"In the end," said Suzanne Roy of In Defense of Animals, "the San Diego Zoo does not want these elephants to save their lives � they could go elsewhere. They want them for captive breeding programs in the hopes of creating more elephants for exhibition despite the fact that breeding elephants in captivity is a dismal failure and the zoo already had elephants they could have tried to breed, but who were evicted to make room for these new ones. Zoos want new wild, young elephants, because those animals bring in the visitors and their wallets. This was never about conservation. It�s always been about money and profits."
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Joyce Tischler of the Animal Legal Defense Fund added, "Conservation is not about building captive animal displays � it is not about taking elephants from the wild and breaking up families. Conservation is about preserving habitat and animals. African elephants breed well in the wild and poorly in captivity. It is wrong to take elephants from their natural environments where they thrive and put them in a captive situation where they suffer from mental and health problems, where they stop reproducing due to stress and suffer from lack of exercise and boredom and domination by humans."
commondreams 08.08.03{It's the lack of a common emotional language. If the kids who go to the zoos could hear and see the despair of the animals they stare at for what it is, they would flee in horror, most of them.
There's a profound sickness at the heart of all that zoo business. A triumphal display of dominance.
But that's not where the real enemy is, not anymore. That was how it started. Now it's the business model, as both Ms Tischler and Ms. Roy point out. Elephants and giraffes, lions and tigers, polar bears and penguins. That's what the people pay to see, and these men are willing to destroy every last vestige of wild life on earth to provide that sad spectacle. It's a lie that captive breeding programs are designed to rescue anything but the bank accounts of the agencies involved. And it's a lie that animals in zoos are anything but prisoners.}
