Researchers compounded a study showing that elephants and zoos don’t go well together at all. Their findings have been published in the prestigious “Science” journal, so they were taken quite seriously, which bothers their critics even more.

This study shows that = female elephants in European zoos have shorter life spans than those in special protected environments such as those in Asia and Africa. It would seem that being separated from its mother is not a good thing for an elephant to go through. So, according to Los Angeles Times, the main conclusion of the study is that  “bringing elephants into zoos profoundly impairs their viability”.

The one who took up defending the pro-zoo side of things was Dr. Paul Boyle, senior vice president of conservation and education at the Association of Zoos and Aquariums of North America. He refers to the article as being “flawed” and is quite mad at “Science” for publishing it. One of his arguments is that the study takes into account only zoos in Europe: “This is about elephants in Europe. There are wonderful zoos in Europe and there are zoos that are not so wonderful.”

He also argues about the timeframe of the study; it was made based on records dating from 1960 to 2005 on 786 female elephants held in captivity at European zoos. These they compared with observations made on 1.089 female African elephants at Amboseli National Park in Kenya and 2,905 female Asian elephants working for a logging company in Burma, the Myanma Timber Enterprise.

They found out that zoo-born elephants tend to live an average of 16.9 years, while wild elephants reach an average of 50 years.  

Dr. Georgia Mason, who is one of the authors of the article and a professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, at the Department of Animal Sciences, summed up things in an interview: “Currently zoos are consumers rather than producers of elephants. We feel that’s not really appropriate”