"It's unconscionable," says Alyne Fortgang of Friends of Woodland Park Zoo Elephants. "There are no words and we hope that the mayor and city council will step up on behalf of the people and pass a resolution to send the elephants to sanctuary."
Open letter to King County Councilmember Larry Phillips regarding Bamboo and Chai, the elephants on exhibit at Woodland Park Zoo.
"It's gotten to the point where the Zoo can no longer ignore the science of elephants, and they can't ignore public opinion. And at this point, they can no longer ignore the media. The time has come for the Zoo to finally take care of the problem and let the elephants go." -Alyne Fortgang
"The Task Force consists primarily of lay people with little to no prior expertise regarding the Earth's largest terrestrial animal." Excerpt from the Final Report of the Woodland Park Zoo Elephant Task Force.
Four slides showing the dramatically different amounts of space available to Watato, Bamboo, and Chai at Woodland Park Zoo versus what would be available for them at The Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennesee. For decades these three elephants have had only the same tiny one-acre unchanged exhibit to call home. At The Elephant Sanctuary they would have 2,700 acres.
If Woodland Park Zoo President Deborah Jensen is to be believed, the Zoo and its elephant exhibit are all that stand between wild elephants surviving as a species and their ultimate extinction. Because to save them we must enslave them.
Not ten minutes into the second meeting of the Woodland Park Zoo's Elephant Task Force on May 28th and it was becoming sadly clear what direction things were heading, and what that meant in regards to saving the zoo's three elephants, Bamboo, Watoto, and Chai.
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