Shachi Hime

If that sounds alarmist, consider this: the zoo world is already feeling a huge amount of pressure from animal rights groups who are campaigning to shut them down and is seriously struggling to overcome internal division and fight for its existence in any effective way. That’s while people from different organizations and practices can at least still agree on a common goal. Bringing Pacelle - someone most people in the zoo field utterly distrust - to speak officially at AZA will do such damage to AZA’s relationships with other parts of the zoo world that future collaboration on any topic may be entirely off the table.

The Pertinent History:

To understand why I’m so genuinely worried about the potential fallout from this one dude’s speech at a conference, you’ll want to have some context for the political situation this is creating. I’ve talked about it in other posts on the blog before, but in case you’re new to this, here’s a quick synopsis of a couple decades of politics:

First, the Humane Society of the United States is not associated with your local humane society or animal shelter - it’s a huge animal rights organization that is basically PETA but with better PR and an affection for legislative action instead of shock-and-awe campaigns. During a panel I attended at the 2016 AZA conference, an HSUS surrogate stated openly in response to a question that HSUS and PETA advocate for the same issues and end goals and are mainly differentiated by the tactics they utilize to achieve them. 

Second, HSUS has never truly been supportive of the existence of the zoo industry, with organizational action running the gamut from the support of “humane zoos” run by the AZA in the 1970s to a frustrated declaration in the early 1990s that many zoos - even those that were committed to the conservation of endangered species - needed to close permanently. HSUS has long been involved in and supported attacks on zoos from other animal rights organizations: in the early 2000s HSUS activists took part in campaigns to remove elephants from AZA zoos all over the country, and in in 2013 they were overwhelmingly supportive of the contentious documentary Blackfish and wanted to use it to help end all marine mammal captivity (including in AZA zoos). The current position statement on the HSUS website regarding zoos make it clear that they do not support the current structure of zoos and their conservation programs - the organization wants to see zoos “act as sanctuaries for animals in need rather than breeding them.”

Third, HSUS has a history of shady behavior, including: having their lawsuit against Ringling thrown out of court after it was discovered the key witness in the case had been paid to testify and had lied under oath; making an agreement with the Ohio Farm Bureau in which HSUS promised not to push for tighter animal welfare regulations for farm animals if the state of Ohio helped crack down on exotic pets - including a clause that allowed HSUS to pursue the very ballot initiatives against agriculture groups if they felt recommendations they made regarding dangerous wild animals were not being implemented appropriately; and suing the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office for harassment after refusing to comply with multiple requests for the organization’s fundraising records for an audit.  

Fourth, a partnership between HSUS and AZA facilities has appeared to be developing during recent years, a trend on which AZA leadership has pretty much declined to comment, leaving many zoo staffers highly uneasy. Trade organizations are supposed to protect the interests of their members and some in the zoo field have expressed the sentiment that collusion with a group viewed as the enemy - especially without any explanation - is inappropriate and unwanted.

Lastly, HSUS has implemented even harsher attacks on non-AZA facilities during their burgeoning partnership - campaigning for government agencies to shut down all unaccredited zoos, writing legislation to protect exotic animals that proposes to regulate any non-AZA facility out of existence, and actively condemning alternate accrediting groups and any facilities they list on their membership rolls.

Needless to say, there’s not a lot of love for HSUS from people who work in the zoo field. Most people who work at zoos did not start out with jobs at AZA institutions, and remember well the treatment their previous employers received from HSUS and their cohort. Many have worked at zoos that HSUS has defamed or sued, or have friends and colleagues at such facilities.  

All this history sets us up for the really important point we’re at now: AZA leadership has made the decision to have Pacelle represent the zoo industry in the eyes of the public by having him give the keynote at the organization’s national conference… when the majority of their membership body does not support the actions or goals of HSUS.

I predict this leading to two irreversible major schisms that will redraw the entire political landscape of the zoo industry.

Conflict #1: AZA vs literally everyone else involved in the zoo industry.

The first big political schism has already been in motion for years and will simply be expedited and cemented by Pacelle’s keynote address: a divide between AZA and the rest of the zoo field.

