The extent of the mess around Billy the elephant – the one activists in LA want the city council to seize from the LA zoo and move to a sanctuary – just keeps getting worse. If you’re not up to date on the story so far, you can read that here.
In the post earlier this week, WADTT covered the fact that the only sanctuary in the United States that Billy could go to, if seized, was the one run by the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS). Of the two elephant sanctuaries that exist in the country, only PAWS takes male elephants – the other, The Elephant Sanctuary (TES) only houses females. It was always a little weird, though, that the sponsor of the motion – Council Member Koretz – never actually specified the name of the sanctuary he’s advocating for moving Billy to. It didn’t make sense. There’s only one place he can go, so why obfuscate that? Well, now it makes way too much sense. The two pertinent pieces of information:
PAWS says they are too full to take Billy(even though they say the offer from their late founder to do so a decade ago still stands) and is stating it would take $5-6 million dollars to build his living quarters, plus $75k a year to cover his expenses. They have not asked for this money from the city directly, but have indicated they are “open to discussing options with city and zoo representatives” if it is decided Billy needs to be moved to a sanctuary. It’s unlikely donations could cover this huge cost, which implies that taxpayers might end up footing a portion of what could end up being – at minimum – a 8.1 million dollar move (assuming Billy lives to be 60, the average age for an Asian elephant in the wild).
There’s a new elephant sanctuary group, supposedly inspired by Billy’s predicament, whose staff are partnered with the LA-based elephant advocacy group leading the charge to “free” Billy.
The problem? The new sanctuary for Billy doesn’t exist.
What’s more, the group behind it – the Kerulos Center – doesn’t have anything ready to guarantee that it ever will. There’s no known master plan for the facility, no available timeline for getting it built, no visible source of funding, and no physical site for building on. The only public information available about their timeline for actually establishing a place for elephants to live is that $2 million dollars has been earmarked for buying a piece of land to build on in Georgia that has not yet been identified, and that they’re currently “working with a team of architects and landscape consultants” to design the facility. Even if construction on the sanctuary could be started tomorrow (assuming all other logistics were suddenly completed), it would take years to actually build a facility capable of housing elephants. What’s more, there is no indication of if the sanctuary – once built – would be aiming for accreditation by any sanctuary accrediting group, which is actually a requirement for wherever Billy goes, as stated in Koretz’s original motion.
The Kerulos Center – an organization which has mostly focused on educating the public about “trans-species psychology” and “animal traumology” since it’s inception in 2009 – is planning to open the All Bull Elephants’ School of Sanctuary (ABES) because of the “critical need for refuge and recovery of hundreds of Elephants suffering in North American zoos and circuses.” The Center is supported by the advocacy group Elephant Guardians of Los Angeles (co-founded by two LA public school teachers, Kiersten Cluster and Marcy Winograd), and the combined effort of the two groups catalyzed the passing of a resolution by the Democratic Party of Los Angeles County to “end the elephant exhibit at the LA Zoo.”
Aside from the fact that the ABES sanctuary doesn’t actually exist yet, there are some pretty serious issues with the idea of sending Billy to any sanctuary run by the Kerulos Center.
Kerulos has stated that the center will be run in accordance with their “10 Principles of Being Sanctuary” and modeled off of an unaccredited elephant sanctuary in Thailand. Kerulos has not indicated what, if any, science-based elephant husbandry standards will inform animal care at ABES, instead stating that their care will be “trauma informed” and that their “curriculum [will be] grounded in principles of being sanctuary which combine science, somatic, and contemplative studies.” Kerulos has also not indicated which, if any, accreditation standard the facility will comply with. What this means is that there is no guarantee that the standard of elephant care at Kerulos will even be on par with, much less better than, what Billy receives at the LA Zoo.
As a further concern, very few people involved with the organization or the planned sanctuary have professional elephant management experience. None of the Board of Directors, nor even the heads of the entire organization have any elephant experience: the Executive Director is an ecologist and psychologist, the President is a psychotherapist who specializes in movement and dance; the head of the Asian Elephant Program is a Ph.D candidate in sociology with a masters degree in psychology; and the Elephant Sanctuary Coordinator has a masters degree in anthrozoology.
Only two members of the current fourteen-person ABES team are confirmed to have ever worked with elephants in a professional capacity: the Director of Elephant Care for their Elephant Liberation Program has worked as a keeper at PAWS for a little under eight years, and a member with no known position was an elephant keeper at the Phoenix Zoo for fourteen years. ABES’ Wildlife Rehabilitator worked at the Atlanta Zoo for a little over a year, although it is unclear if she worked directly with the elephants. While the credentials held by some of the other members of the team hold academic value, without much actual experience in elephant management or even exotic animal care, the overall group seems rather inexperienced to be responsible for designing and running a facility that is mean to house giant, intelligent animals with complicated husbandry requirements.
