No to bullhooks/ankus

There is a better way to move a elephant than using a ankus. Please teach your keepers about protected contact.
 PROTECTED CONTACT - BEYOND THE BARRIER 

Gail Laule and Margaret Whittaker 

Active Environments Inc. 

At the 1991 AZA Annual Conference in San Diego, John Lehnhardt reported some 

sobering statistics on the risks of working with elephants. Between 1976 and 1991, fifteen 

people died in elephant-related incidences in North America. Six of those deaths occurred 

in the 2 ½ years between 1989 and 91. An elephant handler was 3 times more likely to die 

on the job than someone in the next most dangerous occupation, coal mining. If you didn't 

like those kind of odds, you could reduce your risk by joining the police force or fire 

department. In that same paper, John identified 3 elephant management options available 

to zoos: free contact, confined contact, and no contact. At the time, only 6 zoos had 

functioning restraint devices, and no contact was considered impractical, which left free 

contact as the only viable option for the vast majority of zoos. However, all the deaths had 

occurred in a free contact setting, which created a dilemma for zoos looking to reduce the 

risk of captive elephant management. Coincidentally, at the same conference, on the 

same day, Active Environments presented a paper on the results of a 2 year project 

funded by the San Diego Zoological Society to develop an alternate system for elephant 

management (Desmond, Laule, 1991). It was a project that began with a concept 

document written in 1989 by Tim Desmond describing a new form of elephant 

management that he had named protected contact. 

Between that AZA conference in September 1991 and September 2000, protected contact 

has grown into an internationally recognized system for elephant management. It is now 

being used by nearly half the zoos in AZA and is appearing in programs outside the US in 

growing numbers. It is taught in the AZA Principles of Elephant Management course, and 

is discussed and debated in a variety of forums including conferences, papers, listserves, 

newspaper articles, and television spots. Despite its acceptance and integration into 

modern elephant management, PC still manages to generate controversy, albeit a milder 

form than 9 years ago. 

The purpose of this paper is to provide an updated perspective on the current state of 

protected contact, nine years after introducing it to AZA. As a starting point, we would like 

to take a closer look at the current AZA definition of PC- "Handling of an elephant when 

the keeper and the elephant do not share the same unrestricted space. Typically, in this 

system, the keeper has contact with the elephant through a protective barrier of some 

type, while the elephant is not spatially confined and may leave the work area at will". This 

is contrasted with the definition of free contact where the keeper and elephant do share 

the same unrestricted space, and confined contact where the elephant is spatially confined 

and handled through a protective barrier. The two primary elements in all these definitions 

are the physical location of elephant and keeper, and the presence or absence of a 

physical barrier. There is no reference to the tools, techniques, or human/animal social 

dynamics that distinguish one form of management from the other.