TAXPAYERS TO ZOO BOND COMMITTEE: INHUMANE ELEPHANT ENCLOSURE IS WASTE OF MONEY, CLOSE IT
Former LA Zoo Employees Tell Committee Why $12 Million Bond Cannot Solve Elephant Problem At Zoo

Los Angeles, CA - Taxpayers are incensed at city plans to spend $12 million on an elephant exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo despite knowing that a mere one acre will not provide the space necessary to keep elephants physically and psychologically healthy. Concerned L.A. taxpayers will stage a protest in front of L.A. City Hall during a meeting of the Zoo Bond Oversight Committee—the government oversight body that makes recommendations to the Mayor and City Council regarding the zoo bond capital improvement program—and demand a cease to the irresponsible spending. Opponents to bond plans urge the city to save taxpayer dollars and elephants’ lives by immediately transferring all elephants at the Zoo to a sanctuary and permanently closing the elephant exhibit. 

When: Thursday, February 24, 10 a.m.
Where: Los Angeles City Hall, 200 N. Spring St. (front door)

Elephants, the world’s largest land mammals, are genetically designed for almost constant movement, essential for their digestion, foot and joint and overall health. Wild elephants can easily travel tens of miles a day; there are 640 acres in one mile. Yet elephants in zoos spend their time inactive in tiny enclosures, standing on concrete or hard compacted dirt which leads to extremely painful arthritis and recurrent foot infections. The L.A. Zoo’s spate of twelve premature elephant deaths since 1975 reinforces the fact that L.A. Zoo, like most urban zoos, is incapable of providing the vast acreage necessary to accommodate elephants’ physical and psychological needs. Elephants in zoos die on average at half their natural 70-year lifespan due to captivity-induced health problems. At the L.A. Zoo, Tara, a 39-year -old elephant who died in December, suffered from debilitating arthritis prior to death, and another elephant, Gita, aged 46 years, now suffers from zoo-induced foot infections and arthritis – two of the leading causes of euthanasia in captive elephants in the U.S.

Unlike any zoos, two sanctuaries in the U.S., The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee and the Performing Animal Welfare Society in California, provide elephants with access to hundreds of acres where they can roam on soft, varied soil, take mud baths, and form lifelong bonds with other elephants. These therapeutic naturalistic environs can improve elephants’ painful captivity-induced foot and joint conditions.

In December, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted to address elephants’ spatial needs by implementing a fifteen-acre minimum space requirement for any San Francisco Zoo elephant exhibit.

“As a taxpayer and a mother, I am appalled that the city wants to waste taxpayer dollars on the construction of an enclosure that will continue to be grossly inadequate in size and will continue to cause elephants to suffer and die prematurely,” says L.A. resident Catherine Doyle. “Los Angeles Zoo simply does not have the hundreds of acres needed to keep elephants healthy. It’s time that the city put the elephants’ welfare before business interests by closing the elephant exhibit and sending the elephants to a sanctuary where their feet and joints can begin to heal from years of standing on hard, compacted soil and concrete at the zoo.” 

Please visit SaveZooElephants.com for more information.