Elephant Encounters: Part One
China: Shanghai Zoo
Elephants have always held a special place in human culture; deified and honoured in equal measure. Interwoven with this acknowledgement of their beauty and intelligence, there has been a dramatic contradiction in how they have been treated.
In South-East Asia it has been a custom for thousands of years to ‘domesticate’ elephants for use in industry; farming, logging and most recently to provide rides for tourists around historic landmarks.
Though in the West we didn’t have this sort of history with elephants (due to lack of access), we aren’t absolved from blame in their exploitation. Western institutions, once it became clear that such a thing was possible, hungrily gathered as many elephants as they could for display in zoos and at the circus. The desire for ivory products led to a frightening decline in elephant numbers throughout the world that continues to this day.
African elephant numbers have declined by 97% in the last century, falling 60% since 1979. [1] In a recent study, ‘The Great Elephant Census’, the current population stood at 352,272 individuals.[2] This reveals a drop of 30% in 7 years. The current yearly loss is 8 – 12%, or around 27,000 elephants.
At current rates it would lead to a total wild extinction in 13 years. The Asian elephant numbers are in an even worse state than the African, with only 30,000 – 50,000 left remaining in the wild.[3] It is worth remembering that a species can be considered committed to extinction before it actually occurs. When the population falls below the point of recovery, it will be an inevitable decline from then onward. This can take up to a decade, with their fates having been set long before.
I travelled throughout Asia for two months during the summer of 2018. During my travels I was confronted by three very different experiences with elephants.
The first in Shanghai Zoo, the second in the wild jungles of Borneo, the third in an elephant sanctuary in Cambodia. Each has highlighted a different aspect of the situation that elephants currently find themselves in. I will begin with my visit to the Chinese zoos and cover the other experiences in later posts.
Shanghai Zoo house four female Indian elephants and one bull. Outdoors there are three sections, of various sizes, one of which has a small pool. None of them, however, are large enough for even one captive elephant.
Inside the elephant house the smell is overwhelming. Elephants have a particularly pungent odour at the best of times, but when kept in filthy conditions the smell is enough to make your eyes water. The elephants were kept in their own separate cages, each one roughly 20 m2.
Chains were hooped around each of their front feet. Though not chained to the bars or ground a.t that point, the very fact they have them means that it must be a regular occurrence.
All the elephants were stuck in endless cycles of stereotypic behaviour. This is defined as repetitive behaviour that serves no obvious function.[4] It is a symptom of severe stress and, in many cases, of trauma. It is not simply that the animal is bored, the psychological implications are much deeper than that. Not one of the elephants, in the hour that I observed them, stopped performing their stereotypies; head swaying, trunk swinging, rocking back and forth. Imagine a human being nodding their head all day, every day, doing nothing but this. What would you think of their mental state?
Stereotypies are not always as obvious as head swaying, especially in animals as complex and intelligent as elephants. One elephant in Beijing, for example, would walk from the back of its cage to the front corner, lift her right front foot, stretch her trunk through the bars, walk back to the same starting point at the back of her cage, and then repeat the process over and over again. If you were to wander past for 30 seconds, you might not recognise this longer, more complex compulsion.
In obsessive-compulsive disorder a compulsion works by “grounding” the wave of anxiety experienced.[5] As anxiety peaks, the brain seeks to restore peace. To exert control, it will compel an action to prevent “something bad” from occurring. Performance of this action convinces the brain that whatever was feared will not occur, thus reducing and grounding the anxiety. It is, however, only a short-term solution. Over time, like drugs, these actions lose their effect. They soon need to be performed with greater frequency and greater complexity in order to enable the same relief.
Imagine the level of anxiety experienced by these elephants such that it pushes them to perform compulsions every moment of the day. Their brains must be struggling against an overwhelming torrent of anxiety that their compulsions are no longer able to satiate.
One female had begun behaviour that appeared to be self-harm. As I stood watching, she walked to the bars between us and proceeded to smash her face into them. With shocking force that dislodged clouds of dust, she slammed her face against the bars. As she turned to walk away, I saw that she was developing a scar across the bridge of her trunk where she had been hitting herself. It was discoloured to the point of being black. She then continued hitting her head against the bars at the back of her cage until I left.
Beside this female was the bull. The previous female had only a partial bruise and scar on her face from the impacts she endured, this bull was littered with scars. I can’t imagine what was done to it, or what it did to itself, to achieve such a level of scarring on its body.
It was then that I realised that, unlike the other elephants, this bull was actually chained to the bars. Its front right leg was chained so tightly it could not walk more than one step in any direction. I had not noticed at first, as it had been rocking back and forth on the same spot the entire time. Watching more closely I noticed that the chain pulled taught with every forward rock.
I revisited the exhibit at the end of the day and saw the keepers letting the elephants outside. One female, in an odd display, reversed out of her cage backwards rather than walking out normally, and it took her a good while to even achieve this. It suggests to me that she had been kept in a trailer for a large part of her life, most likely in a circus. Unable to turn around, she would have had to back up to exit the trailer. As such now, when she exits her cage, she leaves via the same trained method for fear of what might happen if she doesn’t, even though she is no longer in that situation.
