Elephants don't benefit from being kept in Zoos

Conventional wisdom says that bringing elephants from the wild into the safe enclosures of zoos should prolong their life as they are protected from enemies and receive a consisten diet. But a study by researchers on 4,500 elephants in European zoos has established that their lives are significantly curtailed. Elephants born in captivity suffer from high infant mortality and average lives of less than 20 years whereas they are fairly likely to grow till the age of 40 in the wild.

Zoo committees are predictably up in arms. They claim the data used in the study goes too far into the past and is thus not a fair reflection of improved conditions in zoos today. They also suggest data bias in the compartive analysis of judging the average life of elephants in the wild.

The researchers insist that there agenda is not to prove that zoos are ineffective at what they try to do. But rather to suggest that improvements in zoo operations are necessary such as minimizing transfers between locations. At the same time, activists are getting further credibility to their notion that elephants are better off being conserved within the wild rather than in zoos.