My Elephant Watching

A seriously flawed study recently came out, which, despite not being well done, nevertheless came out with some shocking results. Elephants in zoos live DRAMATICALLY shorter lives than elephants completely in the wild or in large parks. Now, the study has enough problems with it that you can't really assign specific causality, but just the average lives of the elephants say it all. Both African and Asian elephants live less than 20 years on average in zoos and over 40 years on average in the wild. I think we can assign SOME causality to the zoos, even if we can't identify the specific mechanism.

[Note: I know correlation doesn't mean causality. If A and B are correlated, and it's not a coincidence, then either A causes B, B causes A or C causes B and A. In this case it's too prevalent and stark to be a coincidence. I don't see how living shorter lives would cause an elephant to be in a zoo, except the thin argument that years ago the elephants captured for zoos were the least healthy and therefore the most easily captured. That argument has some validity, but it wouldn't more than HALVE the lifespan. Finally, given that the populations studied had oceans between them, it's hard to believe C is causing both A and B, and even if it is something like the weather, our putting the animals in zoos is exposing them to whatever "C" is.]

This raises a tough question: what do we do with the information? There's a good argument to be made that not keeping elephants in zoos endangers the whole species. Elephants aren't exactly numerous, and animals get much more sympathetic treatment from private groups and governments alike when people can SEE the animals. The ability of humans to observe an animal is the second best way to preserve a species (the best way being to eat enough of the animal to encourage farmers to create giant herds of it, but as much as I want to eat an elephant, there probably aren't enough right now for that to work, so we're left with preserving visitation rights). Human compassion often stems from personal experience, and elephants need people to see them and admire them in order to save them. But we more than halve the lives of every animal we make easily available to the public. So do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? And who are we to decide which of the few get shafted? Most zoo elephants are born in zoos, so I guess that's a convenient filter, but we're creating a subspecies of unhealthy short-lived versions of African and Asian elephants.

And I guess a final point is that elephants aren't humans and have very few rights in this country, but since we're talking about zoos in many countries and over long periods of time, I want to talk about it philosophically and on principle only. So what do we do with the elephants? Cripple dozens or hundreds to aide thousands? Let them all go free? Try to fix the problem and not allow elephants in certain zoos that can't meet their needs while insisting the ones that keep them take steps to replicate conditions proven to keep them alive longer? I favor further study and a middle-of-the-road solution. But maybe that's because I'm a sissy on the issue, or because I don't know enough, or because I'm falling into the trap of seeing two seemingly good opposing arguments and assuming the truth lies somewhere in the middle (a HUGE human flaw if you ask me, though not a bad way to manage the risk of unbridled stupidity).

All I know is that it seems wrong to essentially torture or cripple or harm animals for our own viewing pleasure.