Oregon Zoo » Oregon Zoo

07-12-2007

us australians here have had numerous arguments and discussions over the situation with elephants in australia. we have only five zoos with elephant exhibits and the upside to this is that it didn't take much redevleopment to become a "bad elephant enclosure free country"....

melbourne zoo's enclosure has an excellent design. with its two excellent sunlit modern barns and three ajoining paddocks it allows for great amount of flexibilty, something that is essential with complex animals such as elephants. all paddocks are concrete free. all paddocks have water pools (of varying sizes). all paddocks have shade and sun, all have enrichmet devices installed and importantly, all elephants rotate time throught the day in all exhibits. in addition to this access gates allow the female elephants can be walked though the zoo.

these features are in my opinion, the minimum we can offer elephants. for their own mental and physical health and effective management of conservation breeding programs. i now want melbourne to expand adding a forth "social paddock" that is at least as big as the other 3 put together!

but i'm an "elephants should be in open range-style zoos" kinda guy.

so as massive an improvement melbournes exhibit is and as recogfnised as it it as a well thought out and functioning system (a US zoo is currently building an exhibit borrowing the melbourne design, which i think was incidently developed by US company Portico) i hope that US zoos don't continue with band-aid "minimum" exhibits like this...

melbourne will be forced to expand again in 10 years. i'm sure.

07-12-2007

Good response yet again Patrick. I support your notion that elephants should perhaps belong only in open range zoos, and that Melbourne has one of the better elephant enclosures for a typical city zoo. Space is critical to reduce stress, avoid obesity, and to halt any development of foot problems. I also detest the practice of locking elephants in at night, and believe that they should still have the full range of their exhibit if they so wish. Do Melbourne and Taronga allow their elephants free rein in the evenings? Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo won an exhibit award for its 1.5 acre elephant forest when it was built in 1989, but now it's past its prime and has come under fire from animal rights activists. They always lock their elephants indoors during non-opening hours, and so that means for a good 14 hours per day the elephants have a puny amount of room to move around in. Where are ethics when you need them?

07-12-2007

[quote=patrick;

but i'm an "elephants should be in open range-style zoos" kinda guy.


melbourne will be forced to expand again in 10 years. i'm sure.[/QUOTE]

I have been saying this for years, I with you 100% on that, I hope Mel zoo can give them some more room if they can

07-12-2007

which is made worse by the fact that elephants must spend less time sleeping than any other species i can think of (okay except maybe dolphins who never truly sleep!)

fortunately, melbourne allow the elephants access to their outdoor paddocks at night. pretty sure taronga would do the same. i can imagine that northern US zoos would restrict nocturnal outdoor activities due to the cold weather, but that makes no excuse for adopting such unreasonable managemnet practices in the warmer months.

fortunately even the coldest melbourne nights are not really different to those asian elephants would experience in many parts of their home ranges.

early on, when melbourne was fundraising for its new exhibit (it took about ten years!) it made some very simple alterations to their old exhibit to at least provide some additional care whilst awaiting construction. the old exhibit was terribly small and totally unsuitable for a bull and a cow who were kept permanently together, but required very different management methods.

still they jacked-up all the concrete and replaced it with sand (not pour sand over the concrete, as someone suggested oregon did in an earlier post), installed numerous scratch tree posts and arboral feeder boxes (which make the elephants raise their trunks), shadecloth sail over part of the enclosure and added a gateway over teh moat to allow the female to be taken outside of the exhibit for walks.

and lastly the keeping the elephants active became a full time job for the keepers with daily excercise routines etc.

my point is it was largly very simple cheap alterations and a different management attitude that made all the difference. by the time the elephants moved into their new exhibit not only were they completely unstressed, and took to the move amazingly. and i mean that, they absolutely LOVED it.

and these were a pair of elephants that you may expect were good candidates for becoming "problem" elephants, having spent 20 years in a largly concrete box. mek kapah (the female) was an infamous "swayer", now, i haven't seen her sway in years.

its part exhibit, part attitudes. sounds like the woodland park elephant keepers may need some new attitudes.

