Captive breeding programs for elephants are often sold to the public as essential to conservation. Zoos brand them as “Species Survival Plans”—a comforting label that suggests science, strategy, and stewardship. But peel back the glossy marketing, and you’ll find a contradictory and broken system that prioritizes profits and publicity over the autonomy and physical and mental well-being of the elephants they claim to care so deeply about.
The reality: captivity isn’t conservation
At their core, zoo-based elephant breeding programs do not serve wild elephant populations. These programs aim to sustain the captive population of elephants, not reintroduce them into the wild. And they’re failing even at that.
Breeding elephants in captivity is riddled with suffering. Artificial insemination—a common practice due to the difficulty of natural breeding in zoos—isn’t only expensive, it’s invasive and traumatizing. The cost of a single AI procedure can exceed $15,000, and with multiple attempts, the total costs can easily reach over $130,000 per elephant.
Chai, an Asian elephant who died at the Oklahoma City Zoo in 2016, was subjected to more than 100 of these procedures during her lifetime. Her story is one of many that underscore a deeply disturbing truth: these programs disregard the autonomy and well-being of the elephants in their custody, submitting them to a relentless cycle of trauma—all in the name of the greater good of their species.
Despite such extreme measures, the results are grim. The first-year mortality rate of captive-born elephants in North America and the EU is around 30%—double that of wild African elephants in places like Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, where the rate is closer to 10–15%. Higher first-year mortality rates for captive-born elephants is likely higher due to factors like disease, reproductive management practices, and the stress of captivity.
The cost of captive breeding
Captive elephant breeding isn’t just exploitative—it’s costly and inefficient. In 2024, AZA-accredited zoos collectively spent just $350 million on all wildlife conservation efforts. That may sound like a lot until you compare it to how zoos spend elsewhere. For example, Brookfield Zoo, outside of Chicago, is spending $500 million on a single zoo remodel—part of which includes bringing back elephants for a new exhibit. Meanwhile, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) protects over 36,000 wild elephants across a vast landscape on an annual budget of about $140 million.
For scale: AZA zoos house roughly 307 elephants total. The Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) estimates the annual cost of caring for one elephant at $75,000–$100,000. It doesn’t take a degree in economics to see how zoo budgets could be better spent. For a fraction of what it costs to breed and maintain a handful of elephants in captivity, we could protect entire wild herds and their habitats.
Wild capture isn’t “sustainable”
Wild elephant populations have been declining for decades, and still—to fill the gaps that captive breeding fails to close—zoos continue to capture elephants from the wild in order to populate their exhibits. NhRP clients, Amahle and Nolwazi, were both wild elephants who were forcibly removed from their natural environment in 2016. They were two of 17 wild elephants—between the ages of six and 25—who were captured in Eswatini and sent to a zoo in the US. This action was cloaked under the guise of “conservation” as zoo officials described the import as an attempt to rescue them from drought. Of course, the international community, along with top scientists and elephant experts, fiercely objected to and condemned the zoo’s actions.
This isn’t the behavior of an institution that cares about sustainability. This isn’t conservation. It’s exploitation.
Misinformation marketing
Zoos defend elephant captivity and breeding programs as educational, but what kind of message are they really sending? Elephants in captivity are denied space, social complexity, and autonomy. Captive elephant populations are not self‑sustaining. Captive elephants are more likely to die young, experience chronic foot disease, musculoskeletal problems from inactivity, and stress-related illnesses. They exhibit signs of chronic distress—swaying, rocking, aggression—classic symptoms of psychological breakdown. The public may leave with warm feelings after seeing a baby elephant, but they walk away with a warped understanding of who elephants truly are and what they need to thrive.
Seeing an elephant in a small enclosure doesn’t teach people about the richness of elephant societies, their deep familial bonds, or the ecological role they play in the wild. It normalizes and perpetuates injustice.
Real conservation is possible
There are ways to support the protection and preservation of wild elephants that don’t require stripping them of their natural environment or inherent right to liberty. A few examples of what real conservation work looks like are:
- Anti-poaching operations
- Habitat protection and restoration
- Community-led initiatives in elephant home ranges
- Rewilding and open-range sanctuaries that prioritize the elephant’s well-being over profit or spectacle
These approaches address the root causes of elephant population decline, such as human encroachment, habitat loss, and illegal trade. None of these methods require stripping elephants of their autonomy, subjecting them to invasive breeding procedures, and holding them captive in unnatural environments, thousands of miles from their natural habitat.
The forced breeding of elephants in captivity is, at best, a distraction—a costly, unethical, and ineffective detour from the work elephants actually need us to do.
If zoos truly cared about elephant survival, they’d stop pouring millions into exhibits and artificial breeding programs and start funding the people and places doing the real work—on the ground, where it matters most.