Strange Gift: Update on Seattle Elephants and Their Need for Space/Sanctuary

Zoo leadership maintains that SPACE IS NOT AN ISSUE WITH ASIAN ELEPHANTS:

Scott Blais, co-founder of The Elephant Sanctuary in TN, speaking about founding the Sanctuary:

“We set out to give elephants their life back…to create a space where they can live with others of their own kind where they can make their own choices of where they go, when they go there...where most of their diet comes from natural forage...to encourage natural behavior and natural social structure. Doing this…it’s a challenge with captive elephants. We are essentially putting a bunch of elephants that are completely unrelated together and saying “okay, here’s your family now” and it’s the same thing that happens in zoos where you put 3 or 4 elephants together -- The difference with a sanctuary is now they have enough space that they can choose where they go, they can choose who they hang out with. When you are in a small space, you’re kind of stuck…forced to be roommates and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t work, it can be catastrophic. In a small environment, there’s nowhere to flee to. In a large space they have the opportunity to walk away, and keep walking away…We started off with 100 acres and realized, that wasn’t enough…We are often asked “how many acres per elephant does it require to sustain them?” To sustain their diet, maybe 10-20 acres per elephant; but when you talk about the social needs and the psychological needs, we don’t have a number on that.”

…Once the group of elephants was allowed onto the 2200 acres corridor…they thrived. They started wandering off and we saw another layer of growth and development with them that was just exponential…The Sanctuary was created to create a life where elephants can just be elephants.

(In the wild) “Intimate family groups tend to be all related individuals. It’s mother, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, young males…if a female is born into a herd, they are there for their entire lives. They form very, very strong, very close bonds. It is in their nature to do so…In captivity, to try to re-create that…it’s challenging.

We kept our minds open to the elephants. We wanted to see what their needs were. We went into it with this concept of 100 acres is enormous…we may let them all free and they are all going to become rogue and wild. We saw exactly the opposite. One: 100 acres isn’t enormous to an elephant and Two: we saw once they had the space, once they had the freedom and autonomy, they became much more placid, they became much more co-operative…that doesn’t mean there aren’t struggles involved…but generally speaking elephants will thrive when you give them that much space. So in opening up our minds to elephants in that way we learned…how much we discredit them and don’t do them justice, not only with their spatial limitations but also the psychological and emotional limitations that…constrain an elephant’s life. …what we do to them in captivity is…contradictory to what we say about them. Giving them more space allows them to become their full selves. I think until you have the opportunity to see that, you don’t fully comprehend what that means.

It is still a managed operation, it is just managed with significantly more freedom and autonomy.

-Scott Blais interviewed by Duncan Strauss on "Talking Animals," October 30, 2013
http://www.talkinganimals.net/…/scott-blais-elephant-exper…/

I am unable to attach the audio link from talking animals.net but, as mentioned above, it is very worthwhile to listen to!