For Zoo Elephants, Greener Pastures
Sometime late this month, a 42-year-old Asian elephant named Dulary will board a trailer bound for a 2,700-acre sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tenn., 85 miles southwest of Nashville. Animal advocates are delighted. Dulary's new digs are as good as it gets for an elephant in captivity, they say, and much better than living alone in a barn stall at the Philadelphia Zoo, where a fight with a younger African elephant left Dulary injured and alienated. (They now take turns using the quarter-acre yard.) Dulary's departure, and the relocation of Philly's three African elephants to the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore this summer, is part of a larger trend. Changing standards of care have prompted many zoos across the U.S., including Detroit, San Francisco, Chicago's Lincoln Park and New York City's Bronx, to close or phase out their elephant exhibits, citing insufficient funds to manage pachyderms and provide them with ample room to roam. (Activists say public outrage over cramped conditions and hard-surface floors, believed to cause arthritis and foot disease, has also played a role.) Maryland, meanwhile, is taking the opposite tack: to better serve its enlarged herd, it plans to add a winding, wooded exercise trail as part of a $30 million expansion. The elephants will have to wait though: the new facility isn't due to open before 2010.