I was glad to see for once Torontonians having a protest at the Toronto Zoo over the elephant enclosure. The Toronto Zoo needs to be in the spotlight more. Just because it isn’t as much of a hellhole as the other zoos in this country doesn’t mean it should miss the spotlight.
CTV covered the story (click here for the link) and I was astounded to see Eric Cole’s outrageous statements:
“Our elephants are not aggressive at all and they’ve been at the zoo for 35 years. We have no aggressive elephants,” said Eric Cole, the supervisor of the African Savanna, who has been working with the animals for more than 10 years.
Watch a video showing just how non-aggressive they are: (the pertinent footage is from the two minute to the five minute mark)
The other outrageous statement:
“There’s no ground to say elephants are prone to getting more arthritis in zoos,“ Cole said.
Apparently, the Toronto Zoo doesn’t even believe experts in its own industry on this subject:
From an In Defense of Animals (IDA) news release (scroll down):
“THE EXPERTS AGREE: ZOO CONDITIONS CAUSE FOOT AND JOINT DISEASE IN ELEPHANTS
“There is general consensus that lack of exercise, long hours standing on hard substrates, and contamination resulting from standing in their own excreta are major contributors to elephant foot problems.”
- Intro to The Elephant’s Foot, proceedings of North American conference on elephant foot care, 2001
“A zoo really isn’t conducive to the health of elephants and the feet are a large part of it. You just have to accept this as a chronic condition, because you aren’t going to cure it.”
- Blair Csuti,, zoologist who organized the first North American conference on elephant foot care in 1998, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 17, 2006
“We believe that no matter how good a foot care program is, eventually foot problems will be seen because they are the result of keeping elephants in captivity.”
Alan Roocroft, consultant who has worked with captive elephants for over 30 years and James Oosterhuis, DVM, San Diego Wild Animal Park, The Elephant’s Foot, 2001
“Foot-related conditions and arthritis are the leading cause of euthanasia in captive elephants in the United States. Activity allows the elephant to wear down the structures of the feet normally. In the wild, elephants move or walk up to 18 hours daily in search of food and water. Although captive elephants may have large enclosures, they do not need to, and sometimes they cannot or often will not, move around. This contributes to the development of foot disease and arthritis. Unyielding, hard surfaces, which are present in most elephant barns and yards, also contribute to foot diseases.
- Gary West, DVM, Oklahoma City Zoo, The Elephant’s Foot, 2001
“There are no substitutes for walking in a restricted environment, no enrichment strategies that motivate a captive elephant sufficiently, no boomer balls or tire that replace walking and no food dispensers that will create activity patterns in elephants that even come close to being beneficial to the long-term management of captive elephants. The absence of walking from an elephant program, considering the elephant is genetically programmed to move, must have a dramatic long-term effect on the elephant¹s physical and mental stability and must ultimately affect its longevity and propagation.”
Walking, Outline of USDA Elephant Course, Seattle, August 3, 1998
“The first, and undoubtedly the single main reason zoo elephants have so many foot problems is the universal use of concrete floors in zoo indoor elephant enclosures. . . . The number one cause of illness and premature death of zoo elephants is zoo-genic foot disease caused by decades of life spent in the traditional zoo elephant enclosure… it is by far the number one source of suffering and premature death for elephants in every zoo.”
- Dr. Michael Schmidt was Chief Veterinarian and Senior Research Veterinarian for the Portland Zoo for 25 years, specializing in the care and breeding of elephants, Jumbo Ghosts: The Dangerous Life of Elephants in the Zoo, 2001.”
Please circulate this post so the Toronto Zoo can know that its lies can be blown apart very easily.
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wow what crap.. any visitor who stands at the exhibit for long and with any regularity knows the elephants are aggressive. Not all but lots of politics and fights in that dismal yard. It’s a prison yard bully culture. Hard to know how the dynamics will change as the numbers rapidly dwindle.
The stuff about concrete not being linked to arthrtiis laughable. Even other zoos are getting THAT.
It is indeed a shame that the talking heads at the zoo are allowed to make such unscientific statements without being challenged. Glad to see the protests!
This is the load of crap. So one fight broke out. Humans fight like animals all the time. There may have been a new elephant in the zoo’s herd. The matriarch would be protective of her enclosure. Elephants pee to get eachother’s scents and do mock charges to show dominance. Do some research before you point the finger.
I was happy to get the above comment “load of crap”. Anyway who has observed the Toronto Zoo elephants aggressive interludes over the years and knows the history of the entire herd to be one fraught with fights will laugh at the ignorance of the poster above who knows absolutely nothing about the Toronto zoo elephants. No, there was no new elephant in the herd. In fact the “matriarch” had died a few months back, or should I say euthanized due to the usual reasons elephants in zoos die prematurely, and revenge tactics were going on in the “herd”, a fact that no one would dispute unless of course being quoted in newpapers.
And of course anyone who knows anything about wild elephants knows matriarchal herds don’t fight the way humans do. Only a zoo employee would think that due to ignorant pride that their concrete prisons could possibly provide some kind of life for these facsimilies of real elephants.