ABES does have an advisory board, but it is comprised to a large degree of people with areas of expertise that are not actual animal care: two people with psychology Ph.D.s, clinical faculty for the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA, the founder of a sea turtle conservation trust in India, the founder and executive director of a farm sanctuary, the co-founder and executive director a military veteran support organization, the director of a foundation protecting the rights of wild animals and vulnerable communities in South Africa, and an author with a Ph.D in ecology. Most of these board members seem to have specialties that focus on the internal states of animals or the psychology of healing with trauma, not the practicalities of animal management in captive settings. The advisory board members with actual animal experience are the co-founder of an animal rescue charity in Bangalore, the chair of the Elephant Specialist Advisory Group in South Africa, and a Senior Wildlife and Veterinary Advisor for World Animal Protection who completed a PhD on diagnosing health issues in Asian elephants. The only advisory board members with professional elephant management experience in a sanctuary setting are
the founder of the elephant sanctuary in Thailand that ABES will be modeled after, and the founder of Elephant Aid International and The Elephant Sanctuary – but the latter’s reputation is rife with concerning situations that occurred under her oversight at TES, such as an elephant allowed to lay dying for twelve days without being euthanized and a tuberculosis outbreak that infected eight sanctuary staff. While there are at least a couple more people on the ABES advisory board who have elephant management experience than on the actual ABES team, there’s no way to know how much influence or oversight the advisory board will have over the animal care and management practices of the potential sanctuary.
With all the issues around the proposed ABES sanctuary and their parent organization (and there are a lot more than just those directly related to their ability to actually create an appropriate sanctuary for elephants), and PAWS looking to leverage money out of being the only existing sanctuary Billy could go to, it’s no wonder that Council Member Koretz purposefully hasn’t named a favored facility even though Elephant Guardians of LA has majorly influenced his actions. He has no good options. Koretz either has to convince the city to send Billy to the only elephant sanctuary in the country that can take him right now, for a huge amount of money, or he has to commit to leaving Billy at the zoo until he can eventually be moved to a sanctuary whose quality of care and accreditation status cannot be guaranteed… if it ever actually gets built.
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Well, folk, it looks like January is the month for elephant politics. A couple of weeks ago, someone wrote in with a question about if anything had happened in regards to Billy, the male elephant at the LA Zoo, whom activists are trying to convince the city government to seize from the zoo and transfer to a sanctuary. For a long time, there hasn’t been any movement on the topic – aside from frequent protests at the entrance of the LA Zoo – but now things are ramping up again.
On January 24th – Wednesday of this week – the The Arts, Entertainment, Parks & River Committee of the City Council will be hearing Council Member Koretz’ motion. While it’s mostly been presented to the public as a motion to move Billy to an “accredited sanctuary”, there’s actually other aspects to the motion that are equally if not more alarming. In addition to forcing the zoo to transfer Billy to PAWS (the only elephant sanctuary in the country that accepts bulls), it also asks the city to force the LA Zoo to cancel all current or future breeding plans for their elephants and to turn the exhibit into a sanctuary for abused female elephants. This whole situation is far more than concerned citizens advocating for the welfare of a single bull. This is about zoos and sanctuaries and animal rights and industry politics, for all that it focuses on a single animal as a figurehead.
What’s really distressing is that while the LA Zoo has been running a letter writing campaign to encourage constituents to rally against this motion, only a single person from the zoo’s animal care staff has made public comment to the city council about the proposal. Neither the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, nor the California Association of Zoos or Aquariums – both associations of which the LA Zoo is a member – has made any public comment on the motion. As of the time of writing this, there was also no posted public comment by the Elephant Manager’s Association. In short: almost nobody with zoo animal management experience, much less elephant management experience, nor even the “gold standard” accrediting body has contributed anything to the committee’s understanding of Billy’s current welfare at the LA Zoo. It’s not even clear if any of the committee members have visited the zoo and seen Billy and his living conditions, despite the urging of Council Member David Ryu. The committee will be hearing the motion and interpreting it based on hundreds of comments from the well-meaning public, most of which are form letters written by anti-zoo associations. That’s really not how government officials responsible for ordinances that effect animal welfare should be educated on the topic.