07-12-2007

That's very interesting. I know Packy was the first Asian elephant born at portland Zoo. Was he also the first-or first successful- birth in the USA?

07-12-2007

I find that quite remarkable, even more so given they have had such an exceptional breeding record over the years.

08-12-2007

The reason why the Oregon Zoo hasn't been in serious hot water over their elephant exhibit is because of their excellent beeding record that includes 27 calves. I think that Packy was the first elephant born in the western hemisphere (1962) in many, many decades, and he's still alive and kicking at the zoo.

The Calgary Zoo regularly experiences temperatures below freezing, and in the past week the temperature there has been between minus 5 and minus 15 degrees. They have 4 elephants at that zoo, and I can guess that they have all been kept locked inside their barn 100% of the time during the awful weather. The Edmonton Zoo has a single elephant left named Lucy, and she also spends 100% of her life locked in her barn due to the even colder temperatures. The very idea of keeping elephants in Canadian climates is ridiculous, and even though the Calgary Zoo spent $10 million on expanding their elephant enclosure this year, it doesn't justify keeping such massive animals indoors for entire winters. A month can go by without the elephants spending much time at all outdoors. Even if given the choice many times it's simply too damn cold for the pachyderms!

Many other large animals face the same predicament. The gorillas, giraffes, hippos, etc at the Calgary Zoo spend months and months locked inside because there is two feet of snow in their outdoor paddocks. Even fairly progressive zoos in Seattle and Oregon have to keep their ungulates inside on days with frost or in heavy downpours.

It was a joy for me to tour many zoos in Australia and witness the beautiful weather that allows for large mammals to choose where they spend their days. There isn't snow to worry about, and if anything the only weather-related problems that zoos face is how to keep their creatures comfortable in the searing Aussie heat. The giant pandas arriving in Adelaide in 2009 might get a shock in the hot summer months.

08-12-2007

you know snow leopard, you are the first person from the northern hemishere on this forum who i have heard admit that really, zoos that find themselves knee deep in snow really can't provide for large tropical mammals.

i have always maintained a position that i think temperate zoos should focus (and that doesn't mean EXCLUSIVELY) on temperate species and warm weather zoos should focus on tropical and subtropical species.

usually i find myself up against americans and europeans aggressively defending their right to keep elephants and giraffes, though personally i think it comes down to a personal desire to see them on their part than a true belief that keeping them locked in barns for months on end is actually fair.

and the funny thing is - even though i say it goes both ways (i'm not a fan of polar bears on the queensland goldcoast either), it doesn't seem to get any levelof agreement, becase lets face it - most of our zoo favorites, gorillas, elephants, giraffe and rhino - all come from warm climates.

still. i'm unshaken. i don't much care how well they breed in europe. if you need to keep you elephants indoors for months on end then i really don't think you have a right to keep them.

08-12-2007

Yeah Patrick, it's really too bad that others can't see that many hot-weather, tropical animals struggle in the colder climates. There was a study done on the two elephants at the Edmonton Zoo by Zoocheck.com that found that the elephants spent 75% of their lives locked inside their barn. That includes all four seasons, and the tiny zoo in Edmonton (a city of almost one million people) has finally shipped one of the pachyderms off to the southern United States. Unfortunately now there is one elephant all alone in the frigid climate, being locked in after zoo hours, locked in whenever the temperature dips below freezing, and therefore could possibly spend a few months at a time without ever leaving the barn.

Edmonton is similar to Calgary in that they experience horrific winters, and I lived in Edmonton for the first ten years of my life. One year in the early eighties we had snow on the ground for 8 months of the year, and so what does the zoo do? They used to shut down half of the exhibits, and all of the animals that came from warmer climates would be squeezed into their "winter enclosures"...which were usually a third of the size of their summer exhibits. And now that I'm in my early thirties and can comprehend how damaging that is for the elephants...well it is truly appalling. Either the zoo lets the animals outside and risks freezing temperatures, or they are locked indoors without any natural light whatsoever.

