Zoo will celebrate 12^th Annual Elephant Festival on June 7-8

By Rick LoBello, Education Curator

Make reservations now for Breakfast with the Elephants – deadline is May 23

For over 50 years the El Paso Zoo has been home to Asian elephants.  Mona was the first followed by Savannah and Juno.   Today, Savannah is one of the oldest living elephants in North America at age 62.  She came here from the Baton Rouge Zoo in Louisiana to be a companion for Mona in 1997.  When Mona died in 2001, Savannah was alone and needed a companion. Soon the Zoo arranged for another elephant named Juno to come to El Paso from the Ringling Brothers Circus in Florida to be Savannah’s companion.  Both elephants can be seen daily in their main Asia exhibit and during daily elephant training programs at noon.  El Pasoans love coming to the Zoo to see their elephants.  Today we can confidently say that over the years millions of school children have experienced seeing their first elephants right here at the El Paso Zoo.

The first time I ever saw an elephant was when I was 4 years old visiting the Buffalo Zoo in New York with my Kindergarten class.  My mother was a chaperon and I will never forget that day.  Like so many others who are working in the field of conservation I credit my experience visiting the zoo as a child in having a profound effect in helping me to decide how I would live the rest of my life.   Today I am working with the El Paso Zoo team and conservation advocates across the country in trying to help save elephants from the impacts of humanity.   The challenge is mindboggling when one thinks about how fast elephant habitat is disappearing in Southeast Asia and all the elephants that are being killed from the growing ivory crisis in Africa.   The world is not a very safe place for these amazing creatures and both the Asian and African species are in danger of going extinct during the lifetimes of the children visiting the Zoo today.

When I was hired as the Zoo’s first Education Curator in 2002, I immediately started working on a plan to make elephant conservation a high priority as part of the Zoo’s conservation education program.   On October 6, 2002, Zoo staff and volunteers presented the Zoo’s first elephant festival celebrating humankind’s 5000 plus year relationship with elephants.  In addition to learning more about Savannah and Juno the event featured conservation education opportunities focused on helping people to get involved.  On June 7-8 the Zoo will host the 12^th Annual Elephant Festival.  Learn more about the event on the Zoo’s website at www.elpasozoo.orgwww.elpasozoo.org and be sure to sign up for “Breakfast with the Elephants.”

Juno and Savannah are conservation ambassadors for elephants around the world.  Elephants are a keystone species playing a critical role in the health of their associated ecosystems. Their role within the Southeast Asia ecosystem and in Africa consists of path making; tree felling, soil aeration and seed dispersal, as well as creating and maintaining water holes. They play a crucial role in maintaining links in the food chain and are the architects of the rainforest, opening up dense woodlands for generations of plants on the forest floor. Such vegetation provides a food supply and hospitable environment for thousands of other wildlife species. These in turn represent a potential food supply for large carnivores such as clouded leopards and Sumatran tigers in Indonesia and Malaysia and leopards, cheetahs and lions in Africa.   Elephants also deposit waste that results in the transfer of nutrients and increased productivity in the ecosystem.

Over the past twelve years, the Zoo’s conservation education program has focused on the last remaining herd of about 200 Sumatran elephants living in Tesso Nilo National Park. Every day Zoo visitors learn about our conservation efforts during the Zoo’s daily noon-time elephant training program. To help protect this ecologically strategic herd and their rainforest habitat, we encourage visitors to join the El Paso Zoological Society and to avoid palm oil.  Palm oil production is killing elephants and other endangered animals around the world as their tropical rainforest habitat is destroyed by expanding palm oil plantations, the largest cause of deforestation in Indonesia and other equatorial countries.

With the help of the El Paso Zoological Society the El Paso Zoo has become the major Zoo sponsor of the World Wildlife Fund’s Flying Squad and overall protection of Tesso Nilo National Park.  The Flying Squad is a small group of domesticated elephants that human handlers called mahouts lead into farming areas near the park where wild elephants come into conflict with people. For over ten years their efforts have helped to decrease the number of conflicts which is essential to the protection of the elephants. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the program has helped to reduce crop damage in some villages by 99%.

Earlier this year the El Paso Zoo signed on with other zoos and conservation organizations to help with a major new conservation effort to help save African elephants.   “96 Elephants” seeks to unite a broad based coalition of partners to coordinate and leverage their collective influence, constituencies, and resources to save African elephants from extinction. Together we aim to secure U.S. legislation that will create a moratorium on ivory sales, raise funds to bolster elephant protection, and educate the public about the link between ivory consumption and elephant killing.   At this year’s Elephant Festival we will encourage our guests to support this new effort by joining the herd at  http://www.96elephants.org.   We will also have a conservation action station in the Kalahari Research Station where children will be able to color a picture of an elephant that will be sent to President Obama as a show of support for the 96 Elephants Campaign.

When I went to Africa in 1989, the same year the international trade in ivory trade was banned, I was fortunate to see my first herd of wild elephants at Masai Mara National Park in Kenya.  Never did I imagine 25 years later that I would see the day when an average of 96 African elephants each day would be killed for their ivory.  Unfortunately this terrible situation is happening as I write this blog.  In 2012 alone 35,000 elephants were killed by poachers in Africa.   Currently there is inadequate protection of elephants, insufficient efforts to halt ivory trafficking, and skyrocketing demand for ivory.  I hope that you will do your part to help elephants and will visit the Zoo during our Elephant Festival on June 7 and 8.