Close Buffalo Zoo’s Frozen-In-Time Elephant Exhibit!
Close Buffalo Zoo’s Frozen-In-Time Elephant Exhibit!
Frozen in time, the Buffalo Zoo in Buffalo, New York continues to keep the Asian elephant captives, Jothi and Surapa, inside the inhospitable prison it calls a barn, for yet another brutal Buffalo winter. Supporters of Buffalo Zoo brag that the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) has granted the zoo a five-year accreditation. However, meeting the AZA’s paltry standards does not ensure a humane life for the elephants there. It’s time to close the elephant exhibit and retire the elephants!
AZA standards do require that elephants who are exposed to temperatures below 40°F (5°C) for longer than 60-minute intervals be monitored hourly to assess the potential for hypothermia. Over three consecutive winters (2013-2015), max daytime temperatures in Buffalo in January and February went above 40 degrees only 30 out of 177 days. Assuming the zoo follows the AZA criteria of no exposure below 40 degrees for more than an hour, the elephants would spend only 17% of January and February having any meaningful outdoor time. These short winter walks are the equivalent of “yard time” in human prisons.
The Buffalo Zoo recently remodeled its small “Elephant House”—but the more than $2 million put to this use was essentially wasted. The zoo installed barriers dividing the alleged 1,850 interior square feet into much smaller enclosures. If improving the welfare of the elephants was really the end-goal, the funds should have been invested in moving Jothi and Surapa to a warm-weather sanctuary where they would live infinitely better lives.
Meanwhile, in public offerings like one of this past summer’s “Elephantastic” events, the Buffalo Zoo forces elephants to participate in stressful animal-encounter events, and to perform unnatural behaviors such as painting for human entertainment. It is no surprise that Buffalo Zoo has been on our Ten Worst Zoos for Elephants List four times.