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.
ao assinar, você aceita o termos de serviço da Care2 Você pode gerenciar suas assinaturas de e-mail a qualquer momento.
Está tendo algum problema?? Avise-nos.