Elephant Exhibit

After a special meeting of the Los Angeles City Council's Arts, Parks, Health and Aging Committee on Tuesday afternoon, the chairman, Tom LaBonge, said he would recommend that the full council vote to continue construction on the Los Angeles Zoo's controversial elephant exhibit. The City Council is scheduled to make a long-awaited decision today on whether to let the zoo complete the $42-million exhibit or halt construction permanently and take the zoo out of the elephant-keeping business.

Re "Judge calls for changes at zoo," July 25 As an educator and a docent at the Los Angeles Zoo who spent seven years observing its elephants, I was stunned and saddened by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge John L. Segal's harsh words on the zoo's elephant exhibit. I know the zoo's elephants, especially Billy, the 27-year-old Asian bull. I also know that the zoo is devoted to the elephants' well-being. And I know that, had the judge accessed the multi-year, ongoing research of the elephants' behavior at the zoo that volunteers like me document, he would have written a different opinion.

The City Council's Budget and Finance Committee voted 3 to 2 Monday to recommend that the city stop construction on the Los Angeles Zoo's $42-million elephant exhibit. "This has not been a very easy decision," said Councilman Bernard Parks, the committee's chairman. The zoo has already spent $12 million from a mix of public and private sources. Councilman Tony Cardenas recently offered a motion to halt construction, saying the exhibit would not be big enough for the huge creatures to thrive.

The Los Angeles Zoo “is not a happy place for elephants, nor is it for members of the public who go to the zoo and recognize that the elephants are neither thriving, happy, nor content,” declared L.A. Superior Court Judge John L. Segal in the decision he signed Monday ruling in favor of two local citizens and animal welfare advocates who sued the zoo, arguing it mistreats its pachyderms. “Captivity is a terrible existence for any intelligent, self-aware species, which the undisputed evidence shows elephants are. To believe otherwise, as some high-ranking zoo employees appear to believe, is delusional.

To the man suing the city of Los Angeles over how its zoo treats elephants, Billy endures a miserable existence. The Asian elephant has spent much of his 27 years at the zoo in Griffith Park. He's now overweight and plagued by cracked toes and weary joints, plaintiff Aaron Leider alleged in court documents. Billy bobs his head for hours, which some experts say is a sign of emotional turmoil, and he's sexually frustrated for months at a time. Billy's maladies - and what may have caused them - will be debated at length this week in a trial that began Monday in downtown Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Zoo keepers Sunday appealed to city officials to complete a $42-million elephant enclosure, saying it would be the best place for Billy, the zoo's lone remaining elephant, to breed and thrive. The exhibit, they said, would allow for more exercise and stimulation than an animal refuge, where critics have suggested the 23-year-old Asian bull be sent. Creation of the 3.

Anticipating that the City Council will vote next week to expand an elephant exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo, an animal-rights group said Thursday it is prepared to challenge the move in a November ballot initiative. Los Angeles-based Last Chance for Animals opposes the proposed 3 1/2 -acre, $38.7-million exhibit, saying the zoo's three elephants belong in a much larger wildlife sanctuary. Two city committees voted Monday to recommend that the council approve the project.

A federal investigator said Friday that the San Diego Zoo's elephant exhibit does not violate animal welfare statutes, disputing charges leveled last week by the Humane Society of the United States that the exhibit is "grossly inadequate." Dr. Homer Malaby, an animal care specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said that his visit Thursday to the zoo revealed just one potential area for improvement--a narrow cat walk that zoo officials have said they already plan to widen.

After weeks of impassioned and lengthy debates over elephants and whether the world's largest land mammals still belong in the Los Angeles Zoo, supporters and critics alike got only a tentative verdict Wednesday: The City Council halted construction of the zoo's controversial $42-million elephant exhibit but did not outright kill it. The project seemed headed for extinction but for an 11th-hour proposal from the zoo's fundraising arm, the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Assn.

In the latest tit-for-tat exchange with the San Diego Zoo, investigators at the Humane Society of the United States on Friday attacked the credibility of the zoo's spokesman and restated their belief that the elephant exhibit is badly in need of repairs. "There is no nice way to put this," David K. Wills, a vice president in the Humane Society's Department of Investigations, said in a press release rebutting several published statements made by Jeff Jouett, the zoo's spokesman.

