A major focus that I have had in my 19-plus year career working with elephants has been to successfully reproduce elephants in places that are not the wild.
Why is this important, why is it important to have elephants in a zoo, and why should the National Zoo have baby elephants?
I think there are a couple of very straightforward answers. One, as you've seen from Chris's data, elephants are an endangered species. They are seriously threatened in the wild by the expansion of human population, and there is literally less and less space for elephants. The only way that we're going to help elephants is to care about them. And the only way people are going to care about elephants is if they have the opportunity to see them, understand them, and learn about them.. I think that elephants can perform an extremely vital role in terms of conservation education in zoos.
They are so wonderful to watch, and so interesting to be around that people immediately care about them. Those of you who know about our baby elephant here and loved her like we did, realize that this is true. I think when you can get people to care, you can get them to influence where we're going with our world, and hopefully save the elephants in the wild. If it were my choice all elephants would be in the wild in their natural habitat, but that's not an option. We have almost 700 elephants in North American, and if we today decided, well, they shouldn't in zoos, let's take them all back to the wild, there's no place for them to go. There's literally nowhere for them to go. So I think if we're going to conserve elephants, we need to get them - have them in zoos, we need to have them reproduce in zoos, so that we can have a genetic bank to hold against that onslaught of expanding human population that is taking away their habitat and their lives.
But how do we keep them in zoos? And that comes to the question of why a baby elephant. Elephants are about as social an animal as you can possibly find. There are so many similarities between elephants and people in terms of social structures that it's sometimes hard for me to differentiate what society I'm a part of. Female elephants have their babies and live with their female offspring throughout their entire lives. And in zoos that hasn't been the way they've been managed, historically.
In North America since 1880, there have only been 100 births of Asian elephants, and less than 10% of all the Asian elephants in North America have ever reproduced. That's not a very good record. And that's the kind of thing that we need to change. Elephants need to be managed in a situation like you see here. This is the Metro Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon.
And in this picture are three elephants all with different mothers who are within six months of age. They are Rama, Lu-chi and Sun-surin. This picture was taken in 1983. And it’s an example of what I think we should be doing with elephants. We should be exhibiting them in normal social environments.