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San Diego and Lowry Park Zoos Capture and Import 11 Juvenile African Elephants from Swaziland URGENT
UPDATE: WHAT
YOU CAN DO:
Background During the
week of March 10, 2003, personnel from Big Game Parks in Swaziland rounded
up
and immobilized 22 elephants in the Mkhaya Game Reserve and Hlane Royal
National Park on the country's eastern side. Presiding over the capture
effort were officials from the San Diego Zoo and the Lowry Park Zoo in
Tampa, sent onsite to handpick 11 elephants to airlift back to the U.S.
and place on public display. The target elephants were part of a group
of orphans who had been transported in 1994 from the Kruger National Park
in South Africa after their parents were killed in a cull. Swaziland imported
the elephants in order to reestablish the species in a land where elephants
had been extirpated decades before by hunting and habitat destruction. Incredibly, two of the females were pregnant, a factor known by zoo officials when they chose them for capture and confinement. Veterinarians
delivered an antidote to the remaining elephants before stealing away
by air, leaving the unsuspecting pachyderms to awaken to find half of
their families mysteriously gone missing. Our coalition again filed suit in U.S. District Court to prevent these zoos from permanently tearing these young elephants from their native home, and forceing them to live the rest of their lives in small zoo enclosures that cannot even approximate their natural habitat. Unfortunately, on August 8, a conservative federal judge denied our motion for a preliminary injunction to halt the import, and the Court of Appeals later upheld the decision. The 11 elephants—including the two expectant mothers—were airlifted to Tampa and San Diego in late August. By paying a cash-poor nation hundreds of thousands of dollars for elephants, these zoos are setting a terrible precedent for international conservation by promoting the commercial trade in this threatened species. Meanwhile, the zoos mouth platitudes about conservation while spending tens of millions of dollars, not on helping range countries preserve habitat and protect elephants, but on capturing them from their homes, separating them from their families and exploiting them in severely inadequate but extremely expensive exhibits in the U.S.
World's
leading African Elephant Experts Denounce Zoo Import
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The
elephants, now 12 years old, had formed stable herds and lived peacefully
in the Swaziland reserves for nearly a decade, enjoying 2,000-acre habitats
and a lush natural setting. On the day of the capture, their peaceful
existence was shattered forever. Helicopters swooped in delivering veterinarians
who darted entire small groups of elephants, rendering them unconscious.
Ground crew arrived next in vehicles, separating the "desirable"
elephants from the individuals the zoos would leave behind. In the end
13 elephants (11 intended for the zoos and 2 held as "replacements"
in the event of death or injury), were dragged onto trucks, loaded and
driven away.
The
13 elephants were been held in a 3.5-acre enclosure awaiting export to
the U.S. for over five months. The zoos' plans to import the elephants
ran into trouble in April, when IDA and the Save Wild Elephants Coalition,
an international consortium of animal protection and conservation organizations,
filed suit to stop the import and exposed fraudulent misrepresentations
that both zoos had made in their federal import permit applications.
IDA
is committed to exposing the hypocrisy of the San Diego and Lowry Park
Zoos as well as any other zoos that try to increase profits by plundering
the wild and sentencing elephants to a life of loneliness, deprivation,
and isolation in captivity.