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Horrors elephants
won't forget
Brian Sewell, London Evening Standard, 29th October 2002
The elephant, said Rudyard Kipling, is a gentleman.
The elephant, said Hilaire Belloc, will only read The Times.
The elephant, said John Donne, four centuries ago, is Nature's great masterpiece.
But the elephant in Blackpool zoo is Milton's beast, "the unwieldy
elephant" of Paradise Lost, the elephant
that to make us laugh uses "all his might and wreaths his lithe proboscis".
And why, clowning, does he wreath his lithe proboscis, open his great
mouth as though in a guffaw and raise a great flat foot as though
to shake our hands? Because each of his two keepers, men with the mien
of soccer hooligans, prods him with an ankus to urge him to perform his
tricks, and an ankus is a "an elephant hook" sufficiently sharp
to produce pain enough through that thick hide to make the great beast
respond, not willingly, but with obedience.
Our headlines last week were devoted to the 700 Muscovites held hostage
and the sexual mishaps
long ago of a fading middle-aged celebrity in Proustian mood, all of it
man's utterly predictable
inhumanity to man and, therefore, unremarkable, none of it as futile in
its cruelty as the
torment of the elephant. The elephant was in the news because the RSPCA,
not before time, issued a
report on its welfare in zoos, and one broadsheet chose to illustrate
its summary with the animal in Blackpool zoo.
The photograph was wonderfully explicit, the hooks of the ankus sharp
and clear, the expression of the
elephant easily interpreted by an anthropomorphist as human laughter.
Laughter, however, is far from the reality, for the prick of the ankus
reminds the
beast of pain far worse: of the electric cattle prod that was the first
instrument in his education, the means of breaking him from a simple
exhibit captured from the wild into a circus performer to amuse the
Blackpool visitor in daylight hours, when the more sophisticated pleasures
of that ghastly place are not available.
But this is not a circus; this is a zoo, a place, it is so often argued,
of conservation, education and research, a place
that with breeding programmes will ensure, against all the odds of the
polluted world in which natural
habitat is constantly reduced by the demands of man, the survival of endangered
species. Were it a circus, the
Blackpool elephant's conditions would be even worse, shackled by one forefoot
and one
hind foot into near immobility when not performing in the ring, standing
in its
turds and urine as it is trucked from one roll-up, roll-up place to another
and the
next, release into the ring the only freedom that it ever has, there to
make itself ridiculous.
At least the Blackpool beast has an enclosure in which to roam, though
roam is not quite the word for
freedom to move about in what, in human terms, is a single room with matching
patio, but no front door
to open on the world. The zoo elephant cannot forage for itself, cannot
with its lithe proboscis reach
into a tree, cannot wade into a water-hole for the pleasure of a bath.
Nothing that an elephant
does daily in the wild can be done in a zoo enclosure. Why then is he
there? What possible
benefits to education and research can there be in having the great beast
as an unnatural
exhibit? Is it a matter of town pride to own an elephant? If so, then
we revert to the medieval
folly of the menageries of kings and emperors who exchanged
rare animals as readily as relics of the saints. Are we really so silly
as to think that the
elephant's "little eyes express his unaffected thankfulness"
for the supposed comforts of
captivity, far away from poachers who would slaughter him for his ivory
or, as in modern
Zimbabwe, for his edible flesh? What comforts? Those of a tropical animal
trapped in the
cold damp north, arthritis, madness and an early death.
Elephants are herd animals for which the life-long bond of the family
group is the natural
society - but never in zoos. Deprived of the habitual and intuitive interactions
of the
family, the elephant born in captivity is overweight, unhealthy, infertile,
suffers
stress and dies at 15 instead of more than 50. Is this science? Is it
education? Is it
conservation? Is it kind? If it is none of these, why in England have
we 90 elephants
in zoos, most alone or in pairs, and why in civilised Europe have we 400
more?
But it is not only the keeping of elephants that we should question. What
quality of life has a giraffe
in a concrete enclosure, polar bear, a bear of any kind, any animal indeed
that is a rover over
distances that are, on foot, far beyond the abilities of man? Are apes
happy in a
treeless zoo? Are birds? The one-wattled cassowary in Regent's Park
was, on my last visit, the perfect example of grubby, bedraggled misery.
I am aware of the argument that not until a child has seen animals in
a zoo, been awed by
the size of them, heard them grunt and growl and fart, watched them empty
bowels and
bladders, pinched his nostrils to shut out body odours, will he truly
be aware of what an
animal is, the argument that no television programme is a substitute for
the real thing, just
as shopping at the supermarket is no introduction to the reality of the
cow, the pig, the
lamb. But the real thing in the zoo may be half mad, its behaviour
far from natural, its enclosure a prison, not a habitat.
The tiger, cheetah and leopard tread the same few paces a thousand times
a day, weaving
figures of eight; squatting apes rock from side to side, elephants stand
and sway; in captive
animals we see irrefutable evidence of psychotic behaviour never witnessed
in the wild, the
consequence of boredom, lack of stimulus, frustration and imprisonment
inflicted by man.
What is to be said for zoos? Not much even for small animals when we consider
the
needs of the domestic dog, but the zoo is marginally better than the circus,
where
cruelty is inevitable in the urgencies of the business - witness the recent
prosecutions
here. As for other countries, I shall never forget the bewildered baby
elephant walloped
and dragged through Gottingen to advertise a circus, nor the ragged lions
and tigers of a
circus in Puy-de-De; I shall never forget the dancing bears of Turkey
nor the dog-baited bears
of Pakistan, and as for the 7,000 caged bears milked of their bile in
China for the
benefit of superstitious medicines or slaughtered for their paws...
But I digress. We have a Labour Party besotted with the fox, but in terms
of animal welfare it
should have larger targets for reform; our ill-treatment of farm animals
has proved too ambitious
an object for its revolutionary zeal, too close-tied to the corrupting
subsidies of Europe, but it
could raise the issue of zoo and circus animals at a pan-European level
and could attempt
to remedy their plight. Such reform, however, does not have about it the
frisson of
class hostility that lends such zest to their save-the-fox campaign.
As for practical measures, at £25,000 a year to keep an elephant,
Europe now
spends £12.5 million, almost half as much again as Kenya spends
on wildlife
management. Add the cost of keeping all other animals in zoos and it is
immediately
evident that were we to contribute that level of funding to wildlife reserves
in the countries
from which they came, we should indeed be involved in all that zoos claim
as their
justification, conservation, science, education and survival, conserving
habitat
too, with none of the deprivations and inherent cruelties of the urban
zoo.
Brian Sewell
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