A Baby Elephant is Born
Asian elephant Maharani gave birth to a 140-kg (308 lb) female calf at the Calgary Zoo yesterday (Thursday, August 9). The little one has not yet been named.
This is Maharani’s second calf in three years. She gave birth in November of 2004 as well, but rejected the calf, and without the mother-child bond that is so necessary in high-level, highly social mammals, the calf failed to thrive, and soon died.
As a result, the zoo team sweated Maharani’s 22-month pregnancy this time around. The captive breeding program is part of a worldwide effort to save Asian elephants from extinction. Every birth is celebrated, and with every death, we fail a population that is disappearing to habitat encroachment and poaching.
The fear that Maharani may again fail to bond with her infant may be one reason the zoo is holding off naming the baby. Once we name something, we connect to it. And once we’re connected, any loss hurts all the more. But when you see a photo of this newborn elephant, bewildered by birth and struggling for life, you will feel connected, name or no name.
This elephant’s birth reminds me of another elephant born in captivity not so very long ago - April 26, 1970. Tina spent 34 years of her life in a small enclosure at the Greater Vancouver Zoo, much of it in a state of extreme boredom and loneliness and suffering serious foot problems because of the surfaces on which she stood. When it came to light that the Zoo was planning to sell her to a circus operator known to have abused his other animals, journalist Nicholas Read sparked a huge media campaign, bringing in Peter Fricker of the Vancouver Humane Society and Julie Woodyer of Zoocheck Canada, and leading to an enormous outcry from a public who had long held Tina in great affection. The result was a massive rescue effort that led to Tina’s journey to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, where she spent the last year of her life in the company of her own kind, in as much freedom as she had ever seen in her lifetime.
It took me less than a second — the time it takes to see a photograph, to absorb its content and process what that content means to me — to fall in love with Maharani’s new baby. I can even applaud the Calgary’s Zoo’s contribution to conservation efforts; wild animals don’t belong in zoos, but in so many cases now, zoos may have become their only hope for survival as a species.
But I can’t forget Tina, or how much she suffered (despite how much she was loved). We have Zoocheck to tell us how well our zoos are doing on the animal welfare front. But we don’t have the laws in place to enforce Zoocheck’s standards, should a zoo fail to meet them.
It is not enough to bring them into the world. We need to make the world a safer place to bring them into. We need to do more. We need to change the laws.
Go look at her photo, little whatever-her-name-will-be. Fall in love. And then find out what you can about the laws designed to protect her. We are her guardians.