The bull was left inside, chained to the bars. Outside, each of the three enclosures were occupied, and so even if they had wanted to release him there was nowhere for him to go. I suspect that the bull is simply now too dangerous for the keepers to handle or control. Even inside its enclosure there was a huge pile of accumulated dung. The keepers are clearly not keen to enter its cage and clean it. Considering its scarring, it has most likely been the victim of abuse at the hands of men. Some of the scarring might also have been caused by smashing itself against the walls and bars of its cages in rage as the famous elephant Jumbo was known to do.[6] As the keepers become more frightened of him, they leave him chained for longer, and so the worse he becomes. This downward spiral will now likely continue until either the bull kills a keeper, or it dies prematurely.
The sad reality is that all of these elephants, even the bull, would be capable of at least partial recoveries were they cared for in an appropriate environment with specialised carers.[7] The lack of animal welfare awareness in china is apparent in the excitement of the visitors as they watch the elephants, unaware of the horror show unfolding before them.
The conditions these elephants found themselves in are not rare within the zoo world, if you think globally. Progress is being made in Europe at least – A state of the art exhibit was recently opened in Copenhagen Zoo which is the first of its kind to allow its elephants to sleep together at night, as they would in the wild.[8] It has no bars, only large wood effect posts that allow the elephants both a better view of their surroundings and greater privacy. It has an electronically controlled humidity regulator, temperature control, under floor heating and leaf patterned sky lights to mimic the rainforest canopy.
In the UK all zoos must infer upon captive animals five ‘freedoms’ according to s.9 of the Animal Welfare Act 2006:
- Freedom to eat and drink.
- Freedom from pain and discomfort
- Freedom from fear and distress.
- Freedom from illness and disease.
- Freedom to perform natural behaviours.
What is becoming clear however, is that there is no captive environment that can provide an elephant with what they require for a healthy life. The UK Government is soon to pass a bill through Parliament which, if successful, would phase out the keeping of elephants in UK zoos and wildlife parks.
There are those that believe that zoos can be a bastion of conservation for elephants, providing sanctuary from the forces that might otherwise drive them to extinction. But if the plan is to release them back into the wild, then this is fraught with dangers and complexity. If wild elephants were to go extinct, it would be akin to attempting to repopulate the earth with a group of people who had spent their entire lives in solitary confinement, with no idea of what it means to be human.
The only viable option is to prevent their wild extinction in the first place. If they die out, then the millennia of knowledge passed down from matriarch to matriarch about the environment, how to survive in it, and what it means to be an elephant, will be lost forever.
The elephants in Beijing and Shanghai Zoos are still there today. The bull remains chained, the female’s scar grows larger as she rams her face into the bars. Their suffering will continue until either internal or external pressure forces the Chinese Government into action. I remain, unfortunately, rather pessimistic on the likelihood of this.
[1] Alice Catherine Hughes, ‘Stop the slaughter of African Elephants by banning the ivory trade for good’ (The Conversation, 28 Sept 2016)<http://theconversation.com/stop-the-slaughter-of-african-elephants-by-banning-the-ivory-trade-for-good-65743> [Accessed on 21 September 2019]
[2] Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Inc, ‘Great Elephant Census Final Results’ (31 August 2016) <Press Release: Great Elephant Census Final Results — Great Elephant Census> [Accessed on 21 September 2019]
[3] International Elephant Foundation, ‘Elephas Maximus’ (2019) <https://elephantconservation.org/elephants/asian-elephants/ > [Accessed on 21 September 2019]
[4] Nora Philbin, ‘Towards an Understanding of Stereotypic Behaviour in Laboratory Macaques’ (1998) 49 Animal Technology 22 <https://awionline.org/content/towards-understanding-stereotypic-behaviour-laboratory-macaques> [Accessed on 21 September 2019]
[5] Mind, ‘Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)’ (Mind.org.uk, 2019) <https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/obsessive-compulsive-disorder-ocd/#.XYWffygzaM8> [Accessed on 21 September 2019]
[6] Graham Duggan and Dugald Maudslet, ‘New research shows that elephants and other animals can suffer from PTSD’ (CBC.ca, 2019) <New research shows that elephants and other animals can suffer from PTSD | Nature of Things (cbc.ca)> [Accessed on 21 September 2019]
[7] G.A. Bradshaw, ‘Solving the Problem for Elephants’ (Psychology Today, 8 February 2017) <Solving the Problem for Elephants | Psychology Today> [Accessed on 21 September 2019]
[8] Fosters and Partners, ‘Elephant House – Copenhagen Zoo’ (FostersandPartners.com, 2008) <Elephant House Copenhagen Zoo | Projects | Foster + Partners (fosterandpartners.com)> [Accessed on 21 September 2019]
