If Fresno Chaffee Zoo truly cares, its elephants should go to a proper sanctuary

In the Fresno Chaffee Zoo live three elephants: 27-year-old Nolwazi (whose name means “mother of knowledge” in Zulu), her 12-year-old daughter Amahle (“the beautiful one”) and an 18-year-old male named Vusmusi (“to build a family”). Nolwazi and Amahle were among 39 elephants who once roamed freely in eSwatini, formerly Swaziland.

In 2016, they and 15 other elephants, most of them breeding-age females, were taken from their natural habitat and imported to US zoos despite global public outcry, including from 80 respected elephant and conservation experts. Vusmusi was born in the San Diego Zoo Safari Park to an elephant who was pregnant with him when she was imported to the US from eSwatini in 2003, also despite global public outcry and with zoo and eSwatini officials making the same misleading claims about the elephants needing to be killed otherwise.

Today is World Elephant Day, an annual global event dedicated to the protection of this cognitively, emotionally, and socially complex species. Denied freedom and family, the Fresno Chaffee Zoo elephants are spending today the way they spend every day: in pens that don’t allow them to walk more than 100 yards in any direction and where their only forms of enrichment are a fake rock wall with holes they can reach into to grab food, a pole with hay hanging from it, a small man-made pond that isn’t deep enough for them to properly bathe in, and a few trees and rocks wrapped in wire to prevent the elephants from touching them.

The zoo director has told The Fresno Bee that this remodeled version of the exhibit means the three elephants “will live in a typical matriarchal setting as they do in Africa.” The zoo plans to breed more elephants to share this already small, insufficient space, which cost $55.7 million to create (in contrast, the zoo gave only $118,000 in grants to 20 conservation partners according to its most recent annual report).

The truth is, these elephants aren’t really living in the Fresno Chaffee Zoo. They’re dying in it. And a better, more just life is possible for them.

That’s why my organization, the Nonhuman Rights Project, has filed a lawsuit seeking to free Nolwazi, Amahle, and Vusmusi to an elephant sanctuary. As a Californian, I’m proud our state is home to one of the world’s best – the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) in Galt. Less than 150 miles from Fresno, PAWS is a world away from the zoo in terms of the freedom, peace, and dignity it gives back to elephants.

There, instead of the stress and boredom elephants endure in a zoo exhibit (as can be seen in Vusmusi’s broken tusks, the elephants’ bobbing and rocking, and the health conditions that led the zoo to euthanize three elephants) they can explore acres of rolling hills and varied natural terrain. Instead of being susceptible to the brain damage that confinement is known to cause elephants, they can heal and experience the richness of a vastly bigger, more natural space designed to meet their complex needs — not designed for us to look at them.

We understand that the zoo employees who manage the elephants surely care about them. We also understand why people want to see elephants. But the fact remains: elephants need and want to live freely just as we do, which is what we emphasized in the billboards we recently put up across Fresno — at least, until they were inexplicably taken down a few days into what was supposed to be a month-long display.

The Fresno Chaffee Zoo doesn’t need a court order to change the world for these elephants and help shift how we view and treat the species. This they can do by acknowledging elephants don’t belong in zoos, releasing Nolwazi, Amahle, and Vusmusi to a sanctuary, and closing the elephant exhibit for good, as other zoos have already done. For the elephants’ sake, we urge them to do so.

Courtney Fern is the director of government relations for the Nonhuman Rights Project.