SAVING THE WILD: Elephant conservation from the Southwest to the Serengeti
The standard way to identify elephants in the wild is by looking at their distinctive ear features, such as holes and jagged edges, because those small differences can be as unique as fingerprints.
But after 25 years of studying the elephants that roam the savannas of Tarangire National Park in northern Tanzania, Charles Foley doesn’t rely on those distinctions anymore. “Once you know these elephants, it’s like you taking your dog to the park,” said Foley, who directs the Tarangire Elephant Project. “There might be 20 different dogs over there, but you know exactly which one is your dog. The color, the way it moves, its behavior — it’s exactly the same with elephants.”
Elephants occupy a far more tenuous position than dogs, however. African elephants are listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. As of 2017, only 415,000 were left in the wild across 37 African countries, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
More than 9,500 miles away in Tucson, Arizona, the city-owned Reid Park Zoo supports Foley’s work with part of its conservation budget. The zoo’s five African elephants are visitor favorites, which is part of the reason the zoo chose to make elephant conservation a flagship project. “It seems like the animals that people really love and enjoy a lot are the elephants, the giraffes, lions, tigers — the charismatic mega-vertebrates,” said Jason Jacobs, director of Reid Park Zoo. “At our elephant habitat we have an area where folks can make a direct contribution to help elephant conservation in Tanzania, and that’s very important.”
Photograph courtesy of Charles FOLEY
Murdered for trinkets
Overall, the biggest threat to elephants is poaching, Foley said. People illegally kill elephants to cut off certain high-value body parts. Ivory from their tusks is particularly valuable in both legal and illegal markets.
“[Collectors on the black market] want the ivory because they like the trinkets or it looks nice, and they’re prepared to pay money for it,” Foley said. “And as long as people are prepared to pay money for ivory, there will be poaching in Africa.”
Decades ago, most ivory went to Europe, America and Japan, according to Foley. Now, it mostly goes to Asia, specifically China. On average, 96 elephants are killed per day for their tusks, but China has recently taken steps in the right direction. “The Chinese government has now said that it’s imposing a domestic ban on ivory, which is a huge step forward,” Foley said.
Losing land
Beside poaching, African elephants face the growing threat of expanding agriculture. Land devoted to crops will increase by more than 10 percent by 2025, according to a 2017 Stanford study. “In most of East Africa, certainly Tanzania, none of the national parks are fenced, so animals can move in and they can move out,” Foley said. “And so they’ll go from a protected area onto community land.”
While on community land, elephants sometimes eat or trample crops that farmers need to survive. “They will kill animals that come onto their farms for crop protection,” Foley said.
Foley focuses on the issue of agricultural expansion because northern Tanzania is one of the few areas in Africa where poaching is not widespread. That’s because the predominant land use is pastoralism, or herding cattle, Foley said. The Maasai, whose land extends from central Tanzania all the way up into southern Kenya, is the strongest tribe in the area, and Foley works closely with them.
Shifting traditions
The Maasai historically co-existed with wildlife because they don’t eat game meat and raise more cattle than crops, Foley said.
But the tradition of cattle herding is coming under threat. “As the population increases, there’s more demand for land, and there’s more demand for agriculture,” Foley said.
One solution is to offer the Maasai legal strategies for protecting their pastureland. “What we have been trying to do is to work with the Maasai to encourage them to set aside land specifically for cattle grazing, and this is to stop the gradual creep of agriculture into those areas,” Foley said. “It’s typically a win-win situation.”
Defining conservation
Conservation means being a good steward of the biodiversity of the Earth, according to John Koprowski, a conservation biologist at the University of Arizona. “Conservation is preserving what we have, restoring what we used to have and providing those opportunities for future generations,” he said.
Preserving land for grazing isn’t traditional conservation, Foley said, but today it’s an important method for ensuring the long-term survival of ecosystems. “If those lands are set aside for pastoralism, it, in effect, protects them for wild animals to use as well,” he said.
Zoos also provide solutions to the alarming rates of habitat loss, Koprowski said. “We end up with a role that these populations in zoos or conservation facilities can really play in helping us augment populations in the wild to buy some time while we restore habitat.”
Land protection is part of the big picture. “Absolutely every one of us depends on clean air, on having water, on keeping CO2 levels in the atmosphere down in order for us to have sustainable futures,” Foley said. “And ultimately, if we do not tackle this … it will basically annihilate us.”
Zoos can, in part, help humans avoid annihilation, according to Nancy Kluge, president of the Reid Park Zoological Society. “It’s important for us to teach the public how their actions in conserving water and conserving energy can protect species in the wild and really make those connections,” Kluge said. “[The zoo] is really a living laboratory in many ways.”
Small actions make a difference, Kluge said. When it comes to resources, every action has a ripple effect. Saving water in Tucson means pulling less water from aquifers, reservoirs and rivers. That conservation translates to more rain here, according to NASA, and also to more rain around the world. If watering holes all over the savanna are full, elephants don’t have to travel long distances to find water, which gives them a better chance of survival.
One piece of a larger puzzle
Modern zoos are hitting their stride in their conservation role, Koprowski said. “The more progressive-minded zoos and aquariums are providing educational opportunities about the broader world and are also working actively on the conservation of those species,” he said. Koprowski leads a breeding and conservation research program at the Phoenix Zoo for the endangered Mount Graham red squirrel.
Foley works on educational efforts with the Wildlife Conservation Society, which is the international branch of the Bronx Zoo. It partners with a handful of other organizations and zoos, including Reid Park Zoo. “Zoos need to be education advocates for elephants and for other wildlife,” he said. “They have a captive audience, which is basically a complete, broad cross-section of the American community.”
Being a conservation advocate means making sure people leave zoos with a message to act on. “In regard to elephants, the message should be ‘Do not buy ivory,’” Foley said. “If all zoos did that, that would make conservation work a lot easier.”
At Reid Park Zoo, director Jacobs has a three-pronged philosophy on conservation efforts. “First and foremost, you should definitely fund-raise to help animals in the wild, and that’s usually by supporting conservation work,” he said.
“The second part of conservation is building capacity within a zoological park to breed animals and safeguard them,” Jacobs said. For animals that are critically endangered, such as tigers, zoos are sometimes a last chance to rebuild those populations. “If it comes down to a decision of having no tigers in the wild but having some in zoos, I’d like to see some tigers in zoos,” Jacobs said.
The final part of Jacobs’ philosophy is education. Reid Park Zoo educates visitors not just on the importance of conservation but also on what they can do in their daily lives to make a difference.
Those things don’t have to be complicated, Jacobs said. “Maybe it’s something as simple as recycling or using less water or planting foliage in your backyard that attracts butterflies or other local wildlife,” Jacobs said.
No effort is wasted, Kluge said. Every individual can play a role in conservation. “Reid Park Zoo is one small cog in the wheel, but I feel strongly that if we can affect one person’s behavior, it’s worth it, and it’s something we need to do,” Kluge said. “Maybe that child who comes here as a 4- and 5-year-old and learns to love these animals, when they grow up will be one of our great conservationists that protects and saves these animals from extinction.”
From the tiniest dart frogs to the critically endangered tapirs and hulking African elephants, zoo animals are ambassadors to the public. When visitors learn about wild animals they wouldn’t otherwise interact with, they begin to care about them. “I think that every animal has a story to tell,” Jacobs said, “and that’s our job to tell it.”
