Find elephants a new home, zoo report recommends

After years of controversy and soul searching over what to do with its elephants, Toronto Zoo staff is recommending the best thing . . . is for them to leave.
Seven elephants have died at the zoo since 1984. Three aging elephants remain: Toka, Thika and Iringa. . Zoo staff were tasked with looking into what to do with them.
They found that, given the cost of building appropriate facilities — an estimated $16.5 million — combined with substantial future operating costs of $930,000 a year, and other factors, keeping the program running isn’t the best option, said the report to the zoo’s board of management.
The report also recommends the zoo “reassess its options” for another elephant program after 2013 when a U.S. study on captive elephant care is completed.
Other zoo animals would use the elephant enclosure in the interim, the report recommends.
The zoo board is set to vote on the recommendations at its May 12 meeting.
“Overall I’m very pleased with the report,” said city councillor and zoo board member Glenn De Baeremaeker.
“It’s cold in Toronto especially in January . . . You have a moral responsibility to the animals you shipped into this country to take care of them. And they’re currently in a space that is grotesquely too small,” he said.
Revisiting the idea of another elephant program at a later date is “just plain silly” De Baeremaeker said, adding “we don’t have $16 million or $20 million today, and we won’t have it two years or five years from now.”
Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby, another board member, said that, while she’s disappointed an easier solution than phasing out isn’t being recommended, she understands why.
She remains hopeful that the program will be revisited in a few years, and that “some kind soul will show up with $16 million to help us build a bigger enclosure for the elephants.”
Consultants’ reports conducted for the zoo said the elephants need a new holding and exercise barn four times the size of the existing barn, and two new outdoor paddocks that would triple the current open air space.
The staff report says the existing herd of three female elephants, though healthy, is aging and in a short time the zoo could be below the minimum standard of three elephants accepted by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA).
The report says the elephants should be transferred to one or more AZA accredited facilities.
That rules out massive elephant sanctuaries in California and Tennessee that animal rights advocates have been pushing for the animals to be sent to. Animal protection advocate and former Price is Right game show host Bob Barker came to Toronto last month to push for the elephants to be sent to a sanctuary, even offering to put up an unspecified sum of his own money to make that happen.
If the Toronto Zoo board goes ahead with the staff recommendation, zoo officials would then consult the AZA’s elephant experts to determine the best facility, said John Tracogna, the zoo’s CEO.
The cost to transfer the three elephants would be in the range of $30,000 to $50,000.
Source http://www.thestar.com/