Environment: Playing God, and Noah, at Zoos

Increasingly, they must not just exhibit, but also save and breed

At 7,000 Ibs., she was not Dr. David Gershuni's everyday kind of patient. But the orthopedic surgeon, working early one morning in a large barn at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, was unfazed by his jumbo task: to place a cast around the fractured leg of a twelve-year-old African elephant named Mandavu.

Mandavu had tumbled into the moat around her compound one night and broken two bones of her lower right rear leg. When the leg did not heal, it seemed that Mandavu...

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