Life as a male elephant in zoos

Jake is a male Asian elephant who was born into the unnatural and painful world of an elephant prison on November 2, 2009. They call his first prison the African Lion Safari, and it is in Ontario, Canada. 

The men and women who stand on the other side of the iron bars that define his existence celebrated when he was born. They celebrated because he was the first elephant born from artificial insemination in Canada, an achievement worth celebrating solely because it might mean greater earning potential for Canadian zoos. After all, elephants are notoriously bad breeders in captivity, and elephant calves make zoos the most money. 

A month shy of his ninth birthday, he was put into an elephant-sized shipping container, loaded onto a truck like an Amazon package, and driven nearly 1,600 miles to a home he had never known, where he would be forced to share his life with elephants he had never met, while never again being able to see his mother or any other elephant he had bonded with over the past nine years. In the wild, bonded social relationships are maintained for a lifetime. They call his second prison the Denver Zoo, and it is in Denver, Colorado. 

Elephants who have been transferred between zoos exhibit more stereotypic behavior (i.e., repetitive behavior resulting from brain damage due to impoverished living conditions and lack of choice) than elephants who have not been transferred. Asian elephants who have experienced a transfer also have a lower life expectancy than their counterparts who were never transferred. The disruption to elephant social lives caused by inter-zoo transfers has a major negative impact on elephant welfare, including Jake’s. 

What little autonomy he was allotted at the Denver Zoo was quickly reduced further because he was selected for the insidiously invasive practice of captive elephant breeding. In the wild, he would have been able to choose his sexual partner; choice is an essential component to elephant well-being. 

Every month, sometimes multiple times a month, one of the prison’s employees coerces him into a restraining device. Informally, the device is called a rape stand or rape rack. Rape stands are used in dog fighting circles to force females to breed; they are used in factory farming to prevent the milk from running dry. His rape stand immobilizes him entirely.

Once he is immobilized, a man or woman positions themselves behind him. They insert an arm into his rectum and begin to massage his prostate. The hope is that upon rigorous massage he will be stimulated enough to ejaculate. This is not a guarantee, and often his insides are inflamed and in extreme pain—to say nothing about the humiliation of having someone force themselves inside of you, especially when that someone is not even a member of your species. If this occurred outside the prison’s walls it would be called bestiality, better yet: rape. 

Month after month, year after year, he is exploited. On November 23, 2024, that exploitation produced offspring. He never met Jade, the elephant who experienced similarly invasive procedures to be artificially inseminated by his sperm, and he will most likely never meet his son. Born at the prison called the St. Louis Zoo in St. Louis, Missouri, the son was named Jet, and Jet will experience the same traumas, the same horrors, and the same rape that his father continues to experience today. 

 It is the great lie of zoos: that captive breeding through artificial insemination helps wild elephants. It does not. No elephant has ever been released from a zoo into the wild. Ever. The St. Louis prison’s Curator of Mammals once said: “We are thrilled to welcome this calf, which starts the fourth generation of our Asian elephant family at the Zoo.” That is four generations of elephant prisoners too many. 

To do this to an elephant is sad, it is sick, and this country’s legal system must evolve to account for these kinds of traumas. Nobody, human or nonhuman, should be forced to have these indignities visited upon them. There is no justification for forcing oneself onto or into another. None. Yet zoos make the choice to act this way every month. This choice is a symptom of a world that incentivizes the imprisonment of elephants. It is the kind of choice the Nonhuman Rights Project is committed to taking off the board by eliminating the root cause of captive breeding–elephant captivity itself–and securing elephants’ fundamental right to liberty.