In a sense, this divide has always existed, as AZA has been trying to get rid of non-AZA facilities since the organization incorporated in the 1970s. When they couldn’t convince congress to legislate other zoos out of existence, they created their accreditation standards to differentiate AZA’s standard of care from the rest of the industry and used that credibility to deflect animal protectionism criticisms of inhumane treatment onto “the other guys.” While these disagreements used to be cordial in nature, enmity between AZA and rest of the industry has grown in recent years, with AZA actively joining animal rights groups in lambasting the other main zoo accrediting group, the Zoological Association of America (ZAA), and unaccredited “roadside” zoos. During a panel at the 2016 AZA conference, the AZA moderator joined an HSUS surrogate in decrying the validity of ZAA’s existence to a room full of conference attendees, only to be unable to define the purpose of the ZAA or provide any real information about the organization when questioned. This rhetoric can be viewed as both overly-aggressive and short-sighted, as there are a number of stellar zoos that are accredited both by AZA and ZAA, and ZAA-accredited facilities contribute significantly to the success of some of AZA’s conservation breeding programs.

As discussed recently on this blog, there are a number of reasons a good zoo might choose not to pursue AZA accreditation - and the behavior of AZA towards facilities external to their accreditation is absolutely one of them. As the apparent partnership between HSUS and AZA has evolved in recent years, AZA rhetoric about ZAA and unaccredited facilities has begun to mirror the messaging of the animal rights movement. This is really upsetting to a lot of people in the zoo field, as most zookeepers and other zoo staff don’t start their careers at prestigious AZA institutions - they started wherever they can get a volunteer gig or an internship and worked their way up to whatever job they have now. So, in calling for all unaccredited zoos to be shut down or decrying ZAA’s animal care standards, AZA leadership has been lambasting the friends, coworkers, and mentors of their own zoo employees. Slowly but surely the larger zoo community has started to be alienated by this exclusionary behavior by AZA’s management, and non-AZA facilities and staff have become increasingly reluctant to partner with an organization that will simultaneously accept their labor and publicly trash their facilities.

Bringing Pacelle in for the keynote at the 2017 conference - a position offered as an honor to the selected presenter, and whose presentation sets the tone for entire meeting - will cement the impression that AZA is aligning with the animal rights movement against the rest of the industry. This move makes it seem pretty likely that AZA will now be partnering with HSUS in exactly the way Pacelle described months ago in a blog post: “[working] to expose these bad actors, to pass meaningful legislation to help all animals, to educate the public about the wide set of animal welfare issues, and to blow the lid off phony accreditation programs that have little meaning or value.” (AZA management did not respond to an email looking to ascertain if Pacelle’s statement was an accurate characterization of their partnership, and has made no public statement regarding any collaboration with HSUS that I’m aware of as of the writing of this post.) This allegiance starts, apparently, by giving HSUS the top billing at their national conference in order to gain AZA credibility in the eyes of the animal rights movement. It’ll be to the detriment of the other sectors of the zoo world, but AZA’s previous behavior has indicated that their management is willing to throw other organizations under the bus in order to survive the onslaught of animal rights attacks. Anyone not part of an AZA institution - or even those working for an AZA facility who owe their careers to a non-AZA job or mentor - are going to have a really hard time justifying their support of that move.

Conflict #2: Actual zookeepers vs AZA’s chosen representatives

The second schism I’m expecting isn’t written on the wall as clearly as the first, but has the potential to be a lot more messy.

It sounds like Pacelle’s keynote will be on the topic of animal welfare - which makes sense, given his decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Detroit Zoo’s Center for Zoo Animal Welfare and the fact that the Detroit Zoo has an unusually large presence on the conference schedule this year. At first blush, you’d think that’s a good thing, because the need for high-quality animal welfare is something that both animal activists and animal caretakers should be able to agree on.