It also works both ways, as you pointed out. The solitary polar bear that is sweating it out in the Singapore Zoo is evidence of animal cruelty. I've never been to Singapore, but they claim to be a progressive zoo and have at least agreed not to import any more polar bears after the one they have dies.

10-12-2007

That may be because you are talking here about animals in really extreme cold climates e.g. Canada. In the Uk we rarely, if ever experience, snowfall nowadays apart from the North & Scotland,(and even there its diminishing each year) and I doubt a Uk zoo has been knee deep in snow since about the 1950's. So although we have long, damp and rather miserable winters, they're usually mild with intervals of fine weather. Most of the larger exotic species are able to use their outdoor enclosures for at least some of the time throughout the year. Probably the same applies in Europe too, though their winters are colder and more snowy than ours the further North and East you travel.

I do agree the situation in zoos in countries much colder than the UK is far from ideal for these same species.

10-12-2007

San Diego is an excellent example of how a zoo can thrive in a warm climate. For those who haven't been there, an interesting fact is that besides the massive reptile building the ENTIRE zoo is open air. Each and every exhibit has fresh air, sunshine, and is wide open to the elements. There are indoor buildings for the animals' night quarters, but I don't recall being able to view any of them. It is a much better practice as compared to cold climate zoos where the animals don't actually gain a glimpse of sunshine or even fresh, outdoor air for months at a time.

The Metro Toronto Zoo has over 5,000 animals but many of them are contained in large pavilions that are arranged geographically. Due to the harsh Canadian winters that zoo has coped well with the use of such enormous buildings, but I still think that the San Diego climate has so much more to offer the animals.

10-12-2007

its funny. the whole concept of a "monkey house" or a "pachyderm house" is completely foreign to us australians. like san diego with the exception of reptile and invertebrate houses, all our zoo exhibits are open-air, year round.

somehow an indoor zoo doesn't seem like a real zoo to me!

grant - i agree with you that the UK is much milder in climate. and obviously believe that affords them a greater range of animals they can care for. what those animals are i'm not going to distinguish, but suffice to say once again if it need be locked up indoors or shivering cold, then its unsuitable.

what often supprises me is that many big charismatic animals are temperates or have temperate counterparts. it always supprises me when northern zoos have collections that don't take advantage of this.

asia has a wealth of temperate species that are completely exotic to europeans and americans.

11-12-2007

In the northern cities of North America and Europe almost every single zoo has at least one large building that accomodates tropical animals. There are zoos like Toronto where people basically walk from one structure to another, and in the winter it's simply too cold to spend much time outdoors. Many cold-climate zoos have purposefully built even more buildings in order to entice visitors during the colder months. Seattle's zoo sees 65% of its business in May, June, July and August, when the weather is much nicer and the kids are out of school. It is a struggle throughout the rest of the year to get folks through the turnstiles. The addition of "indoor exhibits" creates more business...

For the sake of the animals there perhaps should be more of a focus on geography, as in the Northwest Trek Wildlife Park that only showcases North American wildlife in their natural environment.

11-12-2007

here in Scotland we have the Highland wildlife park which is now specialising in tundra and mountain species, it has since its opening held Scottish native species and animals that were native to Scotland at one time, also the Edinburgh zoo in recent years have accomodated species into their masterplan that are more suitable to the climate e.g Steller's sea eagle, wolverine, Japanese serow, Chinese grey goral, Pallas cat and the likes of the Bactrian wapiti and Amur leopard that are in the process or have already moved to the highland wildlife park.
Big money is required to exhibit tropical species in suitable housing, money that very few British zoos have, so maybe the time is right with a whole new raft of zoos in the process of masterplanning to look at their collections in the future to consider this point as Edinburgh has.

11-12-2007

whoops looks like were going off-thread here, sorry.