Let The Zoo Elephant Go

617 Words3 Pages
Big Foot Needs Big Home Les Schobert, the author of the article “Let the Zoo’s Elephants Go” spent more than thirty years taking care of elephants as a curator. After years living with wild animals, he started writing about the elements in Nation Zoo and the things that were happening to them. “Let the Zoo’s Elephants Go” was published on October 16, 2005 as an urgent call to Nation Zoo for freedom for elephants. In the article “Let the Zoo’s Elephants Go”, Schobert debated that Zoos must change the concept about keeping elephants in a small captivity and send them to a bigger place like sanctuary. Since elephants are big animals, they need to live in a lot bigger space, but the zoos only provide them small areas to live, so they can easily get harm, especially in their feet. For example, in 2000, at the Nancy Zoo, a female Africa elephant was suffering from foot injured, it was very painful for her to move or even stand still. In many cases, the result is that when elephants get old, they suffer from arthritis because lack of activity and movement. Toni, an Asian elephant is another example, she was died at 39 years at the National Zoo because of arthritis. Some zoos, they seriously understand this issue and send their surviving elephants to sanctuary, but some others do not. They explain because of longevity and natural behavior cause this problem for them such as arthritis as they age. Therefore, a few cases of zoo’s elephant gets sick cannot conclude that keeping elephant in zoo capital cause harmful for them. However, for every wild animal, living at a big place and nature obviously is the best thing for them. As the author, he was not against animals living in captivity, but he had a mission, to improve living conditions for them. He spent so many years taking care wild animal, so that he had enough experience to state his point. He wrote that an elephant
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