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The lifespan of captive elephants is also significantly reduced compared to their wild counterparts, with premature deaths resulting from chronic health issues.
- Overview
- Wild and Long-Lived
- Survival Strategies
- Huge Improvements
Wild elephants in protected areas of Africa and Asia live more than twice as long as those in European zoos, a new study has found.
Wild elephants in protected areas of Africa and Asia live more than twice as long as those in European zoos, a new study has found.
Animal welfare advocates have long clashed with zoo officials over concerns about the physical and mental health of elephants in captivity.
British and Canadian scientists who conducted the six-year study say their finding puts an end to that debate once and for all.
"We're worried that the whole system basically doesn't work and improving it is essential," said lead author Georgia Mason, a zoologist at the University of Guelph in Canada.
Obesity and stress are likely factors for the giant land mammals' early demise in captivity, she said.
Mason and colleagues looked at data from more than 4,500 wild and captive African and Asian elephants.
The data include elephants in European zoos, which house about half of the world's captive elephants; protected populations in Amboseli National Park in Kenya; and the Myanma Timber Enterprise in Myanmar (Burma), a government-run logging operation where Asian elephants are put to work.
Only the survival rates of females were analyzed because of their importance to future populations.
The findings show that captive elephants live considerably shorter lives.
For African elephants, the median life span is 17 years for zoo-born females, compared to 56 years in the Amboseli National Park population.
For Asian elephants, the results are "much more worrying because they are the rarer of the two species," Mason said.
To keep zoo elephants alive longer, the authors recommend routine screening for obesity (something that's done in U.S. captive elephant populations), as well as monitoring stress via a chemical known as interleukin-6.
Checking this biological marker, which shows that the body's immune system is battling sickness, would allow zoo officials to intervene before the animal is seriously ill, Mason said.
Robert Wiese, collections director at the San Diego Zoo in California, was not part of this study. He said making a comparison between the lifespan of captive and wild elephants may seem deceptively simple.
"There are just so many confounding issues, especially in small sample sizes [of] zoo animals, that it's hard to really separate and make sure you're comparing apples to apples," he said.
In 2004 Wiese co-authored a paper in the journal Zoo Biology showing the opposite of Mason's findings: that zoo elephants live as long as those in the wild.
He said that within the last decade accredited facilities have made huge improvements in the care of captive elephants by providing better nutrition to combat obesity, as well as environmental enrichment activities that reduce stress.
Captive elephants have significantly lower life spans than their wild counterparts and are usually dead before the age of 40. Captive elephants suffer from chronic health problems, such as tuberculosis, arthritis, and foot abscesses, which nearly always lead to premature death.
They also have a longer lifespan than most livestock. Elephants exhibit a wide variety of behaviors, including those associated with grief, learning, allomothering, mimicry, play, altruism, use of tools, compassion, cooperation, self-awareness, memory, and language.
Dec 12, 2008 · The study, which compared female African elephants in Kenya's Amboseli National Park with those in zoos, found that the wild elephants lived three times as long on average, surviving to a median age of 56 years compared with 17 years for elephants living in captivity.
Aug 7, 2018 · We show that captured elephants have increased mortality compared to captive-born elephants, regardless of their capture method. These detrimental effects of capture are similar for both...
In the wild elephants can live to be 60-70 years old; in captivity, the average life span is cut in half. What’s worse is the primary cause of their early demise: the number one killer of captive elephants is foot disease, infections in the bones of their feet that become systemic and joint disease.