The problem is that HSUS has a really spotty history when it comes to both assessing and providing appropriate welfare for the animals under their purview. HSUS was a prominent engineer in the orca Keiko’s release in 2002, and Pacelle’s latest book represents the transfer as a success because “[he] had been given a fuller, richer, and more natural taste of life as a free orca” - however, reports indicate that once freed, Keiko was unable to integrate into pods he encountered, solicited attention from boats and humans, and died from pneumonia after less than a year and half in the wild. In the mid 1990s, an HSUS-backed attempt to rehabilitate navy dolphins - one that eschewed the input from the only zoo scientists known to have facilitated successful dolphin releases - resulted in two injured, underweight dolphins and the leads of the project being tried for seven violations of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. In both of these examples, the noticeable pattern is that HSUS chose to work with activists who had no scientific background or animal management training instead of the appropriate experts - to the detriment of the animals involved.

Pacelle has been involved with the Center for Zoo Animal Welfare (CZAW) at the Detroit Zoo since 2011, but some of actions of CZAW also raise serious questions about the extent of their credibility as a pro-zoo organization. For instance, advisory committee members include representatives from multiple animal rights organizations known to be anti-zoo (including the Performing Animal Welfare Society, known for petitioning for zoo elephants to be sent to their sanctuary); a director who made waves for attending an animal law symposium composed almost entirely of animal rights advocates; and a history of hosting very exclusive invite-only symposiums to which both HSUS and PETA representatives have been in regular attendance. Most concerning, though, is that an attendee at CZAW’s 2017 symposium reported that the first day was spent putting zoos on the defensive, forcing them to justify their right to exist to the animal rights organization representatives in their midst. That was a meeting held at a zoo with a facility specifically dedicated to animal welfare research, by a pro-welfare organization that has existed for almost a decade, with the purpose of creating “processes to safeguard the well-being of animals and fundamental animal welfare policy for zoos and aquariums developed to ensure all animals are able to thrive” … and they’re still having to debate that zoos should even exist with the leaders in the field who were hand-picked to attend? Something about that dynamic just doesn’t feel right. Detroit Zoo is participating in number of sessions related to animal welfare at AZA 2017, however, so no matter how weird their operations appear externally they’ve got the support of AZA management.

AZA is struggling under the onslaught of animal rights attacks right now - the pressure on them can be assessed by simply counting the number of accredited zoos fighting against AR campaigns that want to confiscate their elephants - and is likely aligning with HSUS in an attempt to regain some public confidence in the quality of their animal care. It’s likely that, given the heavy presence of the Detroit Zoo on the 2017 conference schedule, Pacelle will be speaking about animal welfare - specifically about his desire for HSUS and AZA to collaborate to ensure that “good zoos” become part of the “humane economy” Pacelle promotes. However, when HSUS has previously decided to compromise with an organization it has been publicly attacking, that offer has always come with strings attached. In order for Seaworld to get the public support of HSUS, CEO Joel Manby had to agree to retire the orca breeding program. The Ohio Farm Bureau had to agree to support legislation restricting exotic animal ownership in order for HSUS to stop pushing bills forcing more welfare regulations for farm animals. What will AZA have to give HSUS to gain their public stamp of approval? It’s probable that, like Seaworld, AZA will have to capitulate on some topic important to the animal rights movement. Pacelle’s most recent book hints at what those priority topics might be - mainly, the cessation of all elephant and marine mammal captivity. It would not be surprising if Pacelle eventually pushes publicly for AZA to, on the basis of improved animal welfare, either send all their elephants to sanctuaries run by animal rights organizations or cease marine mammal exhibition entirely. 

This creates a situation with a lot of potential for conflict between the opinions of the zoo staff who actually work with animals and the authorities on welfare their trade organization has decided to publicly support. When Seaworld decided to partner with HSUS, staffers were livid - and that was just the choice to stop a breeding program. If Pacelle and HSUS - distrusted outsiders without actual exotic animal experience - attempt to force major changes to the ways zoos manage their animals without actual evidence that it improves animal welfare, there would be a massive amount of resistance from the animal care staff at AZA accredited institutions. Any suggestion of ending conservation breeding programs and transferring zoo residents to sanctuaries would cause internal turmoil. AZA management has previously attempted to punish zoos that disagreed with new regulations handed down by threatening to withdraw their accreditation - and the grants and federal exemptions for a facility that accreditation ensures - and might continue to utilize that tactic in such an instance. There’s already a precedent for zoos purposefully splitting from AZA over just such a disagreement (the Pittsburgh Zoo forfeited AZA accreditation in 2015 over new protected-contact elephant management requirements) and if AZA allows Pacelle to influence new welfare-based animal care regulations it is likely to cause such a divide that staff - and potentially even entire zoos - will choose to terminate their relationship with the trade group.

