Zoos are no haven of safety for endangered elephants, and could be contributing to shorter life spans and higher infant mortality rates for captive females, a new study shows.
The findings, to be published in Friday's edition of Science, show that the ideal of creating self-sustaining captive elephant populations is almost impossible under current conditions.
While the research focused on European captive elephants, co-author Georgia Mason, from the University of Guelph, said there are implications for zoo elephants all around the world.
“European zoo elephants are doing similarly, or perhaps even better [than in other regions],” Dr. Mason said in a podcast accompanying the paper's release. “It looks as though the whole global zoo population is non self sustaining without importation.”
The paper compares data on 4,500 captive female elephants in Europe – about half of the world's captive female elephants – to information about wild elephants in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, and a captive elephant population at the Myanma Timber Enterprise.
It found zoo-born African elephants had an average lifespan of 16.9 years. In the wild, the average lifespan is 56.
For the more endangered Asian elephants, median life spans in captivity were 18.9 years, compared to 41.7 years in the Burmese population, and infant mortality was also higher in the zoo for Asian elephants.
But what really surprised the researchers was that captive-born Asian elephants had a much lower life expectancy than wild-born elephants that were brought into zoos.
“This is incredibly counter-intuitive,” said Dr. Mason, who holds the Canadian research chair in animal welfare and is one of six authors of the report.
“You'd sort of expect the animals that have been effectively kidnapped, you'd expect them to be more stressed, more scared by people, more frustrated at the lack of natural behaviours, but instead they seem to live a reasonably long lifespan.”
Seven Canadian zoos currently house elephants.