WADTT has covered why this whole motion is a whole barrel of politics in detail previously, but here’s a recap:
It would massively damage the LA Zoo:
If the city of LA decides to seize Billy from the zoo (which they can legally do, as it is a municipally funded facility) the LA Zoo will lose their AZA accreditation. AZA facilities are not allowed to have their management choices for their animals overruled by governmental authorities, because a requirement for AZA accreditation is that the facility and it’s staff are seen as the experts by in determining appropriate care for all of the zoo residents.
If the zoo loses AZA accreditation, it will be forced to pull out of multiple major Species Survival Programs (SSP) (because only AZA institutions are allowed to participate in the Green level programs) and will no longer be able to exhibit or breed Western Lowland gorillas, lions, and Andean condors to name a few; they would likely be prohibited from doing any sort of animal demos either on-site or as part of outreach programming, as LA’s new ordinance banning the use of wild animals in entertainment only exempts zoos accredited by the AZA.
There is precedent for this occurring – animal rights advocates decided they wanted the Toronto Zoo’s elephants to go to a sanctuary instead of being transferred to another zoo, and they convinced the city to overrule the zoo CEO. The Toronto Zoo elephants went to PAWS, and the zoo lost their AZA accreditation.
They’re only advocating for one of the four elephants:
Animal rights groups and Council Member Koretz are advocating for Billy to be removed from the zoo because the conditions he lives in are inhumane and inappropriate for any elephant – and yet are simultaneously ignoring the three elephant cows who also live at the LA Zoo and would be subject to the same living conditions.
Two of the three females at the LA Zoo would be far better candidates to be sent to a sanctuary if the concern was truly allowing elephants to retire to a less stressful life- they both have chronic medical conditions, and are old enough that they are no longer be participants in conservation breeding programs.
Billy is the only elephant living at the LA Zoo who is actually owned by the city of LA. The other three females are on loan from other institutions. The city of LA, therefore, can only seize Billy for a transfer – they have no authority over the movements of the other three females.
The sanctuary Billy would have to be moved to (the only other elephant sanctuary in the country does not accept males) is run by the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS). The founder of PAWS openly advocated against AZA zoos, and the organization has previously unsuccessfully campaigned for the removal of Billy from the LA Zoo to their facility.
This motion is likely the start of the animal rights groups pushing for all zoos to become sanctuaries and stop breeding animals for conservation
The proposal is supported by: the Voices for the Animals Foundation, Humane Society of the United States, the Performing Animal Welfare Society, Last Chance for Animals and Elephant Guardians of L.A.
HSUS CEO Wayne Pacelle has written multiple times about how he wants to see zoos cease breeding animals entirely and become sanctuaries for abused animals. He has also stated that he wants to see elephants phased out of zoos entirely, and congratulated Detroit Zoo CEO Ron Kagan on his groundbreaking decision to send his zoo’s elephants to PAWS. (Kagan was also in favor of the Toronto City Council’s choice to seize the Toronto Zoo’s elephants and send them to PAWS).
Prominent animal rights speakers such as Marc Bekoff have left zoo animal welfare seminars held at the Detroit Zoo in recent years espousing the need for zoos to turn into sanctuaries; Detroit Zoo CEO Ron Kagan wrote a chapter entitled “Sanctuaries: Zoos of the Future?” for an animal law textbook published in 2017.
It is typical of HSUS advocacy to encourage the surreptitious addition of broader language than the public is aware of into pieces of legislation – while the public is simply concerned with with the fate of one elephant, this motion goes to further much longer term goals for the animal rights movement in regards to zoos.
How you can help:
Write the committee! Send them a message – not a form letter, but even just a couple sentences – expressing your support for the LA Zoo’s animal care. You can also say that you think they should have actual experts on elephant welfare who are unaffiliated with either political faction weigh in before they decide!
You can email your comments to clerk.cps@lacity.org – make sure to reference Council File #17-0453 and what you want to see happen (the motion needs to be dismissed) either in the subject line or the first sentence! You can absolutely email them if you’re not an LA resident, but if you are local it’s important information – they’ll pay more attention to your opinion.
I know sending letters is hard, but the unfortunate truth of the matter is that zoo industry politics often keep zoo staff from being able to advocate for their own jobs – no matter how much they want to – and so it’s really up to us to help support them considering how few comments have been submitted from the animal care sector.
If you live in LA, go to the committee meeting on the 24th! You can either listen or submit a “speaker card” so you can speak publicly. The hearing will be at 2:30 PM, January 24th in the City Council chambers, room 340.