Tl;dr: How things evolve around Pacelle’s keynote at AZA is incredibly important, because it has the potential to be so divisive as to permanently alter AZA’s relationship with rest of the zoo industry. The choice to feature him is already alienating a lot of people just by the fact that it aligns the trade organization - and therefore the facilities they accredit - with an animal rights organization that has historically opposed the many of the basic objectives of zoos in such a public and positive manner. If the HSUS presence causes the maximum amount of potential fallout I’m expecting, it could very leave the animal management field so scattered and at-odds with each other that animal rights organizations will easily make zoological institutions and their conversations programs as we know them today extinct.  

As someone in the zoo/aquarium field, I want to say something to everyone who is not…

It is not appropriate or respectful for you to publicly question the death of any animal under the care of zoo professionals. It is also not appropriate to say things that suggest you are more heartbroken than the people who cared for that animal. In case you weren’t aware, all living things must die. Sometimes it’s unexpected, sometimes it’s tragic, and sometimes it’s peaceful and planned for in a humane way.

When a human dies, the health care professionals who took care of that person are not typically questioned or accused of wrong doing. The same should be true for animal care professionals. I can assure you, with all my heart, that no one is more upset about the death than the people who personally knew that animal.

Wild animals die, captive animals die, and human beings die. It’s the natural order of things. I promise you, zoo animals have teams of caring, educated people looking after their well being from day 1 until the very end (and beyond, since every zoo animal gets a full post-mortem examination).

So please, next time you read a press release about the death of a zoo animal, think twice before you assume the worst and make any comments that imply something could have been done to avoid the situation. Zoos don’t intend to cover up the truth. But sometimes it takes weeks or even months to learn the whole story. Feel free to express your condolences and support. Send flowers or cards to the staff if you’d like. But please be patient and respectful. If the health care staff can figure out the cause of death, have faith that they will tell the public… But also understand that sometimes there are questions that may never be answered, due to the great amounts of unknown when caring for wild animals.

People should always be able to question what happened to an animal, because transparency and accountability are absolutely necessary in those situations. It strikes a really wrong chord with me for staff to tell people that they should never question what happened, because begrudging the public management and health data about animals is a huge part of why zoos have so many issues with being trusted. 

At least with the facility I worked with, every case was fully reviewed by the veterinary staff if there was a death. Necropsies were performed almost immediately after TOD, or within 24 hours if immediate assessment was not possible. The head veterinarian reviewed every case, and if there was anything to be changed, it was changed.

I think zoological facilities should assure the public they are doing the most for their animals. However, there is a difference between dealing with a concerned visitor/patron/animal lover than dealing with an irate welfare activist behind a keyboard or a guest literally following you around the zoo berating you for answers, even though you’ve given them all the information possible.

Imagine your relative died and people online with no medical degree kept asking you how they died, or claiming they loved them more than you without ever actually meeting them. That’s how a lot of zoo guests or commenters engage such news reports. That’s generally not the kind of interactions medical malpractice suits (unless involving a celebrity, I guess) are handled. 

Animal died at a zoo? Must be the zoos fault. Clearly the zoo killed them intentionally, right? And fuck the keeper who spent 20+ years with that gorilla or dolphin, me as a tourist have a deeper connection with said animal because I saw it once. Actually I never even saw that orca a day in my life, but I have a deeper connection with it than the people who spent decades with said orca. Oh polar bears have a life expectancy of 10-16 years in the wild and this one was 23? Clearly it died from neglect.

THATS what the OP is getting at with the respect aspect. I wish I could say I was kidding when I gave those examples in the previous paragraph but I’ve SEEN those exact arguments before. The anti zoo crowd is deplorable when it comes to death.

