Breeding elephants

$14 million has recently been put into importing 8-10 Asian elephants to Australian zoos and providing appropriate housing for them. This has a caused an uproar on the Birds Australia e-mail list (which like all e-mail lists/newsgroups/message boards just ends up as a place for people to whinge). Many there are anti-zoo (including one of my workmates, who has written in the thread) and wonder why the money didn’t go into saving Australian animals and/or providing reserve space in the elephant’s native countries.

( One of the posts )

I wanted to respond. Explaining that indeed, while saving Australia’s animals is a worthy and necessary cause and the government should put a lot more money into it, at a zoo it’s the elephant who gets the publicity – not a creature like say, a dibbler, which is awfully cute and endearing (and endangered), but small and kept in the nocturnal house and you MIGHT be lucky to see it come out of it’s hidey-hole in there, even if people are sensible and follow the rules and tell their kids to quit screaming and stop using bloody flash photography in there. I also know that Perth Zoo is involved in this program. They’ve most likely completed the new, improved elephant enclosure now and Silup – the breeding (and temperamental) male can now have a proper spacious enclosure instead of being cooped up in a pen behind the female elephants and occasionally being let into the large pen when they are elsewhere.

Anyway, the curator of Taronga Zoo replied beautifully, so I didn’t have to.

( His reply )

Breeding elephants

$14 million has recently been put into importing 8-10 Asian elephants to Australian zoos and providing appropriate housing for them. This has a caused an uproar on the Birds Australia e-mail list (which like all e-mail lists/newsgroups/message boards just ends up as a place for people to whinge). Many there are anti-zoo (including one of my workmates, who has written in the thread) and wonder why the money didn’t go into saving Australian animals and/or providing reserve space in the elephant’s native countries.

( One of the posts )

I wanted to respond. Explaining that indeed, while saving Australia’s animals is a worthy and necessary cause and the government should put a lot more money into it, at a zoo it’s the elephant who gets the publicity – not a creature like say, a dibbler, which is awfully cute and endearing (and endangered), but small and kept in the nocturnal house and you MIGHT be lucky to see it come out of it’s hidey-hole in there, even if people are sensible and follow the rules and tell their kids to quit screaming and stop using bloody flash photography in there. I also know that Perth Zoo is involved in this program. They’ve most likely completed the new, improved elephant enclosure now and Silup – the breeding (and temperamental) male can now have a proper spacious enclosure instead of being cooped up in a pen behind the female elephants and occasionally being let into the large pen when they are elsewhere.

Anyway, the curator of Taronga Zoo replied beautifully, so I didn’t have to.

( His reply )