The Oregon Zoo is a good zoo. I am more familiar with their elephant program than any other part of the zoo, and I can personally vouch for the dedication and professionalism of their elephant keepers. The main group putting out the information you’ve come across, on the other hand - Free the Oregon Zoo Elephants - is run by armchair experts who specialize in pseudoscience and have aligned with PETA and other major anti-zoo groups to attack all of the elephant programs in United States. I am comfortable putting both of those statements in such declarative phrasing because I put in a lot of effort in 2018 get first-hand information from both sides: I’ve attended conferences put on by FOZE as well as the Elephant Manager’s Association, and I’ve toured the Oregon Zoo elephant barn as part of a different conference. What you’ve encountered is a combination of animal liberation activism and the zoo industry’s obnoxious tendency to never address the past because it might make them look bad. To explain that, let me touch on a few different things.
The recent death of the zoo’s five-year-old elephant calf, Lily, was absolutely horrible (and another one of those topics I wasn’t able to face blogging about yet). She was killed by a virus commonly referred to as EEHV: it’s a type of herpes virus that attacks epithelium cells, and it’s very deadly to both captive and wild elephants. The problem is that almost all adult Asian elephants carry multiple strains of EEHV with no symptoms, similar to how humans can go decades with the strain of herpes that causes cold sores without ever having an outbreak. There’s no way to keep baby elephants from being exposed to EEHV if you want them to live around other elephants, and it’s thought that young elephants are more likely to die from it when they’re exposed to it later in life. It’s a genuinely awful disease. By the time you can see clinical signs (lesions in the mouth or on other mucous membranes) the baby probably has like 48 hours to live, and they die from massive internal hemorrhage. Because it’s such a horrible, awful way to have to watch an animal die - and because it’s killing a lot of wild Asian elephants - the zoo industry does a ton of research on EEHV. We still don’t have a cure, but we’ve learned how to detect an active viral infection early through blood tests, and starting treatment as soon as that’s detected is crucial to helping baby elephants survive it. From what I know, the Oregon Zoo is rigorous about testing for any signs of EEHV … and even with all the treatment they were able to provide, the vet staff weren’t able to save Lily. Losing an elephant is always a devastating loss. A baby is worse. Losing a calf that way is… unimaginably hard to bear. But to the people focused on attacking the Oregon Zoo because they’re fundamentally against having any elephants in captive settings for any reason, it was simply another angle they could exploit.
Free the Oregon Zoo Elephants may have started as a grassroots group of citizen activists concerned about the treatment of a specific bull at the zoo (Packy), but they’re now a national presence that is networked with PETA, HSUS, Born Free USA, and other major animal liberation / anti-zoo advocacy groups. They get free communications strategy support from Care2, a petition platform that makes money by selling the email addresses of people who sign their petitions to group that include PETA for use in future marketing campaigns. They’re working in concert with multiple other anti-zoo-elephant groups, such as Elephant Guardians for Los Angeles (the group trying to remove Billy from the LA Zoo), and have the explicit backing of at least one of the sanctuaries that would profit from elephant exhibits closing. The problem with this? Is that it’s spearheaded by people who believe they have telepathic connections with elephants and can “see sadness” on their faces. They have exactly zero scientific background in animal welfare or management topics, nor any actual husbandry experience with exotic animals of any kind. FOZE frequently repeats incorrect or outdated information - I can’t tell if it’s because they literally don’t read the scientific literature and stay up on actual management protocols, or if it’s just convenient for them to misrepresent things to further their agenda. Many of their supporters are the type will happily go take selfies free-contact with orphaned elephants while on travel while simultaneously preaching that people should only ever be allowed to have the privilege of experiencing elephants if they can pay to see them in wild. They want to shut all the conservation work down, end all the research on captive elephants that will help preserve wild elephants, and put all the current zoo elephants out into sanctuaries where they’ll live out the rest of their lives with minimal management or enrichment.
They’re about to sponsor a vigil to “remember the victims” of AZA’s elephant program - because they believe that a group of activists, backed by a couple of elephant behaviorists with name recognition, know more than all the keepers and veterinarians and researchers who have been working directly with elephants and studying them for decades.
So here’s the truth of the matter: yes, the Oregon Zoo used to manage their elephants in some pretty awful ways. So did every other zoo in the country. There was no data available fifty to one hundred years ago that told anyone they should do anything different with their elephants. Zoo animal management has improved so massively in the last couple of decades, and nowhere more than with elephants. Zoos did what they thought was necessary to keep both staff and elephants alive when they were first brought into American zoos, and it has taken a huge amount of research and pioneering new styles of elephant care to reach where we are today. It’s not like that’s ending any time soon - we know we can still always continue to improve. The AZA recently approved a really large grant for researchers involved with multiple institutions to continue studying how to improve elephant welfare in captive settings. However, the zoo world is stuck in this genuinely stupid mentality where admitting care used to be sub-par would somehow mean they’re not the experts now. And because they can’t admit as a community that they used to treat elephants in ways we now know were harmful, they can’t tell the public about how they’ve grown and changed. (This is a massive frustration for me. I attended an professional elephant management conference and was floored by the stories of change and growth and innovation I kept hearing… and nobody is willing to message about them to the public because it’s “too risky.”) Never being willing to admit their faults or be critical of their own history means it’s really easy for groups like FOZE to use old history against them: if the zoo won’t say “yeah, we learned that practice of, say, separating babies at birth was shitty and we stopped” you can keep telling stories about that shitty practice from 30 years ago and people won’t know the difference.
So that’s what is happening with the Oregon Zoo. They’re stuck in a position where they can only play defense against the allegations being lobbed at them by AR groups, and they won’t actually defend themselves and correct the misinformation because they’d have to admit any previous fault in order to do it. Zoos do such an abominable job about telling the public about what’s being done to improve elephant care in zoos that Oregon can’t even market the quality of their program based on their groundbreaking research and innovations to elephant care. It’s so frustrating, because it makes it almost impossible for the public to make an educated choice: if the zoo choosing to only post cute videos and the anti-zoo people are the ones posting about behavior and biology and ethics, who seems more credible? Zoo politics are dumb, and the way zoos are currently dealing with politics regarding their industry is really hurting their credibility in the eyes of even the people who love them - your question is a great example of that.
You can feel free to keep loving the Oregon Zoo. They do good work. The elephant staff are dedicate and professional, they conduct continual research to improve the quality of life for their elephants, and they are trailblazing a new style of elephant care that has nothing in common with the problematic historical practices you’re hearing about.
mind-if-i-scream