What Animals Dont Live as Long in Zoos

Elephants live longer in wild than zoos

WASHINGTON -- Zoo elephants don't live as long as those in the wild, according to a written report sure to stir contend about keeping the behemothic animals on display.

Researchers compared the life spans of elephants in European zoos with those living in Amboseli National Park in Kenya and others working on a timber enterprise in Myanmar. Animals in the wild or in natural working conditions had life spans twice that or more of their relatives in zoos.

Fauna care activists have campaigned in recent years to discourage keeping elephants in zoos, largely because of the lack of infinite and small numbers of animals that tin can be kept in a group. Debates take been especially vocal in Dallas and Los Angeles.

The researchers found that the median life span for African elephants in European zoos was 16.ix years, compared with 56 years for elephants who died of natural causes in Kenya's Amboseli park. Adding in those elephants killed by people in Africa lowered the median life span there to 35.9 years. Median means half died younger than that age and one-half lived longer.

For the more endangered Asian elephants, the median life span in European zoos was eighteen.9 years, compared with 41.7 years for those working in the Myanmar Timber Enterprise. Myanmar is the country formerly known every bit Burma.

There is some good news, though. The life spans of zoo elephants have improved in contempo years, suggesting an improvement in their intendance and raising, said one of the written report's authors, Georgia J. Mason of the animate being sciences department at the University of Guelph, Canada.

But, she added, "protecting elephants in Africa and Asia is far more successful than protecting them in Western zoos."

There are virtually 1,200 elephants in zoos, half in Europe, Mason said in an interview via e-mail. She said researchers full-bodied on female elephants, which make up 80% of the zoo population.

"I of our more than amazing results" was that Asian elephants born in zoos accept shorter life spans than practise Asian elephants brought to the zoos from the wild, she added in a circulate interview provided by the journal Science, which published the results in its Fri edition.

She noted that zoos usually lack have large grazing areas that elephants are used to in the wild, and that zoo animals often are alone or with ane or ii other unrelated animals, while in the wild they tend to live in related groups of 8 to 12 animals.

In Asian elephants, infant bloodshed rates are two times to three times higher in zoos than in the Burmese logging camps, Bricklayer said via e-mail. And and then, in adulthood, zoo-built-in animals die prematurely.

"Nosotros're not certain why," she said.

The report confirms many of the findings of a similar 2002 analysis prepared by the Majestic Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. 1 of the authors of the new study, Ros Clubb, works for the gild.

Steven Feldman, a spokesman for the Clan of Zoos and Aquariums, contended the study did not reverberate conditions in North America. In addition, he said, it is hard to compare conditions in zoos and in the wild. "Every event in a zoo is observed," he said, while scientists can report simply a small number of events in nature.

The project, or individual researchers, received financial support from Canada's National Science and Engineering Inquiry Council, Prospect Burma Foundation, Charles Wallace Burma Trust, 3 Oaks Foundation, Whitney-Laing Foundation, Toyota Foundation, Fantham Memorial Enquiry Scholarship and University College, London.

Among the researchers, Mason has served every bit a paid consultant to Disney's Animal Kingdom USA and one of authors, Khyne U. Mar, has been a paid consultant for Woburn Safari Park, near an hour n of London.