By Alyne Fortgang, co-founder of Friends of Woodland Park Zoo Elephants

Woodland Park Zoo announced it will be closing the Night House exhibit in order to save money. It is reported that the zoo is cutting $700,000 dollars, including 12 full-time jobs, from its $29 million budget.

The most expensive animals to keep on display at a zoo are elephants – close to $400,000.00 a year for the three elephants housed at Woodland Park Zoo.

In addition to being expensive, the postage stamp-sized exhibit is woefully inadequate for the planet’s largest land mammal.

For about seven months of the year, the elephants are locked in a barren barn stall for 16 to 17 hours a day due to climate.

Outdoors, they share less than one acre of yard. Science has conclusively shown that deprivation of space and social contact causes mental and physical suffering in elephants, resulting in their lifespan being shortened by decades.

Woodland Park Zoo and the citizens of Seattle have the opportunity to send our three elephants to the 2,700-acre Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee’s sub-tropical climate.

There they would join 15 other elephants and roam hills, forests and meadows and swim in a 25-acre lake. In other words, act like elephants and heal from the traumas of captivity.

The Elephant Sanctuary has offered to give Chai, Watoto and Bamboo a home for life at no expense to Seattle taxpayers or Woodland Park Zoo.

The change needed to sustain the zoo financially and ethically is to make the unselfish and humane decision to let Chai, Watoto and Bamboo go.