This alert is no longer active, but here for reference. Animals still need your help.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed new restrictions on importing live elephants and elephant trophies from Africa. This is a good step, but it needs to go further and ban all imports of elephants and elephant trophies to the US. Please take a moment to urge the agency to keep African elephants where they belong, in Africa.

CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) recently placed a 3-year moratorium on exporting live African elephants out of Africa. Since this is only a temporary halt, and there is no guarantee that things won't drastically change for the worse, it is important to speak up now to establish as many safeguards as possible as the opportunities arise to hopefully put in place a more permanent solution. The capture and transport of elephants from the wild to zoos is traumatic and brutal. And when they arrive at their destinations, the elephants are doomed to live out their lives in minuscule, barren zoo enclosures.

No elephant is returned to the wild from a zoo. Thus, the zoos' claims that their keeping of elephants contributes to conservation efforts in the wild are not true. Additionally, very little funding is provided for real conservation efforts to prevent more habitat loss and poaching and to mitigate human/elephant conflicts. In fact, taking elephants or elephant trophies from the wild impedes progress in saving endangered elephants where they live.

Here in the 21st century, it is time at long last, to protect African elephants from being slaughtered for their ivory tusks, their skin, or feet, which are used as decorative door stops. It is time to stop allowing them to end up as mere shadows of their former selves, pacing and bobbing day after day, year after year in deprived zoo environments. Elephants are not meant to be trophies, exhibits for entertainment, or serve as breeders to produce crowd-pleasing babies. Elephants deserve to roam the vast savannas of Africa, living wild and free as the majestic animals they were born to be.

This alert is no longer active, but here for reference. Animals still need your help.