Elephantine troubles

Does the Marghazar Zoo in Islamabad really deserve a new elephant, given the manner in which it treated the last inhabitant of its elephant enclosure? The announcement that the rundown zoo is to get a new female elephant, lion and ostrich brings back memories of how Saheli — the 22-year-old female elephant who had lived at the zoo for over five years — died in May this year, mainly as a result of neglect and ignorance. In elephant years, Saheli was barely a teenager when she died. Other deaths at the zoo have been a common feature, with its last pair of lions dying some years before Saheli.

A key issue is that few lessons seem to have been learnt from the past. The main reason given for acquiring the new animals is that they will provide ‘entertainment’ to the people of Islamabad, especially the children. But are zoos really about entertainment? Modern philosophy emphasises that zoos should focus on conservation and also educating people about wildlife. Are we capable of setting up such a project? Are we even actively thinking about it? We still continue to think of zoos simply as a place where caged animals are stared at by people and quite often teased in a bid to get them to move about or make sounds of protest.

The death of Saheli should have been treated as a signal to change how we look at zoos. The ‘environmental plan’ for Marghazar Zoo and the forested areas surrounding it, announced by the Capital Development Authority, may make the site itself look better but at any place where animals are to be housed — and, of course, there is much debate on whether they should be held captive at all — the priority needs to be on ensuring that they are properly cared for.

Indeed, until mechanisms for this can be put in place, it seems foolish to acquire new animals that could end up facing the same fate as those brought to the zoo before them. Efforts to ‘improve’ the zoo must cater to their needs, too.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 10^th, 2012.