Dude. I’m a fucking biology nerd. I absolutely LOVE reading about husbandry and animal care. But I’m not trained in veterinary care or anything like that. Sure, I know more than the average joe, but when I read the full reports released to the public even I don’t understand it. So excuse me if I agree with the zoo keeper who is getting pissed off at keyboard activists with even less knowledge than a hobbyist like me for trying to drag you, ESPECIALLY after you just lost an animal you’d worked with for x many years.

Absolutely question deaths of animals, if you’re a fucking qualified professional. If you’re not a qualified professional, wait till said professionals release their findings and BE RESPECTFUL.

99.9% of wording courtesy of my co-worker and friend. 

June 6th

Straight to the hard questions! Nicely done. 

Honestly, I don’t know about this specific situation - because I’m not sure who it is that is lobbying the city councilman that is driving the motion. There have been mutterings that he’s funded by PETA, but I haven’t had a lot of luck tracking down his donor associations. (If anyone happens to have information, it’s Paul Koretz in District 5). When animal rights went after the Toronto Zoo elephants, it turned out to be ZooCheck that was whispering in city council ears. 

However, there’s definitely some politics that are in play. PAWS is a GFAS (Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries) accredited facility. GFAS was created by the animal rights organizations and is very directly associated with both HSUS. What’s more, the CEO of Born Free - a super anti-zoo organization, and the one that runs the aforementioned ZooCheck organization - sits on the GFAS Board of Directors. GFAS is trying to get more exotics involved with their sanctuaries, because while they’re getting lots of attention because BCR won’t shut up about being a member most of their sanctuaries actually deal with domestics and farm animals. It’s also worth noting that GFAS is currently the main sanctuary ‘accrediting’ group, and most of the new AR legislation I’ve been reading has gone from talking about ‘sanctuaries’ to ‘accredited sanctuaries’ - it’s pretty obvious they’re setting themselves up to be the only accrediting group in existence when animals start getting confiscated and the legislation that’s getting passed says they have to go to accredited rescues and sanctuaries. 

I’ve been following the story of Billy pretty closely. I’m glad you asked - it’s the sort of thing I think is really important to talk about, because people need to understand what’s going on behind the nicely framed stories about animal activism you hear in the media, but I’m never sure how much of that sort of animal industry politics followers are interested in reading. 

The reason this specific instance is so important is because it’s a hell of a lot more complicated than ‘sanctuary vs zoo, which is better for the animals’. The decision to go after Billy - and only Billy, and only right now - looks to me like a really strategic political decision from the animal rights movement, and it falls in line with what I’ve been researching the history, evolution, and MO of the animal rights movement. As I’ve been learning more and more about how animal rights organizations and their partnered sanctuaries conquer and divide to achieve the change they want to see, a very specific pattern of action has started cropping up and this situation exemplifies how they’ve learned to use legislation, the legal system, and the good intentions of the general public to remove animals from zoos. This explanation is going to seem a little bit like jumping at shadows, but this method of petitioning cities to seize zoo animals as assets - and the really conveniently timed fallout that would result from their success - is textbook animal rights organization planning. 

So here’s what you need to know - if Billy is sent to a sanctuary, the LA Zoo would lose their AZA accreditation. They’d likely then be subject to the new wild animal performance law that’s got major support in LA right now, because only AZA institutions would likely have an automatic exemption. The combination of loss of accreditation, potential inability to do public education and outreach, and the ability of the AR groups to spin the situation as ‘AZA kicked them out for being abusive to their elephants’ would massively damage the viability of the zoo as an institution for the foreseeable future… at which point AR groups could easily petition the city to seize more animals from the collection and send them off to sanctuaries, because it’s now “well known” what a horrible institution the LA Zoo is. That would normalize the idea that animal rights organizations and city officials with no professional animal experience know more about animal welfare than the best zoological institutions in the country, and would set a scary precedent regarding what sorts of institutions the public will accept the animal rights organizations condemning and removing animals from. With that sort of potential fallout - and all of the pieces of the puzzle having been successful, individually, within the last decade or so in regards to other animal rights campaigns - this really is not about a single elephant at all. 

