Elephant advocates file a last-ditch lawsuit to block Chai and Bamboo from shipping off to Oklahoma. Meanwhile, Woodland Park’s choice for their new home seems more and more dubious.
It was a lawsuit foretold, but its substance surprised even those waging it. On Friday the Elephant Justice Project, the newly incorporated nonprofit incarnation of the long time advocacy group Friends of Woodland Park Zoo Elephants, sued to block what it calls the “imminent” transfer of the zoo’s last two resident elephants to the Oklahoma Zoo.
“This has come up so fast – in the last week-and-a-half – I haven’t taken it all in,” says Alyne Fortgang, the Friends/Elephant Justice Project’s tireless but, for the moment, breathless co-founder.
It seems that some members of her campaign are lawyers. They got to talking and enlisted another smart young attorney named Knoll Lowney. He came up with an argument no one had thought of yet. No more arguing that Woodland Park’s management of its elephants constitutes criminal cruelty to animals, as the elephant advocates did in an earlier suit seeking to block city funding of the zoo. That claim failed in King County Superior Court, though perhaps not in the court of public opinion.
The new suit makes a more prosaic property claim: for the private nonprofit Woodland Park Zoo Foundation to send the elephants to Oklahoma constitutes an unconstitutional gift of public property. Indeed, the 2002 management agreement under which the foundation operates the city-owned zoo is unconstitutional, the suit contends, because it transferred not only the elephants but all the other animals and “personal property” necessary to operate the zoo to the foundation, again contrary to the state constitution’s prohibition on gifting public assets.
It’s a bit disconcerting to see activists driven by a passionate sense of animals like elephants as something like persons now defend them as “property.” And that’s not the only incongruous point. The suit contends that sending Chai and Bamboo to the Oklahoma Zoo will inflict “substantial pain and suffering” on Alyne Fortgang, who is deeply attached to them. “prevent her from observing the elephants at Woodland Park Zoo in the future, and eliminate the possibility that the elephants will be able to retire to a sanctuary.”
But seeing and sanctuary are mutually exclusive goals. If they go to a sanctuary, they’ll be barred from public view (though donors and – speaking for myself – the odd lucky author have gotten tours). At the Oklahoma Zoo, Fortgang can see them any time she wants to go there.
If upheld in its entirety, the suit would upend much more than the zoo’s plans for two elephants. It would overturn the entire arrangement by which the city has exited the fraught business of operating a zoo at a time when zoos are less cruel than they’ve ever been and more lambasted for their cruelty. But that seems unlikely; the city has been transferring property for decades to public development authorities for similar purposes.
When it comes to the elephants, though, the argument gets more tenuous. The Seattle zoo could say it’s merely lending Boo and Chai to the Oklahoma Zoo, just as it sent their former barn-mate Sri to the St. Louis Zoo on a breeding loan 13 years ago. Given the risk and expense of transporting elephants, the loans will surely prove one-way tickets; Sri, long disqualified from breeding, has stayed in St. Louis. But the zoo foundation can point out that such loans are a standard part of zoo management, which it was appointed by the city to perform.
The suit’s impact, and perhaps its real purpose, would seem to be more tactical: to delay Chai’s and Bamboo’s departure and raise a bigger stink in hopes Mayor Murray and the City Council will come around and intervene, as they until recently seemed inclined to do. Already they’ve claimed an initial victory; they say the zoo has agreed not to move the elephants until April 3, when a judge is expected to rule on the Elephant Justice Project’s motion for a preliminary injunction.
Indeed, the longer you look at the Oklahoma City Zoo, the more unlikely and inauspicious a home it seems for Seattle’s elephants. The winters get much colder there (especially, but not only, this winter) and the summers get hotter.
With the addition of Seattle’s elephants, the Oklahoma exhibit will have less space per elephant than Seattle’s does. That would be mitigated if a large group continue to share the main two-acre yard. But Seattle’s Bamboo hasn’t gotten along with other elephants, save the submissive Chai and timid Sri. She might well spend the rest of her days alone in a half-acre side yard; Woodland Park’s chipper announcement that she and Chai will get to be “aunties” to the Oklahoma herd’s calves would be laughable if it weren’t so sad.
Then there’s the noise. Elephants have famously sensitive hearing; some advocates have worried about the effects of Zoo Tunes concerts and the hum of nearby Aurora Avenue on them and other animals. But those are white noise compared to Oklahoma’s adjacent Zoo Amphitheatre, a self-described “whole new animal” that seats 6,000-plus and features concerts like this, complete with light shows and fireworks.
And finally, there’s the disease factor(s). The Oklahoma zoo has two young calves and an active breeding program. Chai and Bamboo may carry the herpes virus that killed Chai’s calf Hansa in 2007, which is devastating to very young elephants but often resides asymptomatically in adults.
By the opposite token, Oklahoma may not be the healthiest place for Chai and Bamboo. One elephant there has tested positive for antibodies to the other leading elephant plague, tuberculosis, and others have been exposed to it. That’s not unusual. Many zoos and both the major elephant sanctuaries in the United States have had more TB problems than that. But it’s one more hazard to the move.
“Truthfully, they’re better off here than in Oklahoma,” Fortgang sighs, after nine years denouncing Woodland Park as elephant hell. It would be a bitter pill indeed if Woodland Park, forced (though its managers would never admit it) by anti-zoo campaigners to divest its elephants, were to send them to a worse zoo.
Fortgang also thinks Chai and Bamboo would fare better at the Los Angeles Zoo, which seemed to others in the zoo world the likeliest destination for them. The LA Zoo has had its share of controversy and condemnation. Accommodating as its new $42 million elephant exhibit looks, it’s still an exhibit rather than a habitat, built for display first, the elephants’ use second; the trees and grass are subtly wrapped in electrified mesh to keep the eles from eating them. But LA would also afford Chai and Bamboo more space, an ideal climate, a shorter haul, and elephant care that seems to have improved from its bad old days.
The sanctuaries would allow them much more space, somewhat more freedom and, in the case of the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), an even shorter trip. But sanctuaries too are far from ideal, as Fortgang and PAWS president Ed Stewart acknowledge.
However well they may be run, private sanctuaries afford less transparency than public zoos; the public can’t monitor their elephants directly (as the activists have Woodland Park’s) or FOIA their records. Access to Woodland Park records under foundation operation is a contentious issue, but watchdogs have obtained much more than they could from a private sanctuary.
One sanctuary the advocates have urged the zoo and city to consider, the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee, is “a mess,” in the words of one of a number of top staff who left discouraged at the intrigues, turmoil, and lapsed procedures that may have led to tragedy. One keeper there was killed by an elephant; a number of others tested positive for tuberculosis after handling infected elephants without hygienic safeguards. Even though the Elephant Sanctuary recently announced that, with its tuberculosis cases controlled, it would resume accepting new elephants, uncertainties about the extent of the problem and state of treatment still hang over it.
PAWS has had much more management continuity; co-founder Stewart is still in charge. But sending Chai and Bamboo there would entail a wait while PAWS raises funds and builds a barn for them. And TB questions also haunt PAWS.
Still, the sanctuaries have one big advantage in dealing with the tuberculosis epidemic in America’s elephants. Unlike the zoos, they have the space to quarantine infected elephants and still give them a little room to roam.
