Cruelty towards elephants in our zoos

Unfortunately, our Constitution remains silent on animals’ rights and well- being while the constitutions of many other countries explicitly includes clauses for the care of nature in their constitution. For example, the Constitution of India 51-A states, “It shall be the duty of every citizen of India to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife and to have compassion for living creatures”.

I feel sorry for animals when people inflict pain and misery to them. The sight of a donkey pulling a heavy cart is justified as means of earning livelihood issue but a wild animal suffering in a zoo for public entertainment is never justified. Let’s just focus on Suzi, the Lahore Zoo’s female African elephant, in the neighbourhood of the chief minister’s secretariat. We can have all the flyovers and underpasses in Lahore, we can sacrifice trees of canals to widen roads but we cannot make modest renovations in an elephant’s enclosure so that her feet do not remain shackled to the concrete floor all night!

Elephants are highly intelligent. They are known for their memories, remembering their fellows by touching their bones and feeling the vibrations of ground through their cushion-like feet to communicate. Imagine an intelligent, social animal with a complex communication system in solitary confinement. Apart from being shackled half of her life, Suzi has not even seen any other elephant ever since she came to Pakistan in the early 1990s. This also leads to abnormal behaviour, aggression and stress in the animal.

Foot problems in elephants are very common and I am sure some of us would remember Saheli, the female Asian elephant who died in the Islamabad Zoo in May 2012 at the age of just 22 years! She apparently had some foot problem that had developed into a more serious infection.

Elephants live long, for up to 60 years or so. Globally, foot problems are one of the leading cause of their mortality in zoos which is attributed to poor husbandry. This is the reason why more and more zoos abroad have stopped keeping elephants or they only keep them in social groups in large areas for example. For instance, the London Zoo does not house elephants anymore and has moved them to a large enclosure at the Whipsnade, which is more like a safari just outside London.

The Asian elephant male at Islamabad Zoo continues to be shackled in a worse way than Suzi. To everyone’s surprise, Karachi Zoo, which is always under criticism, has much better facilities for elephants. Moreover, there is no official record of elephants in circuses in Pakistan and how they are treated there.

The provincial wildlife laws keep exotic animals and their welfare issues at bay. This entire situation highlights the need to improve cruelty laws in Pakistan, integrate protection for exotic species in provincial legal frameworks but also addresses the very fundamental, intrinsic need to instituitionalise compassion towards animals. Suzi’s case has been brought up with the zoo authorities a number of times. However, no heed was paid. After each sunset, Suzi goes into the darkness with her feet tied to concrete, standing in her own urine. One wonders what she is punished for!

Published in The Express Tribune, March 2^nd, 2014.

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