AZA has this one really important rule in their accreditation standards, and it boils down to: any zoo they accredit must be considered the experts and have final say over the care of their animals. If anyone external to a AZA accredited zoo overrules that zoo’s choice of care for their animals in any way, that zoo loses their AZA accreditation because they are no longer viewed as having ultimate control over the welfare of their charges. This is really important when it comes to elephants, as the Toronto Zoo lost their AZA accreditation over exactly this situation: animal rights activists caught wind of TZ’s plan to transfer their elephants to a facility in Florida where they’d live in a bigger herd, and petitioned the city council to send the elephants a the Performing Animals Welfare Sanctuary (the same one they want Billy to go to, which has a known history of uncontrolled tuberculosis infections on the property to this day). The Toronto Zoo is a municipal zoo - which means its animals were city property - and the city council chose to claim the elephants as assets, ignore the evidence of animals with active TB already living at the chosen facility, and then overruled the Toronto Zoo staff’s due diligence about what choice would provide the best welfare for their elephants and sent them away to PAWS. Having been overruled by the city council and having lost control of animals in their collection, the Toronto Zoo lost their AZA accreditation. (They later reapplied and were re-accredited). 

So, if the animal rights activists can convince the city council to claim Billy as an asset and remove him to PAWS, it would really damage the LA Zoo as an institution. Their credibility in the eyes of the public would be destroyed, they’d lose exemptions from federal legislation due to losing their AZA status; they’d be forced to pull out of multiple major SSPs (because only AZA institutions are allowed to house animals in the Green level programs, of which LA zoo has number); they’d likely lose grant funding. What’s more, the zoo would then be subject to the recent law banning the use of any exotic animal in “entertainment”in LA, because if has the same structure as similar legislation we’ve seen in other states, only AZA facilities get an exemption. If true, that would mean the zoo would no longer be able to do education and outreach programs with their animals (and this law was backed by PAWS, the organization that runs sanctuary they’re trying to send Billy to). 

There’s a very specific reason that this whole campaign centers on Billy, not all three elephants, which is part of what makes it so clear this is a campaign with an end goal of damaging the LA Zoo’s AZA accreditation. Billy’s two elderly companions, Jewel and Tina, would be far better candidates to be sent to a sanctuary if welfare is really the concern driving the advocacy. They’re rescues from a private owner who were massively underweight and had chronic medical conditions, and it’s not as important for them to stay within AZA’s management as other elephants because they’re too old to contribute to the Asian Elephant SSP. The LA zoo has previously been willing to send older elephants to the PAWS sanctuary without needing intervention from the city council (that story is discussed below), so why is this newer campaign ignoring the elderly females and bypassing the zoo entirely by going to the city council when their welfare would likely be more improved by that sort of move? Jewel and Tina don’t belong to the LA Zoo - they’re officially part of the San Diego Zoo collection and on loan to LA - which means the city council can’t claim them as assets and forcibly remove them. The only elephant at the LA zoo that the LA city council has the ability to control is Billy, and so it’s pretty clear this is about getting the city council to overrule the zoo’s choices in caring for their collection and not about which elephants would benefit most from leaving the zoo environment. 

This is an attempt by the animal rights industry to undermine the LA Zoo as an organization - that much is clear. Billy is just a convenient figurehead and an animal that the public will empathize with while being completely unaware of the the ulterior motives behind the advocacy effort. It comes at a delicate time, too, as the LA Zoo is currently in the process of developing a new master plan for the future of the facility. That’s a future that would be massively impacted by a loss of accreditation and all the potential fallout that would go along with it. 

So that’s the context to the Billy situation, and why people are fighting so hard on both sides of the issue. But what the public really cares about here isn’t the politics, it’s the animal welfare, so here’s a look at history and the welfare of the elephant at the center of all this furor. 