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Nosey’s Law – the new “elephant protection”
law that was just passed in the New Jersey Senate and sits on Governor Chris
Christie’s desk, awaiting his signature – has turned out to be a complete mess,
both with regard to what it actually effects as well as the political
motivations of the various advocacy groups that pushed it through. Named after
an infamous privately owned circus elephant, the Nosey’s Law
the public thought they were supporting would have simply protected elephants
from being used in traveling entertainment acts; but instead, it effectively outlaws
all mobile animal education programs in the state.
In its first incarnation, Nosey’s Law emulated
anti-circus bills previously enacted in New York and Illinois that prohibit the
use of elephants in traveling animal acts (or even any type of entertainment at
all). Instead, imprecise language about what constitutes a “traveling act” and
a “performance” in the original bill allowed an overly broad amendment to
expand the scope of the ban from just elephants to all wild and exotic animals.
The combination of the two means that
not only is using elephants in any sort of travelling exhibition illegal, but that
any mobile business utilizing exotic or wild animals for any type of
exhibition, in any way, is also in violation of the new law. While this may
seem like good news to those readers who want to see all animals removed from
traveling entertainment, this actually has much further reaching effects: any
businesses doing wildlife outreach and conservation education programs with a
live wild animal collection will be completely eliminated by the passage of
this law. These highly valuable services and
exhibitions are not the type of animal entertainment that the public expected
Nosey’s Law to prohibit. Not only do they often serve to support the continued
existence of wildlife rehabilitation facilities and exotic animal rescues, they
are also often the only access underprivileged communities have to education
about the natural world.
“Be It
Enacted by the
Senate and General Assembly of the State of New Jersey:
1. a. Notwithstanding any other law, or any rule or
regulation adopted pursuant thereto, to the contrary, no person shall use an
elephant 1or other
wild or exotic animal1 in
a traveling animal act.
b. Any person who violates this section shall be subject to
the penalties provided in section 10 of P.L.1973, c.309 (C.23:2A-10), except
that the criminal penalties provided in subsection f. of that section shall not
apply.
c. As used in this section:
“Mobile or traveling housing facility” means a vehicle, including a
truck, trailer, or railway car, used to transport or house an animal used for
performance.
“Performance” means any animal act, carnival, circus, display,
exhibition, exposition, fair, parade, petting zoo, presentation, public
showing, race, ride, trade show, or similar undertaking in which animals
perform tricks, give rides, or participate as accompaniments for the
entertainment, amusement, or benefit of a live audience.
“Traveling animal act” means any performance which requires an animal
to be transported to or from the location of the performance in a mobile or
traveling housing facility.
2. This act shall take effect immediately.”
The important parts to note are that it
applies to all wild or exotic animals in addition to elephants, and that it
prohibits any public showing of these animals for the benefit of the public. Even
when this bill just dealt with elephants, this wording still would have been
overly broad in comparison with similar extant legislation. Both the New York
and Illinois elephant-specific laws were carefully written to make sure they
didn’t accidentally prohibit legitimate educational presentations: New York
banned the use of elephants in any type of entertainment, travelling or not,
but they emphasized the entertainment part of the definition and included an
exemption for programs run by zoos accredited by the Association of Zoos and
Aquariums (AZA) and wildlife sanctuaries; Illinois (the existing law most
similar to what Nosey’s Law purported to be) chose to emphasize that they were
banning travelling elephant acts and
made sure they exempted any “non-mobile, permanent institution, or other
facility.”
If this legislation has passed as it was
originally written, the vagaries of the wording wouldn’t have affected the
actual implementation – there aren’t any facilities in the state of New Jersey
taking their elephants off-site for educational programs. So how did this bill
go from specifically restricting elephants to a disaster for educational
businesses? On 12/18/2017, the Assembly Appropriations Committee amended the
text of the bill, adding six words that changed the fundamental purpose of the
law: “or other wild or exotic animals.”
The term “exotic animal” is far broader than many people
realize, and “wild animal” is even more so. In general, both terms not only
encompass the iconic megafauna like bears and tigers, but also many species the
general public encounters regularly, such as guinea pigs and canaries. Nosey’s
Law does not define what is considered a wild or an exotic animal, and it does
not reference any other extant definitions (the text is marked as if the definition will be in a footnote, but no such footnote exists at the time of this writing). The bill, if passed, will be an
addition to Title 23 of the New Jersey State statutes.
