Every Elephant Birth Matters

It's good news, but I still am asking the question: are zoos a good idea?

 Ellie the elephant is due to give birth any day now. She is seen at the St. Louis Zoo in February 2013. Photo by Ray Meibaum of the St. Louis Zoo.

The March 26 story about the St. Louis Zoo’s impending birth of an elephant calf left out a number of critical facts.

The piece was about the extraordinary efforts of our zoo’s elephant care team to prepare for another elephant birth. A good deal of focus was placed by the reporter on elephant endotheliotropic herpes virus — EEHV — that can affect elephant calves.

Missing, however, is the fact that this virus affects elephants in the wild as well as in zoos. In fact, this virus co-evolved with elephants over millions of years. This is nothing new to elephants. The ground-breaking science that first identified this virus was a major discovery made by a zoo — the Smithsonian’s National Zoo.

Activists with an anti-zoo agenda argue against breeding elephants because elephant calves might develop this virus. What they completely ignore is our obligation to learn as much as we can about elephants in human care to serve the conservation needs of their endangered counterparts in the wild. EEHV is a threat to wild and zoo elephants. Progress toward effective treatment protocols (and, we hope, a vaccine in the future) is being made possible by funding and collaboration by zoos and other professional elephant care facilities.

Those who argue against breeding elephants also ignore the significant progress we have made in responding to this virus. EEHV-related calf mortality has dropped significantly over the last decade as we learn more about this disease and its treatment. Zoos, like ours, are in the vanguard in seeking answers not only to this disease but also to the origin and treatment of many others. Almost everything we know about wild animal medicine has come from zoos.

We wish the article had devoted more attention to our many efforts to ensure that elephants survive and thrive. Long before the most recent outbreak of poaching in Africa, our zoo was funding community conservation efforts to protect elephants in Kenya. Before extremist anti-zoo organizations discovered it was profitable to their fundraising efforts to engage in the questionable practice of criticizing elephant care at zoos without understanding the facts, our zoo was advancing elephant welfare in the U.S. and overseas. Camp elephants in Sumatra have benefitted for over a decade from the care, expertise and funding our zoo and others have provided through the International Elephant Foundation. The zoo community, not anti-zoo activist organizations, provided resources to identify and develop treatments for a heretofore unknown elephant virus, and our zoo continues to actively support efforts to defeat EEHV.

Our zoo is now caring for a growing elephant family in a way that encourages the expression of the full range of elephant behavior and the development of a social structure mirroring that found in the wild. We work closely with the Association of Zoos and Aquarium Species Survival Plan to foster the development of multigenerational elephant families, like ours.

We emphatically reject the short-sighted and grossly irresponsible notion that elephants should not be bred in zoos. Maintaining a sustainable zoo population is more critical than ever. It would be foolish in light of current and deeply disturbing trends in the wild to assume there is no role in conservation to be played by zoo-born elephants. It is not in our nature to quit. We cannot comprehend taking a position that a species is better off extinct than in human care, nor can we consider not doing everything possible to reverse the disturbing and precipitous decline of elephants worldwide. To those with a sincere interest in the future of all elephants, we invite you to join us and our partners in taking a meaningful and science-based approach to improving the outlook for elephants in Asia and Africa.

So we await the arrival of our next baby elephant with all of our hopes for the best result — a healthy young calf. Why? Because we live in a world where last month 86 elephants (119 if you count the babies carried by pregnant mothers) were slaughtered by poachers in less than a week in Chad. Every elephant birth matters. We share a vision with other zoos that includes elephants in the world’s future — forever.

~Jeffrey P. Bonner

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

April 5, 2013

Go make a difference!