Sylvia Stewart Former Head Elephant Keeper San Francisco Zoo Nursery Herd of May, Penny, Tinkerbelle, Taji Thank you so much for the cartoon! What I want all of us to see from this art work is the reality of Sunda and Tembo being housed through the winter in an unflushed toilet. They are put outside in the snow once a day while their keepers do their work, shovels filling up wheel barrels, water hoses splashing the floor. For a while it is clean, but then the horror for the elephant's starts once again. The stall,the warehouse, turns into an overflowing toilet and there is no stopping it as it spreads across the floor. For our girls there is no clean place to eat, no clean place to sleep and no clean place to protect their feet from the bacteria growing inside all that filth. AZA and the zoo director, zoo vet , all go home to clean plates for dinner, soft comfortable beds. They all have toilets with pull down handles that flow their eliminations away. Not so the elephants, all they have is a barren cement floor. The AZA held a national zoo elephant conference which the book Elephant's Foot was derived from. Chapter 6 written by Carol Buckley "NATURAL HUSBANDRY TECHNIQUES" We can all google chapter 6, study it..elephant's feet become infected from contaminated waste...they need space full of clean moisture from grasses, lakes, streams and clean mud. They also need earth to exercise their feet by using their foot as a shovel and digging in the clean dirt. They need to make beds from grasses. The Topeka Zoo has this book. The AZA calls themselves professionals. I say professionals of what ELEPHANT TORTURE CHAMBERS?
Sylvia Stewart
ReplyDeleteFormer Head Elephant Keeper
San Francisco Zoo
Nursery Herd of May, Penny, Tinkerbelle, Taji
Thank you so much for the cartoon!
What I want all of us to see from this art work is the reality of Sunda and Tembo being housed through the winter in an unflushed toilet. They are put outside in the snow once a day while their keepers do their work, shovels filling up wheel barrels, water hoses splashing the floor. For a while it is clean, but then the horror for the elephant's starts once again. The stall,the warehouse, turns into an overflowing toilet and there is no stopping it as it spreads across the floor. For our girls there is no clean place to eat, no clean place to sleep and no clean place to protect their feet from the bacteria growing inside all that filth.
AZA and the zoo director, zoo vet , all go home to clean plates for dinner, soft comfortable beds. They all have toilets with pull down handles that flow their eliminations away. Not so the elephants, all they have is a barren cement floor.
The AZA held a national zoo elephant conference which the book Elephant's Foot was derived from. Chapter 6 written by Carol Buckley "NATURAL HUSBANDRY TECHNIQUES" We can all google chapter 6, study it..elephant's feet become infected from contaminated waste...they need space full of clean moisture from grasses, lakes, streams and clean mud. They also need earth to exercise their feet by using their foot as a shovel and digging in the clean dirt. They need to make beds from grasses. The Topeka Zoo has this book.
The AZA calls themselves professionals. I say professionals of what ELEPHANT TORTURE CHAMBERS?