Billy at the LA Zoo. (Photo Credit: San Diego Blogs)

Billy is one of three elephants at the LA Zoo - he’s the youngest, at 32, and the only male. Billy is kept separated from his two elderly female companions, Jewel and Tina, because he’s young enough to still want to reproduce and would injure the elderly ladies if he tried to mount them. However, while the elephants are always separated by a barrier, the exhibit was designed with heavy-duty wire fences that meant the elephants could always be able to see, hear, and touch each other through it. The LA Zoo Asian elephant exhibit is one of the biggest elephant habitats in the United States at 6.5 acres (with almost four acres of yard space), and was opened in 2010 - the construction of a state-of-the-art habitat was part of the resolution from the first time animal rights activists demanded the elephants move to a PAWS sanctuary. 

In 2006, an elderly Asian elephant named Gita died at the LA Zoo. It’s not clear what led to her ending up in position she did, but she was found laying on her back legs with her front legs stretched in front of her. Nothing they did could entice her to stand back up, and she eventually died as her body weight crushed her own tissue and the toxins released during that process overloaded her kidneys. (While this sounds brutal, it’s worth keeping in mind that this is likely how many elderly large animals die if they lay down for the last time in a position that puts their weight on their own body). Animal rights activists had already been agitating for the LA Zoo’s elephants to be sent to a sanctuary, and they used Gita’s death as momentum to push for Billy and the other female housed there at the time, an african elephat named Ruby, to be transported to a sanctuary where it was claimed her welfare would be much higher than at the zoo. The LA Zoo eventually caved to public pressure and chose to send Ruby to PAWS (keeping their AZA accreditation by doing so voluntarily) where she was immediately housed with other animals without a proper quarantine period, exposed to animals who were TB positive and were not diagnosed until after death, and eventually died herself in 2011 from an unknown disease that looked suspiciously like TB (PAWS declined to send out samples for testing, despite what appeared to be physical symptoms observed during the necropsy). 

Gita at the LA zoo in 1999 in the old exhibit. ( Photo Credit: Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

Billy remained at the LA Zoo after Ruby left, and the organization undertook a 42-million-dollar elephant exhibit renovation with the intention of bringing in another breeding male and a number of females as part of the Asian Elephant SSP. In 2007, local activists sued to halt construction of the exhibit with the goal of removing elephants from the LA zoo permanently and forcing Billy into a sanctuary - after a case that was drawn out for a number of years and repeatedly stalled exhibit construction, the judge assigned instead that the LA Zoo was allowed to continue exhibiting elephants but was required to exercise them frequently, make regular exhibit improvements such as tilling the soil, and banned the use of tools such as bullhooks and guides at the facility. When the new elephant exhibit opened in 2010, the LA zoo decided to put breeding plans for Billy on hold in order to house a pair of bonded female Asian elephants - Jewel and Tina - who had recently been removed from a private owner who had neglected their medical care. 

The three elephants share access to the large, heated elephant barn and have 24/7 access to five unique outdoor yards. Each yard has a substrate of soft sand that is tilled regularly to keep it from becoming compacted and hard - the shifting motion of the sand helps keeps the elephants in shape as they walk over it - and each yard has unique features like puzzle feeders, bathing pools and waterfalls. 

Browse and treats are placed at unique locations around all the yards each day, encouraging the elephants to explore their environment anew each morning. In addition, a comprehensive environmental enrichment program makes sure the elephants always have novel objects and stimuli to interact with and a daily training session (which the public is able to watch as a demonstration most days a week) keeps them mentally engaged by practicing foot care, grooming, practice for any veterinary behaviors that might be needed, as well as strength- and balance-focused exercises.

The AZA accreditation standards - which cover general animal policy in 34 pages, and use another 12 to cover animal interactions with the public or use in education programs - have dedicated 32 pages specifically to the regulations regarding elephant husbandry, training, nutrition, body condition, enrichment, and welfare assessments. As a large AZA-accredited zoo that frequently falls under the celebrity-studded, critical eye of the local populace, it’s inconceivable that Billy’s care (and that of Tina and Jewel) is not in accordance with these highly detailed requirements. 

Photos of the new LA Zoo elephant exhibit. (Photo credits: The Portico Group).

