Two Elephants Must Relocate, Seek Good Home

The elephant Nicholas deserves much better. In the tangled tale of his unhappy limbo, that may be the only thing that everyone can agree on.

A rambunctious adolescent, Nicholas is an endangered Asian elephant who lives in a largely empty barn just north of Chicago. The barn's owner, who rents out circus animals, was ordered by the Agriculture Department to give away his 16 elephants in early 2004 because of a long list of violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act. Given the popularity and value of elephants, finding potential recipients would hardly seem to be a difficult task.

But nothing is simple in the troubled and contentious world of North America's elephants today, now that a growing and vocal group of advocates and some zoo directors think the social and intelligent animals are often harmed by captivity. The fact that these particular elephants had been exposed to tuberculosis, and so had to be held in quarantine, made any transfers especially difficult.

Nonetheless, after long and acrimonious negotiations, homes were found for almost all of Nic's former barn mates. Most went to the Elephant Sanctuary in rural Tennessee, where they roam relatively free in a large, nonprofit reserve created 10 years ago as an alternative to the cramped quarters and chain restraints of circuses and zoos.

But Nic and one female, Gypsy, were left behind because nobody would or could take a hard-to-control, and perhaps diseased, male; Gypsy remained as a companion. By all accounts, the prospects for finding a home now are bad and getting worse.

"The prognosis is pretty bleak," said Derek Shaffer, attorney for John F. Cuneo Jr. and his circus animal company, the Hawthorn Corp. "These elephants have become very high-profile -- and stigmatized -- in the elephant community. I'm afraid that momentum has turned against them because they've become lightning rods in the whole debate about captive elephants."

Elephant advocates see the situation differently. The problem, they say, is that Hawthorn's owner remains bitter about having his circus elephants confiscated and won't accept any financial responsibility for having them moved and housed elsewhere.

Since it was the USDA that brought charges against the company and set restrictions on how the animal can be housed -- saying, for instance, that they had to be kept away from the public -- the advocates say the agency should require Hawthorn to contribute to their future upkeep. But the USDA does not have that authority, and Cuneo has not been willing to act voluntarily.

Carol Buckley, founder and director of the Elephant Sanctuary, said she spent months negotiating with Cuneo for the Hawthorn females, despite her eagerness to take them all. She ultimately had to raise several million dollars to build a new enclosure for the 11 female elephants her organization did receive -- a time-consuming process that tried the patience of the USDA and almost resulted in the elephants going elsewhere.

Despite this history, Hawthorn would still like the sanctuary to take Nic as well. Buckley, however, has refused. Accepting a largely unsocialized and potentially aggressive male such as Nic would overturn the female-only policy of the sanctuary and would be quite expensive. Hawthorn's reluctance to contribute financially to the animal's upkeep, she said, has kept other sanctuaries from coming forward and rescuing Nic.

"I just can't believe that the USDA is so powerless that it hasn't placed all the animals so many years after finding they were being mistreated," she said. "We have a consent decree that Cuneo signed saying he will give the animals up."

One of the many ironies of Nic's predicament is that the elephant, who Shaffer said is about 18 years old, has unique and highly desirable genes. The only offspring of two elephants taken from the wild, he could add valuable diversity to the limited gene pool of what is called North America's elephant "herd" of 500 to 600 animals.

About half of those elephants are in zoos and, not surprisingly, the USDA initially turned to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums to place Nic and the other Hawthorn elephants. But according to Mike Keele of the Oregon Zoo in Portland, who is head of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums elephant "species survival" program, no member organization has the space and funds to take in a breeding male, and especially one that might have been exposed to tuberculosis.

"Nic is definitely not off our radar screen, but right now none of our members has the need and extra capacity for a breeding male," Keele said. "This is not an excuse, but we just don't have anyone set to deal with him."

Officials of USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service say that they continue to work on finding a home for Nic and Gypsy and that in the meantime they regularly inspect the Hawthorn barn. Nobody is happy with the situation, however, especially not Hawthorn, which pays as much as $100,000 a year in upkeep. (It also paid a $200,000 fine to the USDA.)

Given the bleak prospects, Shaffer said that the company has even approached potential recipients in Egypt, Brazil and Mexico. USDA spokesman Darby Holladay said the agency would allow a foreign placement if the facility meets U.S. animal welfare standards.

Hawthorn prefers a domestic placement, even a temporary one, but "what we have now is not a framework that can continue indefinitely," Shaffer said. "But the fact is that there is no clear solution in sight."