As an elephant biologist, I have spent years observing elephants in the wild. I’ve gotten to know them as individuals and have been privileged to witness them play, mate, care for their young, and lead their families through episodes of drought and violence. I live in Colorado, and I recently visited the elephants at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs. The contrast to what I have seen in the wild was extreme.
Jambo, Kimba, LouLou, Lucky, and Missy were all captured from the wild in the ‘70s and ‘80s. They now live on less than an acre, with limited access to a two-acre “vacation” yard. They can walk no more than 100 yards in any direction, and on cold days, they are restricted to a barn with even less space. Their wild counterparts walk several miles or more every day and roam over hundreds to thousands of square miles.
The Nonhuman Rights Project has filed a lawsuit on behalf of these elephants, alleging that their captivity at the zoo amounts to unjust imprisonment, and demanding that they be released to a sanctuary. This lawsuit is supported by several of my colleagues who are among the foremost elephant experts in the world, with over two centuries of collective experience studying wild and captive elephants. I fully support the lawsuit too, and here’s why.
I have no doubt that the keepers at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo do their best to care for the elephants. But the reality is that it isn’t possible for any zoo to meet elephants’ needs. The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo’s inadequately sized exhibit is by no means exceptional. In fact, the average elephant exhibit in North American zoos is under two acres.
The Denver Zoo touts its 10-acre elephant exhibit as one of the largest in the nation (although the elephants share the space with other species and only have access to part of it at any given time), yet even this enclosure is thousands of times smaller than a typical elephant home range in the wild, and hundreds of times smaller than the space available to elephants at sanctuaries. Moreover, Colorado’s climate is inappropriate for elephants, as the cold winter weather severely restricts the amount of time they can spend outdoors.
Elephants suffer from chronically elevated stress hormones when restricted to small spaces. This causes brain dysregulation, which leads to stereotypic behavior — repeated movements like swaying, rocking, or head bobbing. 47-85% of zoo elephants exhibit it, and I have personally observed it in three of the elephants in the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. It strongly suggests that these elephants are suffering from chronic stress and boredom. Stereotypic behavior is unheard of in wild elephants.
Elephants in zoos also frequently endure physical ailments caused by lack of exercise, like osteoarthritis and gastrointestinal problems. Earlier this year, the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo had to euthanize Malaika, another elephant at the zoo, who had been suffering for years from mobility issues. She was 37, barely middle-aged for an elephant.
Since Malaika’s death, her companion Jambo has been housed alone. As a scientist who has dedicated years of my life to studying elephant social behavior, I cannot stress enough how awful this is for an elephant. Elephants are among the most social creatures on Earth. When I visited the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, I observed Jambo walking in circles and repeatedly trying to interact with other elephants through the bars. It was heartbreaking.
The zoo doesn’t house all their elephants together because they apparently don’t get along with one another. But one thing we have seen repeatedly is that elephants who are aggressive and antisocial in zoos become calm and highly social almost immediately after being released to a sanctuary. There are three elephant sanctuaries accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries: The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, the PAWS Sanctuary in California, and the Global Sanctuary for Elephants in Brazil. The Nonhuman Rights Project is prepared to assist with the cost and logistics of transferring the elephants at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo to any of these sanctuaries.
The zoo justifies its elephant exhibit by claiming that the exhibit is critical for wild elephant conservation. Frankly, this stretches credulity. The $75,000 raised annually for conservation by the zoo’s elephant feeding program is a mere 0.27% of the zoo’s income in the 2021-2022 fiscal year ($27,802,492). Surely, they could find another way to raise these funds.
I applaud the Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts to litigate on behalf of the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo elephants and I look forward to seeing the elephants receive their day in court. The Nonhuman Rights Project’s argument is that due to their exceptional intelligence, elephants are autonomous beings and thus entitled to the right to bodily liberty. As Judge Jenny Rivera of the New York Court of Appeals recently said in a case seeking this right for a solitary elephant held captive by the Bronx Zoo:
Although not true for all nonhuman animals, there are some with advanced cognitive skills, who display self-determinative behavior, with an awareness of death and a capacity to grieve. These animals are autonomous beings. If an enslaved human being with no legal personhood, a Native American tribal leader whom the federal government argued could not be considered a person under law, a married woman who could be abused by her husband with impunity, a resident of Puerto Rico who is a United States citizen deprived of full rights because of Puerto Rico’s colonial status, and an enemy combatant as defined by the federal government can all seek [the right to bodily liberty], so can an autonomous nonhuman animal.
I urge you to join me and my colleagues in calling on the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo to do the responsible thing and send the elephants to a sanctuary, where they can finally experience the quality of life that they deserve.
Michael Pardo is a biologist specializing in animal behavior and ecology. He earned his PhD from Cornell University in 2019, where he studied the behavior of both elephants and birds. Pardo recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Colorado State University, studying vocal communication in African elephants. He works remotely for the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, while continuing to reside in Colorado. He is not affiliated with the Nonhuman Rights Project.
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