Will there come a time when elephants are no longer hunted by poachers, when they are no longer locked up in zoos? They have a very hard life in captivity.
Elephants don’t ‘socialise’ with other elephants. They spend their time in confined spaces, they don’t eat leaves and they don’t bathe in lakes.
The animal may be housed with another elephant, but eventually one of the pair will die or end up in another zoo. There are also some elephants that spend a very long time alone.
Recently, an elephant called Flavia died in a Spanish zoo. She had lived in captivity for 47 years, 43 of them alone. Flavia suffered from depression.
An Indian elephant was separated from her parents when she was three years old.
Since then, she has lived all alone in a Spanish zoo and has had no contact with other members of her species.
Pictures and videos of Flavia wandering around her enclosure with her head on the ground, like a human, have been widely circulated on the internet.
Animal welfare groups have made several attempts to relocate Flavia to live with other elephants, but have not been successful in time.
Recently, a photo of Flavia went viral. The picture was shared by a user who goes by the nickname Soumya Vidyadhar.
It shows the touching farewell of the elephants before they are sent to different zoos and said goodbye forever.
Elephants are on the brink of extinction. On the Dark Continent, an elephant dies every 15 minutes at the hands of poachers.
If the extinction of the largest land animal continues at the current rate, there will be no elephants left on the African savannahs by 2025.
Tanzania, for example, has already lost half of its elephants in the last three years. In 2009, the African country was home to an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 elephants; now it has half that number.
We hope that people will come to their senses and stop destroying elephants! What do you think about the problem?
