| ▲ | Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo(si.edu) |
| 62 points by gmays 15 hours ago | 23 comments |
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| ▲ | uxhacker 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| So there are now 55000 and 1 Asian elephants*. I don’t understand the newsworthiness of having an extra Asian elephant joining the other 15000 Asian elephants in captivity. Wild Asian elephants roam between 100km2 to 1500km2. This elephant will spend a life confined to just how many square km’s? |
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| ▲ | assaddayinh 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The conquest for utopian perfection is the enemy of all good things. In the wild she would be poached, hunted and ground dow into medieval medicine, while contained to ever more little islands of wild. Please god free us from those who want to burn the bakery, because they think tomorrow it will rain manna from the heavens. No curse us greater then a rampant idealist, unwilling to sense reality. PS: Why not have pragmatic solutions where there are elephant days where the herd to roam in a park? | | |
| ▲ | cultofmetatron 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | zoos and aquariums serve a very vital purpose. most people only care about these animals because they can go SEE them alive. documentaries help but nothing beats getting a captive people into a room to see a wild animal and then bamboozling them with propaganda about how important it is to preserve these animals. Its the reason we have funding to keep these creatures alive in the wild at all. if all zoos and aquariums were shut down, public concern about the environment would slowly drift to nothing within 2 generations. | | |
| ▲ | eleveriven 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | At the same time, I think it's risky to lean too hard on the idea that captivity is the only way to sustain concern |
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| ▲ | riedel 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | While I totally agree, the underlying conflict is that Zoos over use the argument of preservation these days. On the other end they certainly have the need to stay entertainment venues, a conflict which they seldomly address. Recently there was a obviously necessary mass culling of baboons in the Nuremberg zoo which shows some of the controversy [1] [1] https://www.greenmemag.com/animals/the-nuremberg-zoo-controv... | | |
| ▲ | assaddayinh 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | They could have hunting preserves, basically areas sharedby predators and prey similar to nature as enrichment, but that would be cruelty for the cityZens. Im argueing against nature preserves in poorer countries, where western nations deluded citizens pay to keep a piece of nature which are basically mirages of "intactness" in economic good times, vanishing from the earth entirely in economic bad times. Which the very same proponents usually argue for with degrowth arguments. |
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| ▲ | eleveriven 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yet framing it as either captivity or guaranteed death is also a bit of a false binary. Zoos are a mitigation strategy, not a moral end state | |
| ▲ | uxhacker 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So it will cost at least 100,000 usd to keep this poor elephant confined in a zoo in the US versus about 15,000 in a wild sanctuary in Thailand. In the wild sanctuary it will have space to roam. | |
| ▲ | dyauspitr 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | To be fair, elephant hunting and poaching in India over the last 20 odd years is negligible. I believe it accounts for less than 1% of elephant deaths since 2010. |
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| ▲ | eleveriven 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Zoos are a tradeoff: constrained lives in exchange for research, genetic insurance... And whether that tradeoff is worth it depends entirely on whether the off-site work actually helps wild populations | |
| ▲ | mikkupikku 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Every single elephant is precious. |
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| ▲ | eleveriven 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I do appreciate that they're explicit about why this matters (genetic diversity, SSP, long-term conservation work) instead of just treating it as zoo PR |
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| ▲ | vscode-rest 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Everything you listed is zoo PR, just for a different target audience. (that doesn’t make it bad) |
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| ▲ | fuzzythinker 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Direct source with better readability and many pictures: https://nationalzoo.si.edu/news/female-asian-elephant-calf-b... And even more pictures and info on Asian elephants: https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/news/get-know-herd-asian-... |
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| ▲ | assimpleaspossi 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There have been seven Asian elephants born at the St Louis Zoo since 1992. |
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| ▲ | eleveriven 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The key difference is that births like those (and this one) aren't about "we need more elephants," they're about which elephants survive and reproduce | | |
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| ▲ | Valodim 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > [this individual] will help strengthen the genetic diversity of the Asian elephant population in North America and around the world. I'm happy for them that there is now a calf after a long time, but this sentence doesn't read as hopeful as the author probably intended |
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| ▲ | kelipso an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Whenever someone mentions Asian elephants in American zoos, I remember my visit to Columbus zoo, where they treated the Asian elephants like African elephants. Very dry environment, very little water, feeding them dry hay, just absolutely atrocious treatment. |
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| ▲ | downboots 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| At last someone addresses it |
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