According to the definitions found in that document, an exotic animal is “any
nongame species or mammal, bird, reptile or amphibian not indigenous to New
Jersey”. There appears to be no extant definition of a wild animal – the
closest is the definition of “wildlife,” which is “any wild mammal, bird,
reptile, amphibian, fish, mollusk, crustacean or other wild animal.” These
definitions are, in keeping with the rest of the bill, incredibly broad, but it
appears that the most likely interpretation of the bill is that it will outlaw
use of all non-domestic species of animals in any sort of mobile exhibition or
outreach.
This means that if Governor Christie signs
this bill into law, the addition of those six words will make it illegal for educational
outreach companies to help children fall in love with wild animals through
entertaining – but informative – events. It will make it illegal for wildlife
rescues to raise funding for their rehabilitation programs by doing
presentations about raptor conservation with the unreleasable animals in their
care. And, because the bill was not written with any of the normal exemptions,
there are six zoos – three of which are accredited by the “gold standard”
Associations of Zoos and Aquariums (a group that almost always has exemptions
from restrictive animal management laws) – it will also make it illegal for facilities
like the Turtleback Zoo to run the classroom programs where they teach
first-graders about the astounding diversity found in nature with the help of
specially trained ambassador animals.
While this may seem like a mistake – surely,
nobody who loves animals could purposefully attempt to do such damage to
educational programs – some of the biggest proponents of the bill indicated in
their comments this is /exactly/ what was intended to occur. The headline of
PETA’s celebratory blog post applauds New Jersey for banning “all wild-animal
acts.” PETA, an organization known for their animal liberation ethos, truly
wants to end all use of animals by humans in any capacity – even for
educational purposes that might encourage people to care about animals. They
even openly celebrated the passing of Nosey’s Law as the first step in closing
all zoos (although the reference to zoos was quickly and quietly removed from
the blog post, likely to avoid cluing in the duped supporters of Nosey’s Law to
their true intentions).
The oddest thing about all of this is that Nosey’s
Law is damaging the business practices of multiple facilities accredited by the
AZA less than six months after they very publicly teamed up with PETA’s legislation-focused
counterpart, The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). The CEO of HSUS,
Wayne Pacelle, wrote publicly about the need for the two organizations “to unite to fight cruelty and promote conservation,” and yet both Pacelle and the HSUS New
Jersey State Director both widely praised the passing of a law that actively
damages the conservation efforts of multiple AZA zoos. HSUS and PETA do not frequently
present themselves to the public as flip sides of the same coin, but their VP
of wildlife affairs, Nicole Paquette, has stated publicly that the two
organizations have the same goals, simply different methods of achieving them; in
light of that, it might seem that Nosey’s Law is the first stumbling block for
the overly optimistic partnership between a zoological organization and an
animal rights advocacy group. However, the comments made by both the HSUS New
Jersey State Director and Pacelle about the law passing indicated that they believed the bill to be
entirely focused on ending circus acts using wild animals. Pacelle,
specifically, opened his blog post on the topic with a statement that the law
bans “almost all wild-animal acts” when the bill as written in fact bans every exotic animal act.
While this
slight discrepancy might not be a big deal from most authors, the HSUS CEO is a
man whose books are written in collaboration with former White House speech
writers and whose blog posts frequently include vocabulary that even well-educated
readers occasionally have to look up in a dictionary – it is utterly
uncharacteristic of him to allow anything to be published under his name to
include a mischaracterization of what he himself dubbed the “biggest win yet”
for ending the use of wild animals in circuses. So what happened – how did HSUS
end up enthusiastically supporting a bill that is so blatantly damaging to
their newest collaborator?
Given that PETA actively celebrated the damage
Nosey’s Law will do to New Jersey zoos, and both HSUS people speaking publicly
about the bill didn’t seem to realize the true scope of the bill – the HSUS New
Jersey State Director didn’t even seem to be sure about what species of animals
would be covered by the ban – maybe HSUS was caught as unaware as the general
public was by the “wild and exotic animal” language amendment. The bill was
amended very late in the legislative process – more than a year after the bill
was originally introduced to the Senate floor – and it’s possible the
additional language could have gone unnoticed by animal advocacy organizations
until it was too late.
And that’s really the take-home lessons we’ve
all learned from this Nosey’s Law debacle – whether
you’re a member of interested public or a public figure heavily involved in
animal advocacy, it’s crucial to keep a close watch on the evolution of
proposed legislation. Even the smallest changes to the wording of a bill can
have big consequences, and in this case, six little words that went unnoticed
in what was intended to be a fairly targeted piece of animal protection
legislation might destroy the majority of conservation and wildlife education
opportunities for New Jersey residents.
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