Transcription of Roger Williams Quote
Investigator Question:
"You mentioned that you try to replicate like the natural foraging behavior [of elephants]. Do you think that there is ever a way of replicating it fully, like to the degree that they have in, like the degree of complexity that they have in the wild."
Keeper's Answer:
"The degree of complexity in the wild is you know, everyone likes to kinda say…[indiscernible] is that they need to walk all this distances. They only walk those distances to find food and the reason they need to do that is elephants are extremely destructive. Elephants in Africa are like white tailed deer to us, which are a pain in the butt. Eating, eating everything that we're planting. That’s the perception of elephants in Africa. But if your giving them food elephants don’t really need to walk these long distances. It is about a 5 K - 10 K but in that is you need to figure out how are they eating, what, how do they do that. So some of it is knocking trees down, stripping bark off trees, some of it is just eating grasses, so we provide all those different things from hay, some of it is reaching up high, some of it is reaching up low getting on their haunches and they’ve gotta really stretch their trunk to get something so those are the things we try to do. It is kind of using their body in all the ways that they would normally."