Zoo Hysteria High as Elephant’s Eye
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It might be easy to write off as a nutty extremist Marianne Bessey, the animal-rights activist who has been banned from the Philadelphia Zoo.
Easy, that is, until you look into the eyes of the giant, majestic beasts she so zealously—some might say hysterically— champions.
Until you look into the eyes of a captive elephant.
There is something there. Something more than docile existence. There is intelligence, fierce intelligence. No question about it. Even the zoo’s own Web site notes the animal’s innate smarts. Is it my imagination, or is there also sadness in those eyes?
Sadness and Longing?
Bessey thinks there is, and she has become obsessed with helping the zoo’s four elephants find freedom—or at least a relative facsimile of it—at a 2,700-acre pachyderm sanctuary in Tennessee.
She has become a major burr under the saddle of the zoo’s administration, regularly visiting the elephants in their tight quarters at the zoo, videotaping them, freely sharing her opinion that elephants deserve better than a quarter-acre exercise yard where visitors stand and gawk at them.
“They’re so intelligent and just so amazing,” she said by phone Friday.
“A Little Depressed”
Bessey, a lawyer, became smitten with elephants as a child. “But when I saw them in circuses or zoos, I always felt there’s something wrong here,” she said. “They always seemed a little off or depressed.”
In 1996, she traveled to Zimbabwe to watch wild elephants in their native habitat and was stunned by how differently they behaved and interacted from confined animals.
And those smart, deep eyes, she insists, had different expressions. Not sad at all.
She calls zoo elephants mere “shadows” of wild elephants.
Last year she began badgering zoo officials to release the four elephants to the sanctuary where they could live closer to how nature intended. So far, the idea has gone nowhere.
She’s particularly frustrated over the fate of Dulary, a 42-year-old female with an injury that has kept her inside a concrete barn since August.
“It’s like putting your child in a closet for the rest of their life,” she said.
As her frustration grew, she posted a message earlier this month on an online chat room known as the Elephant Connection. In it, she wished that Philadelphia Zoo Director Alexander L. “Pete” Hoskins might experience what it would be like to be “kept in a concrete closet for six months to hasten [his] demise.”
“My frustration just boiled over,” she said.
What she didn’t know was that zoo officials were monitoring the chat room (your donor dollars at work), and they filed a police complaint against her, apparently on the theory that her comments were not-quite-but-almost-sort-of a little like a death threat.
A Threat, but to What?
Now, we can’t have death-threatening eco-terrorists at a family attraction, right? And so the activist was banned from zoo property.
Remind me again who’s acting with extreme hysteria?
Let’s get real here. The threat the zoo is trying to contain is not to its director’s life but to its well-coifed public-relations image. Zoos are friendly, family places where all the animals are happy all the time. There is no room for loudmouths questioning whether the elephants might be better off running free.
I like zoos. I like the Philadelphia Zoo in particular, so much so that I have an annual membership. I like taking my kids there. But I have to say, when I reach the elephant enclosure, I see it, too. Those eyes.
Most of the animals seem content in their enclosures. But the elephants always leave me feeling just a little . . . sad. If they could talk, you know what they would say. And it would not be how splendid life is standing in a rectangle of dust so people can take their photographs.
Other major zoos have released their pachyderms to large sanctuaries where they now roam free.
Visit the zoo, look into those deep, knowing eyes. Then ask yourself: Isn’t it time Philadelphia did the same?
