South Florida Sun-Sentinel
October 2, 2006
By Ivette M. Yee

Original Article

Loxahatchee · Stumpy and Mamma are packing their trunks.

After 25 years at Lion Country Safari, the peaceful pachyderms are moving to other elephant-friendly places in the United States. They've been the only African elephants for the public to see in Broward, Palm Beach and Martin counties, but now they're leaving.

Lion Country Safari is participating in an elephant conservation program by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, an accrediting organization for zoos. The program calls for stringent elephant care guidelines and research to provide better care for the animals. Officials with the program asked smaller zoos and wildlife parks to donate their elephants to larger facilities better equipped to take care of them.

Most of the 600 to 700 elephants in American zoos and circuses don't have the opportunity to breed, according to the AZA. And too many female elephants are left to live solitary lives, instead of running in herds as they do in the wild.

AZA elephant experts say elephant habitats in zoos and parks need to be a minimum of 10 acres. Lion Country Safari's "Elephant Island," an expanse of grass with a cool moat and plenty of hay, is about half that size, officials there said.

Until this summer, the island, located on a mock African plain, was also home to Bulwagi and Ladybird. Bulwagi is now at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Orlando, and Ladybird is at the Greenville Zoo in South Carolina.

Animal Kingdom and the Miami Metrozoo are the closest parks with elephants.

Now only Stumpy and Mamma roam the island together, scooping hay and swatting at flies with their trunks. In a year, they will be gone too, since that's how long the search for a suitable home will take.

"This was a very hard decision for us, but it was the right decision," said Terry Wolfe, wildlife director at Lion Country Safari. "We are concerned about how this will affect visitorship, but our visitors have to understand that we want what's best for the elephants."

Lion Country Safari opened in 1964 as the first drive-through safari park in the country. It introduced a new concept to animal lovers, "the cageless zoo," and the elephants always have been a beloved spectacle.

Drivers seem to linger when they reach Stumpy and Mamma, especially during snack time. Each day about noon, the elephants dive for bagels and show, unintentionally, the amazing things they can do with their flexible trunks.

Elephant keepers hurl about 100 bagels into the moat. Without fail, Stumpy, the matriarch, makes her way into the water when she sees the trash bag full of bagels. Mamma waits for Stumpy to have the first round. With their trunks, they easily catch, grab and spoon the bread into their mouths.

Wolfe and his team of four elephant keepers have tended to Stumpy and Mamma since they were toddlers. That includes baths twice a week, pedicures every day and feeding.

"We're like the odd members of the herd," Wolfe said. "We work with them every day, and they know who we are."

Caring for the elephants costs about $50,000 each per year, not including salaries for the staff that takes care of them, Wolfe said. But he doesn't cite that as a reason for moving them.

It's all about conservation, he said.

The AZA's goal with the elephant initiative is education and to ensure a stable captive population. They hope it ends the capture of wild elephants for display.

More than 143 million people visit North American zoos and aquariums every year, according to the AZA. A Harris Interactive poll revealed that an overwhelming majority of the public, about 95 percent, agreed that seeing elephants in real life helps people appreciate them more and encourages people to donate money to or spend time on animal conservation efforts.

"Elephants are so popular, and a lot of zoos don't have them," said Lee Sims, wildlife director at the Greenville Zoo. "You can watch a video on Animal Planet, but it's not the same. You don't really understand them until you look at them and see what they can do."

Before Ladybird was moved to the Greenville Zoo to be a companion to that zoo's 36-year-old elephant, Sims and keepers from each facility visited the other for weeks. They spent time with both elephants.

Elephants are social creatures by nature. But, like humans, they don't automatically get along.

"My fingers are raw from knocking on wood because it has gone so well," Sims said. "The first couple of days it was slow, but by the third day they were like, `OK, we want to be near each other.'"

While a few parks and zoos are participating in the AZA's elephant conservation program by donating their elephants, including the Dallas Zoo and the Albuquerque Zoo, some zoos are upgrading to meet AZA standards.

A 2005 AZA survey found that 40 of its 210-member facilities are planning to expand or build elephant exhibits in the next five years.

"It is appropriate that zoos are now responding to the science that shows elephants in captivity need a number of things: They need space and a compatible group of other elephants," said Carol Buckley, an Asian elephant expert and executive director of The Elephant Sanctuary, a 2,700-acre park for retired circus and elderly elephants in Tennessee. "Since the beginning of zoos in America, elephants have been kept in small spaces that cause them to get ill or die at an early age."

With Stumpy, 48, and Mamma, 36, Wolfe and his staff are looking to keep the two together and send them to join a herd.

"It used to be zoos had every type of animal, but we've learned we can't have the sheer numbers or the cage after cage," said Colleen Kinzley, general curator of the Oakland Zoo.

"I think people will learn to accept that once they learn how these animals are supposed to be living and how they live in the wild."