Even if people become interested, this does not lead to monetary contributions or any long-lasting education effect that actually benefits the animals. Animals in zoos surely aren’t ambassadors for their wild relatives. How can an individual who is caged and has lost his or her freedom be an ambassador for their species? As former zoo director David Hancocks says, zoos are “a different nature” and, indeed, a paradox, for they represent animals in misleading ways.

Of course, I realize research on attitude and behavioral changes toward animals is difficult to conduct and evaluate. Still, there are effective ways of teaching conservation and compassion for animals. For instance, take the conservation camps in Chengdu, China, which Sarah Bexell and her Chinese colleagues have organized. The camps were developed for children ages eight to twelve, and they were designed to encourage the acquisition of knowledge about animals, care for animals, compassion toward animals, and environmental stewardship. The program guided children along what they called a “continuum of care.” To facilitate this process, students first
met small animals (rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, parakeets, and tortoises) as
individuals
(not merely members of a species), and they were encouraged to recognize them as individuals with personalities and feelings similar to ours. They also met exotic captive animals (including giant pandas, red pandas, zebras, golden monkeys, giraffes, and lemurs) as individuals. Bexell and her colleagues found statistically significant selfreported increases of knowledge, level of care, and propensity for animal and environmental stewardship. Anecdotally from observation as well as from parental responses, they also learned that some students became kinder toward their peers, especially younger campers. This program and its evaluation allowed the researchers to document one way that young people can develop positive and humane attitudes and behavior toward animals and nature, and it can serve as a model for other much-needed studies elsewhere.

To conclude, let’s consider what the Association of Zoos and Aquariums itself has to say in their own executive statement, which notes: “Little to no systematic research has been conducted on the impact of visits to zoos and aquariums on visitor conservation knowledge, awareness, affect, or behavior.” Enough said. There’s little groundbreaking information contained in the AZA’s reports, and the burden of proof still falls on those who want to keep animals in captivity. Thus far, they have been unable to provide any convincing evidence that zoos do much of anything for “the good of a species.” All zoos must show that they are living up to their stated educational and conservation goals, and the public must hold them accountable. The animals, of course, can’t do this for themselves.

Clearly, the way we treat animals today doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for our fellow animals, and quite often it doesn’t work for us. Just about everyone I know says they care about animals. Many people work hard to protect animals. Some people say they love animals and yet harm them nonetheless; I’m glad those people don’t love me. While most of us have good intentions, judging by the state of animal welfare today, good intentions aren’t enough. Despite global attempts to protect animals from wanton use and abuse, the institutions and industries we ‘ve created kill and torture billions of animals every year — what currently passes for “good welfare” just isn’t “good enough.” Humans still tend to deny that the wanton abuse of animals occurs in numerous venues, and when they acknowledge it, they still sometimes justify it by saying that animals don’t have emotions and don’t understand what’s going on. But at this point, given the constant reminders in the popular media about animal sentience and suffering, only a hermit could really say, “Oh, I didn’t know animals could feel.”

Our relationships with our fellow animals are complicated, frustrating, exhilarating, ambiguous, and paradoxical; they range all over the place. Our fellow animals challenge us to take a hard look at who we are and who (not what) they are. Our relationships with animals are scattered across the love-hate spectrum, and this causes problems for animals and for us.

According to existing laws and regulations, “good welfare” in research allows mice to be shocked and otherwise tortured, rats to be starved or force-fed, pigs to be castrated without anesthetic, cats to be blinded, dogs to be shot with bullets, and primates to have their brains invaded with electrodes. We need to
ask ourselves what “good welfare” really means. Is it just synonymous with “convenient for humans,” or is this really the best that humans can do on behalf of animals? Consider the real-life scenarios we’ve already read about, which occur in laboratories, zoos, slaughterhouses, and in the wild nearly every day:

Is injuring coyotes and bears in leghold traps so we can study them “good welfare”?

Is shooting pigs to teach medical procedures for treating bullet wounds “good welfare”?

Is drowning minks in aquatic traps “good welfare”?

Is slaughtering hens so we can learn how to debone them faster “good welfare”?

Is injecting a disease into a chimpanzee “good welfare”?

Is blinding seals in chlorinated pools “good welfare”?

Is placing tigers in cages where they can be taunted “good welfare”?

Is moving elephants from zoo to zoo “good welfare”?

Are factory farms that create “downer” cows “good welfare”?

Is chaining circus horses and elephants over 90 percent of the time “good welfare”?

Clearly, “good” isn’t good enough. Treatment that humans regard as acceptable is unacceptable to animals. It is also disquieting that the results of a national survey of 157 veterinary faculty in the United States show that only 71 percent of respondents self-characterized their attitude toward farm animal welfare as “we can use animals for the greater human good but have an obligation to provide for the majority of the animals’ physiologic and behavioral needs.”

When it comes to deciding what constitutes “good welfare,” I often ask people: Would you do this to your dog? Would you trade places with the animal? If not, then why would any animal want to be treated in ways that, though legal, are abusive enough that you would not tolerate them, either for yourself or an animal you love? I ask these questions because we need to be very clear about what we do to animals and why we do it. It is possible for a dog to live in a closet or a cage as long as she or he is fed and given medical care when needed. They might not like it — indeed, they wouldn’t — but they could survive. We need to ask ourselves if we ‘re being consistent in deciding who to treat with compassion, and if not, why. We need to unravel what we mean by “good welfare” from the point of view of our fellow animals.

Françoise Wemelsfelder stresses in her excellent work, which focuses on how we assess the quality of life of animals, that good welfare is more than just an absence of suffering. It concerns the quality of the individual’s entire relationship with his or her environment, how she or he copes with their environment, and our willingness to treat animals as sentient beings with feelings, as individuals who care about what happens to them. In other words, animals don’t want us to merely stop acting cruelly toward them; they need us to also provide a compassionate world in which they can thrive.