Skip to main contentNot so fast with the elephant birthday party.
Two days after Asian elephant Rose-Tu gave birth to a 300-pound baby girl at the Oregon Zoo—the third elephant born in captivity nationwide this year—The Seattle Times unleashed a devastating two-part investigative series charging that elephants are dying out in zoos, despite a coordinated strategy of aggressive breeding and crisis-management public relations to keep the crowd-pleasing "glamour beasts."
The stories, by Pulitzer-winning reporter Michael J. Berens, examine in disturbing detail how Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo bred a female elephant named Chai, first using a regimen of artificial insemination (the sperm was shipped by Greyhound bus from the Oregon Zoo) and then shipping her to a zoo in Missouri. But her daughter, named Hansa, died at age 6 in 2007 from a strain of elephant herpes—part of a pattern of young elephants perishing from disease in captivity.
The story raises serious questions about zoo policies about maintaining elephants, even as the Oregon Zoo continues to plan for a major expansion of its elephant exhibit—a project funded by voters in 2008.
Berens also shows how the public craze for baby elephants started in 1962 with an Asian elephant—an Oregon Zoo newborn named Packy.
WWeek 2015