City Councilman wants to ban elephants at L.A. Zoo
Councilman Tony Cardenas advocates against keeping elephants in enclosures at the L.A. Zoo, which has already spent $10 million on a new exhibit.
Los Angeles City Councilman Tony Cardenas announced today that he would ask the City Council to outlaw the keeping of elephants at the Los Angeles Zoo and instead establish a city sanctuary for pachyderms.
For the Los Angeles Zoo, a city agency, that's one more bump in the road -- which has been long and fraught with controversy -- to building its new $40-million elephant exhibit.
The zoo hopes to bring in Asian elephants to exhibit and breed. But if Cardenas' two motions regarding elephants were to pass, construction on the new zoo exhibit would halt. Cardenas said that the zoo has not yet begun building structures, but has spent $10 million to grade and prepare the land.
Zoo officials, who have planned their own afternoon news conference in front of the site, have said the project is 30% complete.
"First and foremost, this is a humanitarian effort," said Cardenas who now joins the ranks of animal welfare advocates who say it is cruel to keep the giant mammals in enclosures that may measure a few acres but don't allow them to roam for miles as they do in the wild. With their massive weight, many zoo elephants also suffer severe and chronic foot and joint ailments. (Over the years. zoos have changed the surfaces the animals stand on to try to alleviate those problems.)
The elephant proposal already survived a public uproar and a city analysis, commissioned by Mayor Villaraigosa, in 2006. Cardenas was one of the council members who gave the zoo the go-ahead after that city report.
"Ever since then, it really hasn't set well with me," said Cardenas, who was joined today at a news conference and at a council meeting by animal welfare advocates and celebrities including Bob Barker, Robert Culp, Esai Morales, and Alicia Silverstone.
During the press conference, Cardenas kept a 45-minute video running that he said his staff shot two weeks ago of the Los Angeles Zoo's sole elephant, a bull named Billy. For most of the video, Billy stood in his enclosure bobbing up and down, a behavior animal welfare advocates call neurotic -- or "zoocotic" -- and say is the result of the stress of living in a small enclosure. Animal welfare advocates have urged the zoo for months to send Billy off to a sanctuary where he would have multiple grassy acres to roam. The zoo did retire a female elephant, Ruby, to the PAWS sanctuary in central California last year.
