North丨5 Zoos丨23 Elephants
Recently, we went to 5 zoos, including Hohhot Daqingshan Wildlife Park, Ordos Wildlife Park , Taiyuan Zoo , Lanzhou Zoo , Xinjiang Tianshan Wildlife Park . There are 23 elephants in captivity in these 5 zoos, (8 Asian elephants and 15 African elephants .) This time we saw 22 elephants, one of which was not exposed. Not allowed to meet.
An elephant surrounded by a power grid
When you are indoors, you can see an elephant hanging down a curtain to listen to government affairs. It is not an ordinary curtain, but an "electric curtain".
This is the Daqingshan Wildlife Park in Hohahot. There are 5 elephants in the park, including 1 Asian elephant and 4 African elephants. They all live in single rooms. There is also a string of wires hanging down inside the sloping railings to further reduce the elephants’ activity space. Unable to say hello to the elephant next door. (The farthest distance in the world is a wire.)
Indoors are generally smaller than outdoors. There is no natural medium on the ground, and it is all poured cement. Hard decoration is no longer as good as outdoor, but soft decoration is not good either.
The hard-earned sand pile,
is still gone...

Taiyuan Zoo is quite spacious. I remember that before the National Day in 2020, Taiyuan Zoo also promoted that in the newly built elephant hall, sand piles were added to allow elephants to lie down and sleep, improving sleep quality, and allowing elephants to play in the sand.

But when we went to see it this time, it was gone. It seems that we will have to sleep standing up again. Now, there is nothing but excrement, urine, and hay, a barren cement floor.
What can an elephant do in a boring and monotonous environment?
I don’t know how many steps can I take in a day?

has no companions and is boring. The Asian elephants at Lanzhou Zoo are always swaying back and forth, repeating boring movements.

The indoor space of the Ordos Wildlife Park is not large, but with the addition of feeders, the elephants seem more active and can move around from time to time. However, their tusks are a bit strange, and some of them have begun to grow cysts on their bodies.

Elephants living in clusters do not know each other when they first come to the zoo. They may like each other, they may be curious about each other, they may caress each other, or they may attack each other. For unknown reasons, Ordos Wildlife Park and Hohhot Daqingshan Zoo both separated elephants one by one. Is it really so inconsistent?
What kind of purgatory did their bodies and minds go through?
5 The number of African elephants in the zoo is nearly twice that of Asian elephants. This is because imports from African countries have continued in recent years. All African elephants are captured from the wild and are all young elephants around 3 years old. From capture, (torture and beating after capture) to temporary breeding, long-distance transportation, isolation and quarantine, and then to zoos, some African elephants and baby elephants have died in some link in this trade chain. For example, the African elephant that arrived at Taiyuan Zoo around 2013, and was later named Xiao Fei, suffered from severe diseases when it first arrived, including weight loss and abdominal edema. Several other baby elephants that came with him failed to survive and died. After that, I met Xiao Fei again in 2016. At that time, he was still in the old hotel and the environment had not changed.

I didn’t see him at Taiyuan Zoo this time. I heard that he was kept in the infield of the indoor stadium and there was no outreach. But there is obviously a room in the exhibition area that is vacant, why not put it outside? Only it knows that it has gone through hellish torture.
One of the two African elephants on display at Taiyuan Zoo seems to be standing a little strangely.

If you look closely, you will find that there are many injuries on his body, mainly on his buttocks and hind legs.
The first impression of this kind of injury is that he was brutally beaten during training.
According to the staff, “The disease was not caused intentionally by humans, but was attacked by another female elephant next door."This is completely nonsense! The wounds are on the toes and calves. If ivory attacks, they generally will not be in such parts.
How many profit holes are there behind the import that rely on elephants to fill them?
Xinjiang Tianshan Wildlife Park, The front foot just sent away a painful elephant, and the back foot continued to import 4 African elephants and 4 Asian elephants. It can really be said to be a very wealthy zoo. After all, the cost of importing an elephant and raising an elephant are both It is not cheap. The imported Asian elephants are used for elephant riding, photo taking, rental, performance, feeding and other paid projects.

Fortunately, at least none of the elephants seen this time were used. Locked. But is this good?
