Animal Rights Group Sues San Antonio Zoo

[douglas9]

The Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) made good on its promise to sue the San Antonio Zoo over Lucky, an Asian elephant animal right groups want removed from the zoo and transported to an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee.

The lawsuit alleges the zoo is violating the Endangered Species Act by confining the elephant in isolation (its last companion was Boo, who was aggressive and euthanized in 2013); by providing insufficient space; by not providing adequate shelter; and for leaving inappropriate substrate on the exhibit floor. According to the ALDF, these conditions injure Lucky both physically and psychologically.

“More and more zoos have admitted that they cannot meet elephants’ complex needs and have closed their elephant exhibits,” Stephen Wells, executive director of ALDF, says in a press release. “Instead of acknowledging the obvious — that it cannot meet Lucky’s needs — the San Antonio Zoo makes excuses about why it is unwilling to allow her to have a better life. We hope the zoo will choose to let Lucky live out her days in the more natural environment of a sanctuary, rather than stand around waiting to die where she is now.”

http://www.sacurrent.com/Blogs/archives/2015/12/01/animal-rights-group-sues-san-antonio-zoo

[LeftyMom]

1. A zoo problem that doesn't get much press gets breezed by in that article,

and I think it's interesting enough to merit some discussion:

its last companion was Boo, who was aggressive and euthanized in 2013

Zoos euthanize (or "transfer" to dubious facilities where animals may be hunted or skinned) most males of larger mammal species before or at maturity. They're big and dangerous and hard to handle, but they're also not big tourist draws in the way that babies are, and with reproductive technology you don't really need to keep a male around to keep the mature females pregnant or even to run a captive breeding program.

It's a situation that really cuts through the bullshit about zoos as research facilities or breeding programs. You can't really understand species when you keep unnatural populations in unnatural conditions.

edit: To illustrate how skewed zoo/circus populations are, here are the elephants who have been retired to Elephant Sanctuary in TN: http://www.elephants.com/meetElephants.php Note that they didn't cause the problem, I'm just using their herd to illustrate the larger point.

2nd edit: And lest anybody think Elephant Sanctuary's herd is not representative, here's PAWS' elephant facility in CA: http://www.pawsweb.org/meet_elephants.html You should be noticing a theme.