As a rule it is Justin Bieber and Lady GaGa, sleepy kittens and puppies whose videos rack up the millions of hits required to “go viral” on YouTube. But last spring it was two elephant videos that triggered an unexpected flurry of Facebook embeds and forwards in e-mail in boxes around the world.
In “Pool Party” from the Houston Zoo a six-month old elephant named Tupelo can be seen splashing around with his friend Baylor in a an inflatable pool. A zoo keeper is spraying them with a garden hose and they are loving it! At one point Tupelo stumbles out the pool, runs around the side and then rolls into a back flip on top of her buddy. Baby Tupelo is so adorable, Dumbo would get jealous.
The second hit elephant video was a touch – as in totally – different. It opens with a scene of Zimbabwean villagers pointing to a field of crushed sorghum plants. A voice-over by an American businessman named Bob Parsons explains that the crops have been ruined by “rogue” elephants. Fortunately, Parsons – who just happens to be in the neighborhood with a high-powered rifle – is there to save the day by shooting and killing an elephant and videoing the whole thing for posterity. In the next scene the natives are shown tearing apart the dead animal to the tune of AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells.” The whole thing comes across as an elephant snuff film.
The going rate for an elephant kill in Zimbabwe can run as high as $60,000, which includes the dead animal’s head and tusks. The proceeds from this lucrative franchise go directly into the pockets of government officials and cronies of President Robert Mugabe – who confiscated hunting lodges and private game conservancies after taking power in 1980. For now, there is a 5-elephant quota per year, but the trophy hunters who come to Zimbabwe – mostly from Texas, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico – are currently petitioning to get the number increased to 180.
Don’t bother googling that original video – the one with clear footage of Parsons dropping a bull elephant with two well-aimed shots. The replacement version blacks out the one and a half minutes of the actual kill as Parsons explains that he is on a mission to provide “protein” to the starving villagers.
With well over a million views since it was uploaded to YouTube last April, the initial version of the video created a sensation but likely not the kind Parsons had in mind. First came the hail of feedback from YouTube viewers – so outraged that the comment widget on the posting had to be removed. And then came PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) – which named Parsons the “Scummiest CEO of the Year” and called for a boycott of his company GoDaddy.com, which happens to be the largest domain name registrar in the world. Namecheap, a rival company offered a discount and a contribution to Save the Elephants to any GoDaddy customer who jumped ship. An estimated 100,000 domain owners took them up on the deal.
It was one thing for Parsons to have a group of bleeding hearts calling him names. But it was quite another to see his business take a hit. He had no choice but to attempt some damage control. In an explanation that would later be attached to a new sanitized version of the video, Parsons framed the kill in humanitarian terms, “Tribal authorities request that I and others like me patrol the fields before and during the harvest,” he told an interviewer on CNN, “and drive the elephant from the fields.”
Of course, a swarm of honeybees or a few gunshots fired over the heads of the herd might do the job just as effectively. But where’s the fun in that? Not to mention the fact that there would be no elephant head to take back to Parsons’ gallery of big game kills in his Scottsdale home.
Of the two videos, it’s safe to say that the PR advantage went to the Houston Zoo and its mischievous Tupelo. But it’s not like PETA would be amused by that video either. When they see Tupelo and Baylor, they see animals that should be splashing around in the Chobe River in Namibia not in an inflatable kiddie pool. For animal liberationists, no confinement of any kind is acceptable for an animal that roams up to 30 miles a day in the wild. Not in zoos – even the best ones. And not in what it calls “pseudo sanctuaries.”
Many zoos have responded to the criticism of their elephant installations with enlarged and enhanced habitats like the new 42-acre “Asian Elephant Exhibit” at the Los Angeles Zoo. With its waterfalls, waterholes and lushly planted grounds, the elephant park would indeed appear to be, as one of the zoo spokesperson dubbed it, “a paradise for elephants.”
The actress and comedienne Lily Tomlin had other words for it: ”Guantanamo for elephants.” Yes, as so often happens in that star-studded company town, the debate over elephant welfare went Hollywood – with Tomlin and Bob Barker lining up against the zoo and Betty White and the guitarist Slash stepping forward to defend it.
Admittedly, the track record for elephants in zoos has not always been stellar. Before creating its new exhibit, the LA Zoo lost 14 elephants during the previous three decades – half before the age of 20. (Elephants can live up to 64 years in the wild.) Other elephant survival rates in zoos have generally been just as dismal: A study by a multi-national group of researchers published in the December 2008 issue of Science magazine found that zoo captivity shortens elephants’ lives substantially as compared to their counterparts in Africa and Asia.
Scientists tell us that elephants are highly emotional, highly sentient, family oriented creatures that mourn their dead and are even capable of performing pranks like Baby Tupelo. Those qualities have made it easy for us to have a big old anthropomorphized crush on them. To cause them to fly, sit on eggs, and even save the world. Who can blame us then if we don’t just want these gentle giants to survive; we want them to be happy too.
But what exactly is happy for the largest land mammal on earth? Generally speaking, elephants – like all animals require three things: food and water, comfortable living conditions and the expression of normal behavior. Ordinarily we would think of normal for elephants as being free to roam their natural habitats in the wild. But for a number of reasons the wild is growing more perilous to elephants with each passing day.
There is habitat loss due in part to the burgeoning human settlements along wildlife migratory corridors. There is drought like the one in the summer of 1976, which killed some 6000 elephants in Kenya’s Tsavo wildlife reserve. By 1988 more than 13,000 elephants of the park’s original 35,000 had fallen victim to the most deadly scourge of all.
Poachers in Africa are killing elephants at an estimated rate of 100 a day, hacking out their tusks which will ultimately end up selling for around $700 a pound on the international black market. Fueling the demand for raw ivory is the vanity of China’s bao fa hu, the (“suddenly wealthy”) who display ornately carved ivory so as to flaunt their newfound wealth.
But there is some good news.
In 1989 Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi set ablaze 12 tons of elephant tusks to show his country’s commitment to preserve its elephant population. And last February the country’s current President Mwai Kibaki ignited a second symbolic fire incinerating nearly five tons of contraband ivory smuggled through Kenya from Malawi and Zambia.
In China where the Chinese word for ivory is xiang ya or “elephant’s teeth,” most people believe that an elephant’s tusks are collected only after they fall out. To correct this fatal misconception, the Chinese superstars Yao Ming and Jackie Chan have joined together with Wild Aid for a series of gripping public service ads that bring home the point that an elephant must die for its tusks to be harvested.
And zoos are steadily moving closer to becoming the refuge and conservation resource originally envisioned by their founders. In North America where around 290 elephants are housed in zoos, more and more elephant habitats are being redesigned to make them bigger and more comfortable like the one in Los Angeles. In Houston the baby elephants will continue to romp in a children’s pool until they graduate to an 80,000-gallon pool in the zoo’s new elephant yard later this year. Similarly revamped elephant facilities can be found in Dallas, San Diego, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, and Birmingham.
These upgraded facilities are attracting more people to zoos than ever before in their history. Last year attendance at each of America’s 35 zoos was an estimated 1,000,000 visitors, the vast majority of which were children. And while those children are not seeing elephants living an entirely natural existence, they have a particular affinity and attraction to these gentle giants – which gives us reason to hope that every child who falls in love with an elephant at his or her local zoo will be more likely to grow up to care about the welfare of elephants everywhere – both captive and free.
And don’t underestimate the power of those two very different elephant videos on YouTube, which may do more to get people to think about the state of elephant survival – and happiness – than anything else before.