To the man suing the city of Los Angeles over how its zoo treats elephants, Billy endures a miserable existence. The Asian elephant has spent much of his 27 years at the zoo in Griffith Park. He's now overweight and plagued by cracked toes and weary joints, plaintiff Aaron Leider alleged in court documents. Billy bobs his head for hours, which some experts say is a sign of emotional turmoil, and he's sexually frustrated for months at a time. Billy's maladies - and what may have caused them - will be debated at length this week in a trial that began Monday in downtown Los Angeles.

Reporting from San Diego -- Two ailing and aged elephants at the San Diego Zoo had to be euthanized this week, zoo officials announced Friday. The two Asian elephants were suffering and their chances for recovery were virtually nil, officials said. Cha Cha, estimated to be 43 years old, was euthanized Wednesday. To allow other elephants to see her a final time, her lifeless body was lifted on a forklift and taken to where other elephants in the Elephant Odyssey exhibit are kept.

The Los Angeles Zoo said it had no plans to increase security at the elephant exhibit a day after a determined visitor climbed over multiple barriers and petted the pachyderms. The enclosure that separates the elephants from visitors is surrounded by multiple obstacles throughout the 6-acre space, including fences, ditches, a pool and shrubbery, said Jason Jacobs, a spokesman for the zoo. That was apparently not enough to stop one woman from climbing into the elephant pen Tuesday.

The Los Angeles City Council has ruled: The elephant stays in the picture. Just a month ago, council members temporarily halted construction on the Los Angeles Zoo's $42-million Pachyderm Forest exhibit while they considered killing the project and removing elephants from the zoo altogether. But on Wednesday, at the end of a raucous, three-hour meeting, they voted 11 to 4 to allow the zoo to complete the exhibit and keep its solitary Asian bull elephant, Billy.

After a special meeting of the Los Angeles City Council's Arts, Parks, Health and Aging Committee on Tuesday afternoon, the chairman, Tom LaBonge, said he would recommend that the full council vote to continue construction on the Los Angeles Zoo's controversial elephant exhibit. The City Council is scheduled to make a long-awaited decision today on whether to let the zoo complete the $42-million exhibit or halt construction permanently and take the zoo out of the elephant-keeping business.

Along with about 200 Los Angeles Zoo employees, children and community members gathered Monday at City Hall, rock guitarist Slash pledged his support for completing the zoo's Pachyderm Forest. But the opposition had its own celebrity endorsement, this one with a $1.5-million donation, courtesy of former "The Price Is Right" host Bob Barker. The planned future home to 23-year-old Billy the elephant, the Pachyderm Forest is a $42-million, 6-acre proposal that began in 2006 but was put on hold a month ago. Some animal-rights activists said the area still would not provide enough roaming room, and Los Angeles City Councilman Tony Cardenas suggested that the zoo's lone Asian elephant be sent instead to the Performing Animal Welfare Society, a sanctuary in San Andreas, Calif.

Following the deaths of two of their four elephants, managers of the San Francisco Zoo have decided to permanently shutter the city's aging and inadequate pachyderm exhibit. When the two remaining elephants are packed off to sanctuaries or another zoo, it will be the first time since the San Francisco Zoo opened in 1929 that visitors will not be able to witness the comings and goings of the world's largest land mammals from Africa and Asia.

Los Angeles Zoo keepers Sunday appealed to city officials to complete a $42-million elephant enclosure, saying it would be the best place for Billy, the zoo's lone remaining elephant, to breed and thrive. The exhibit, they said, would allow for more exercise and stimulation than an animal refuge, where critics have suggested the 23-year-old Asian bull be sent. Creation of the 3.

After weeks of impassioned and lengthy debates over elephants and whether the world's largest land mammals still belong in the Los Angeles Zoo, supporters and critics alike got only a tentative verdict Wednesday: The City Council halted construction of the zoo's controversial $42-million elephant exhibit but did not outright kill it. The project seemed headed for extinction but for an 11th-hour proposal from the zoo's fundraising arm, the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Assn.