TACOMA – Animal rights activists want the newest addition to Point Defiance Zoo &Aquarium’s elephant herd transferred out of state, claiming the female pachyderm is too unstable and doesn’t get along with other elephants.
Members of the Northwest Animal Rights Network believe the 38-year-old Asian elephant, Bamboo, is unable to properly socialize with herd mates Suki and Hanako, and is overweight. Her August transfer from Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo “denied her the opportunity to heal from a lifetime of confinement, boredom and other abuses,” Diana Kantor, president of the grass-roots group, said in a statement.
Woodland Park Zoo owns the 8,370-pound pachyderm, although she’s now housed at Point Defiance through the American Zoo &Aquarium Association’s species survival program.
Point Defiance officials say Bamboo is neither sick nor a problem.
“I think she’s doing really well,” zoo deputy director John Houck said.
On Wednesday, activists planned to meet with Seattle City Councilman David Della to discuss moving Bamboo to the Elephant Sanctuary, a 2,700-acre preserve in Hohenwald, Tenn. Della chairs the council’s parks committee.
The issue recalls the debate over the western lowland gorilla Ivan, who grew up behind glass at Tacoma’s B&I Shopping Center. He eventually went to live in a premier gorilla breeding and habitat facility at Zoo Atlanta 11 years ago.
Northwest Animal Rights Network plans public relations campaigns and has established a “Free Bamboo Now” Web site, www.narn.org/FreeBamboo, featuring a video of Bamboo.
“It doesn’t take an expert to see Bamboo is suffering,” a message on the Web site reads. “Watch for yourself, the endless pacing. Shaking her head, like a child gone mad. It’s time to give Bamboo a life fit for an elephant.”
The campaign, as explained by Kantor, is similar to those conducted in recent years to win removal of elephants from cities like Detroit and San Francisco to huge sanctuaries in warmer climates.
Former Woodland Park Zoo director David Hancocks is well acquainted with Bamboo. He said she “was one of the most sweet-natured, lively, bright and cooperative elephants” he has ever met.
But in a recent letter to Della, he wrote that “Bamboo is a very different animal from what she used to be. Like so many other zoo animals around the world, her spirit appears to be broken.”
The only way to save Bamboo from a life of boredom and indignity is to move her “to a home that will allow her to flourish in a habitat most like she would have in the wild,” Kantor wrote in a letter to the American Zoo and Aquarium Association’s animal health committee.
Point Defiance and Woodland Park officials said it made sense to send the female elephant to live with two other elephants of similar age. Woodland Park is set up for breeding elephants; Point Defiance is equipped right now to care for nonbreeding Asian elephants.
At Woodland Park, Bamboo also wasn’t as socially compatible with baby Hansa and her mother, Chai, general curator Nancy Hawkes said.
Houck said that at Point Defiance, Bamboo can see, smell and touch Suki and Hanako through the barn door, and they aren’t fighting.
He said she needs time to adjust to her new surroundings, and her keepers believe her head swaying and pacing will eventually correct themselves.
“We have a pretty good track record,” he said. “What we absolutely hang our hat on is that we provide the finest level of care for elephants in North America.”
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