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After briefly recapping the seemingly as-brief visit to the elephant exhibit by the Expert Panel, the Task Force moved to the first of two blocks of witness testimony. Jackie Bennett, Deputy Director of Great Apes and Regional Accreditation for the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries discussed by telephone her and GFAS’ role in accreditation and verification. The more interesting testimony, however, came from Kristin Vehrs, executive director for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.
Vehrs, a lawyer with thirty years at the AZA who helped draft their accreditation standards, spoke at length and with great gusto about the money and jobs AZA affiliated zoos and aquariums provide ($21 billion, 224,000 jobs), the number of yearly visitors to AZA associated facilities (182 million), and the number of animals in those facilities (800,000), stating that their accreditation program was the “most comprehensive and regulated in the world.” Her testimony was, unsurprisingly, geared to make the AZA and its zoos appear to be the best place for any animal not in the wild.
Vehrs brought up the revocation of Toronto Zoo’s AZA accreditation after the Toronto City Council voted thirty-one to four in 2011 to send its elephants to the Performing Animal Welfare Society’s elephant sanctuary in California. The city was concerned that, like many other cities including Los Angeles and Philadelphia, the elephants were suffering physically and mentally at the hands of the zoo. Vehrs made a point of saying that Toronto had its accreditation revoked not because the city wanted to shutter its elephant exhibit but because it was not the zoo staff themselves who made the recommendation. When asked after the meeting if Toronto could be reaccredited at some point in the future, Vehrs told me that it absolutely could and that the issue for the AZA wasn’t that the elephants weren’t properly looked after and cared for (which the city overwhelmingly disagreed with), but that it was an “issue of governance” with the zoo’s board of directors. Meaning, the zoo would need to appoint leadership more able to defend its programs at whatever cost to the AZA’s satisfaction. The fact that the AZA seemed nonplussed that the City of Toronto had major concerns about the elephants’ well being but instead was focused on the zoo’s administration is telling.
It’s important to note that, like Woodland Park Zoo and its self-appointed Elephant Task Force, the AZA is set up and run by zoos and aquariums for zoos and aquariums. And not widely noted is that the AZA also includes members which are neither zoos nor aquariums but are happy to traffic and profit from AZA member animals in the space inbetween. Case in point: the recent brouhaha at the Oregon Zoo when it came to light that a newborn elephant calf was actually owned by Have Trunk Will Travel, and would be shipped off to a life in the circus. That connection between zoos and circuses, all under the legal framework of the AZA (HTWT is listed as an AZA certified related facility), is something they very much like to play down. They’re more than happy, however, to talk up all the “science-based education programs” that AZA members offer, as Vehrs did in her testimony before the Task Force, and how they’re doing vitally important elephant conservation work, but they never seem to want to trumpet what some of their elephant breeding programs are geared towards and how exactly breeding elephants that get shipped off to AZA affiliated circuses contribute to the conservation of the species.
Vehrs spent a substantial portion of her time politely dismissing two recognized elephant sanctuaries, the aforementioned PAWS and The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee; claiming essentially that both were substandard institutions and weren’t affiliated with the AZA, and because of the AZA’s high animal management standards there wasn’t a conceivable need to ever send animals to their sanctuaries. She also made the claim that a number of the elephants in sanctuary at PAWS and TES had tuberculosis and, as such, weren’t good places to send any elephants.
Vehrs relished driving home the TB point, happy to let it play out as a scare tactic. What she didn’t admit, and something that was brought up in later testimony by In Defense of Animals’ Nicole Meyer, was that many if not all of the tuberculosis cases originated in zoos and circuses before those elephants arrived at the sanctuaries. During a Q&A period with the Task Force, Vehrs was asked if zoos also have reported incidents of tuberculosis. “I don’t know. It’s possible.” An answer that seemed, all things considered, disingenous and an issue she didn’t want to admit to as it would diminish the argument she had created against sending elephants to sanctuary.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a March 2011 article on elephant-to-human transmission of tuberculosis, stating that of the approximately 270 Asian and 220 African elephants in captivity in North America in 2009, “most in facilities accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums,” twelve percent of Asian and two percent of African elephants were “thought to be infected” with TB. Just recently, the Oregon Zoo had to quarantine one its Asian elephants, born at the zoo in 1983, when it tested positive for tuberculosis.