The LA Zoo’s elephant exhibit, finished in 2010, was designed by The Portico Group, a design firm founded in Seattle, WA in 1990. The Portico Group’s exhibit designs consistently awards every year within the industry for their incorporation of the newest animal welfare science and management technologies as well as educational and interpretive options. Their design for the LA Zoo is on par with the quality of the rest of their designs, and features a similar amount of yard space for the elephants as the design they created for the widely-praised Cheyenne Mountain Zoo’s Africa expansion that opened in 2013. 

Billy in his habitat at the LA Zoo. (Photo Credit: AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

One of the biggest reasons people express a concern for Billy is a head-bobbing behavior he’s been known to perform his entire tenure at the LA Zoo. The public is aware that repetitive behaviors (called stereotypies) can be signs of low quality welfare, and often worry that means that Billy isn’t being well taken care of at the zoo. However, one thing that isn’t commonly known about sterotypical behaviors is that once developed, they rarely go away once the animal is in a better welfare situation - which leads guests to often misunderstand an animal’s behavior as it relates to their current care. 

The LA Zoo has studied Billy’s head bobbing behavior over the years, and concluded that it appears to be an anticipatory behavior rather than one brought on by stress, as it mainly occurs when the elephant is awaiting the arrival of food, expecting a keeper interaction, or getting ready for movement into another area of his habitat. They also found that Billy had been noted to be displaying the head bobbing behavior when he came to the zoo at age 4 and that it was not something not something he developed during his life at the facility. 

Just because the behavior doesn’t mean that Billy has low welfare in his situation at the LA Zoo doesn’t mean the staff just want to leave him to bob and sway: to help decrease the amount of head-bobbing Billy does and engage him in a range of other behaviors, the keeper staff change their husbandry routine slightly each day and provide enrichment at different times in order to keep him investigating his environment instead of standing and waiting for regular occurrences. 

At the end of the day, Billy’s welfare does not appear to be the impetus pushing this current furor around “rescuing him” - he’s a convenient figurehead for what appears to be a well-coordinated attempt to undercut the LA Zoo’s credibility and accreditation status. 

But even though the actual welfare of the elephant is irrelevant to the organizations pushing this agenda, the general public is now very invested in understanding Billy’s welfare in regards to the outcome of this situation. 

The sanctuary animal rights activists are recommending Billy be sent to has multiple issues with basic elephant husbandry and medical treatment. PAWS was unable to evacuate their elephants in when threatened by a massive wildfire in 2015, due to their policy against doing even the most basic husbandry training with their animals that would have allowed them to be walked into a trailer or crated for transport. Instead, the animals were sheltered on site as the fire came within a few miles of the facility, putting them through massive amounts of stress and resulting in probable smoke inhalation. PAWS frequently take in animals that are reported as healthy upon transport, only to report having to euthanize them within a few years due to crippling chronic conditions. Most concerning is that PAWS appears to be plagued by frequent tuberculosis outbreaks among their elephants, potentially with multiple strains of the disease, despite their stated adherence to biosafety protocols -and that they have had at least one animal die while sick with active, contagious TB infections that were only discovered post-mortem. 

Billy is currently housed in a modern elephant habitat that was created in accordance with best practices for elephant management by outstanding architects - a remodel that was done specifically in response to the original welfare concerns about LA Zoo’s elephants in the late 2000′s. He has access to state-of-the-art veterinary medicine and is cared for by a dedicated team keepers who practice medical treatment behaviors, like foot care, with him daily to ensure that he can quickly receive treatment in a stress-free setting if it becomes necessary in the future. LA Zoo’s elephant keepers work hard to keep Billy active, mentally stimulated, and make sure he has plenty of positive social interactions with both the human and elephant members of his herd. 

If the goal of the general public is Billy’s welfare, he is far better off in a habitat designed for him to inhabit with the staff he has known for a better part of two decades than being sent across the country to a facility with massive red flags in their elephant management program just to fulfill a political movement’s agenda of damaging the facility that holds him. 

Citations under the cut. 

Hi there fruitkink! 🐙

And again zoos are not animal prisons 

If you’re going to argue that captivity is bad then there is absolutely no reason to consider captivity in a sanctuary better than captivity in a zoo just because “sanctuary” sounds nicer.