Woodland Park Zoo
Update: IDA Charges Unnatural Conditions Caused Elephant’s Death
Update: Feds Asked to Investigate Elephant Death of Baby Elephant
Background
After enduring decades of confinement in small zoo enclosures and repeated punishment for expressing her resulting frustrations, 38-year-old Bamboo is considered a troubled and even dangerous elephant. In August 2005, after spending virtually her entire life at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, she was transferred to Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, which specializes in handling “difficult” elephants. In Tacoma, Bamboo remained dangerously overweight and spent most of her time alone, pacing a circle in the treeless sand of her less-than-one-acre enclosure, relentlessly shaking her head back and forth.
Now Bamboo’s life has been upended again, and she has been shipped back to Woodland Park Zoo after unsuccessful attempts to integrate her with the Point Defiance Zoo’s “herd” of two female elephants.
Travel and changes in environment, especially when new conditions are just as stressful as the old, are very traumatic for elephants, so it is best not to move them unless there is a very good reason. Yet a third upheaval may be in the works, as Woodland Park is currently searching for yet another zoo where it can send its "problem elephant." But clearly she needs to go to a sanctuary with the space, natural habitat and social environment necessary for her to heal from her physical and psychological wounds. The Zoo’s hometown newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, agreed with that opinion recently when it wrote, “if Seattle's political leaders intend to keep Bamboo captive here, they, and not the zoo experts behind whom they hidden like frightened prey, have a lot of explaining to do.”
Fortunately, The Elephant Sanctuary (TES) in Tennessee has generously offered to transport and care for Bamboo at its own expense if the Woodland Park Zoo agrees to this arrangement.
At TES, Bamboo would share 2,400 acres of hills, forest, pastures, lakes and streams with a herd of nine other Asian elephants.
The warm climate of the Southeast, where TES is located, more closely resembles elephants’ natural habitat, than does the Pacific Northwest, where Bamboo is forced to spend extended periods indoors during the cold, wet winters, standing on concrete behind the bars of her barn stall.
There would be no better place than TES for Bamboo to spend her final years, but Woodland Park Zoo officials first have to be convinced to let her go.
What You Can Do
Write an e-mail (or better yet, a letter or a fax) to Seattle City Council members and urge them to pass a resolution calling for Bamboo’s release from the Woodland Park Zoo to The Elephant Sanctuary. A resolution from the Board of Supervisors helped get elephants from the San Francisco Zoo to the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) sanctuary in California, and a similar resolution in Seattle could benefit Bamboo.
Tom Rasmussen - tom.rasmussen@seattle.gov
Richard Conlin - richard.conlin@seattle.gov
Richard McIver- richard.mciver@seattle.gov
Jan Drago - jan.drago@seattle.gov
Sally J. Clark - sally.clark@seattle.gov
Nick Licata - nick.licata@seattle.gov
David Della - david.della@seattle.gov
Peter Steinbrueck - peter.steinbrueck@seattle.gov
Jean Godden - jean.godden@seattle.gov
[Name of Councilmember]
Seattle City Hall
PO Box 34025
Seattle, WA 98124-4025
Fax: (206) 684-8587
- Contact the Woodland Park Zoo and urge them to transfer Bamboo to The Elephant Sanctuary.
Deputy Director Bruce Bohmke
Woodland Park Zoo
601 No. 59th Street
Seattle, WA 98103
Tel: (206) 684-4880
Fax: (206) 684-4854
woodlandparkzoopr@zoo.org
Carolyn Cox
Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium
5400 N. Pearl St.
Tacoma WA 98407
Tel: (253) 591-5337
carolync@tacomaparks.com
- To learn more and to donate money to the effort to help get Bamboo to a sanctuary, visit
www.freebamboo.org.
In 1968, when she was just one year old, Bamboo was taken away from her family in the tropical forests of Thailand and brought to Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Washington. In the wild, female elephants spend their entire lives in extended family groups, learning from their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters and other relatives how to be elephants. Like any young child, Bamboo must have been incredibly frightened and lonely when she was removed from her family and native habitat and brought to a strange, unnatural environment.
When David Hancocks was Design Coordinator and then Director of Woodland Park Zoo from the mid-70s to the mid-80s, he knew Bamboo as a "cooperative, trustworthy, smart and playful" elephant. Though Hancock readily admits that the Zoo's housing for Bamboo was substandard, he and the rest of the elephant care staff did all they could to treat her with respect, providing the young elephant with mental and physical enrichment, as well as extended time with caretakers. But decades of living in squalor and the reintroduction of harsh management methods after Hancock’s departure – including daily overnight chaining and physical beatings – "deeply changed...this gentle and docile elephant" according to the former Zoo Director. "Like so many other zoo animals around the world," he wrote in a letter to a Seattle Councilman, "her spirit appears to be broken."
For most of her life, Bamboo got along well with other elephants at Woodland Park Zoo, but after three decades, the effects of confinement, deprivation and abuse finally took their toll, causing her to become aggressive:
• Bamboo became belligerent after another elephant at the Zoo gave birth, so handlers put her in solitary confinement for an extended period.
• She was forced into isolation repeatedly over the years, with Zoo personnel handling Bamboo more and more roughly as she became increasingly miserable with her situation. Bamboo’s formidable size (she weighs over four tons and stands eight feet tall at the shoulder), coupled with the anger she displays as a result of her mistreatment, can make her dangerous to other animals as well as to humans.
• After turning against her trainers in 1989, the Zoo chained Bamboo in her barn overnight. Such punishments only increased her unhappiness and antagonism.
In August 2005, Woodland Park Zoo transferred Bamboo to Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, which specializes in handling "difficult" elephants. Since then, her disposition has only deteriorated. On June 11, 2006, she was returned to Woodland Park, which has stated that it will likely to send her to another zoo.
Sadly, not even the most well-intentioned zoo can provide Bamboo with the space and environmental enrichment that she needs to be healthy. On the other hand, if she is sent to The Elephant Sanctuary (TES) in Tennessee, Bamboo will have a chance to be happy and live as an elephant should.
• TES is home to many other elephants who formerly lived in zoos or traveled with circuses.
• Like Bamboo, many were considered “troubled” animals by their “owners,” but after a relatively short time in their new habitat, they started to act like happy, normal elephants again.
• Allowing Bamboo to live with other elephants on hundreds of acres of grassland and trees is now the only way to mend her broken spirit.