96 Elephants

I like to thumb through Fortune Magazine when it comes to my home every week because it makes me feel smart. I can pretend to understand articles about big business and high finance. My son studies finance at Valdosta State and he is in some financial honor society. The subscription is actually his.

Imagine my surprise when I was looking at one of the August issues and I saw something I knew a lot about – a full page photo of an elephant. It was on page 45, opposite an article on whether Tech CEO’s should take their companies public. The caption under the elephant read “Take Action Now”. I recognized this as the slogan of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s 96 Elephants Campaign, but what was it doing in a magazine about finance?

The 96 Elephants campaign is based on the appalling fact that 96 elephants are killed EVERY DAY in Africa. This works out to about 35,000 animals killed every year. At that rate, it won’t be long before they are extinct. Imagine the stir it would cause if someone found the last living woolly mammoth and had it on display at their farm. What would you pay to see it in person – to be near enough to touch it? People would be lined up for blocks. Scientists would clamor for genetic material. The government would likely seize the animal as a national treasure. Is that the fate that awaits modern-day elephants?

I hope my grandchildren don’t have to ask me what it was like to see a live elephant. Seeing them in video images won’t convey their size and majesty or transmit the smell and the chest-rattling power of their subsonic communication. Elephants are endangered not due to sport hunting or because of the bush- meat trade. They are endangered because their ivory tusks are a valuable commodity on the black market – valued by some estimates at $1,500 per pound. If you consider that a pair of tusks can easily weigh more than a hundred pounds, you can see the problem. That is a lot of money.

Elephants are endangered because of money, so I guess when you think about it, Fortune Magazine is a perfect place to advertise their plight. Perhaps someone will be inspired to write an article about the economics of elephant ivory trading on the illegal commodities market. As the population of animals continues to decline, I would think the value of their ivory will increase, which seems like simple supply and demand economics. And when elephants are finally extinct and the ivory can no longer be obtained, I wonder if the value of ivory will seem trivial compared to the value of seeing a live elephant.

The Toronto Zoo - A Grand Opening Remembered

When the Metro Toronto Zoo opened its 710 acre “zoogeographic” zoo on August 15^th, 1974 it was, I believe, ahead of its time. No other zoo took the zoogeographic theme (organized around groups of animals from the same parts of the world) to the level of the Toronto Zoo. Its huge continental areas of Indomalaya, Africa, the Americas, and Eurasia had sprawling, outdoor animal exhibits and each area had an indoor pavilion that was a combination zoo, aquarium, museum, and botanical garden. It would be another ten years before other zoos began to catch up, with the opening of large indoor facilities like the Bronx Zoo’s Jungle World.

I had been working there for nearly a year when the Toronto Zoo opened, and I have long been puzzled about why I have no recollection of the opening celebration. It was the day we had all been working toward and, yet, it is as though I was never there. Then, as I looked back on my diary and notes, it hit me. I was too busy working.

In the days leading up to the grand opening, I was a senior keeper in the Americas section of the zoo. This included an indoor pavilion, a large polar bear complex with underwater viewing, and a South America paddock. The pavilion was largely underground and it held the most diverse collection of animals a senior zookeeper could be expected to care for, including mammals (beavers, otters, cacomistle), birds (band-tailed pigeons, native song birds, waterfowl), reptiles (alligators, rattlesnakes), and fishes. In the days and weeks leading up to opening, and especially on opening day itself, we were frantically preparing exhibits and receiving animals.

The fish had been in their tanks for a month or so, but most of the animals we were receiving had been quarantined and stockpiled at barns and holding facilities all over the region. On July 17^th, we received 1.1 (1 male and 1 female) cacomistles from the Claremont barn and 4.2 armadillos from the south service building. On the 19^th, it was a Mississauga rattlesnake that was donated and four alligators from Toronto’s soon-to-close Riverdale Zoo. On the 23^rd, we received two band-tailed pigeons and on the 29^th, one opossum and three young alligators from Riverdale. On July 31^st, we received a large alligator from Riverdale, a jaguarondi from Claremont, three skunks, fourteen quail of three different species from Kirkham’s barn, two fox snakes, seven box turtles, and a diamond-backed terrapin. The next day, on August 1^st, we received a huge alligator, eighteen song birds, and an otter. We were scrambling to get animals introduced to their new accommodations and to each other. And when opening day came and went, our challenges continued with one day running into the next. It was, I am told, quite an event those forty years ago – and I was there. I just wish I had seen it!