Elephants are loved and respected worldwide for their size, intelligence, and deep social ties. These qualities make them a compelling draw for zoos, yet they also complicate the keeping of elephants and pose major hurdles for welfare-conscious captive facilities. While many zoo-accrediting organizations establish care standards for elephants, it’s unclear whether these standards are enough to give captive elephants an overall positive quality of life.

To address these questions, the authors reviewed 217 sources, most of which were peer-reviewed studies from the past 10 years, to examine the current state of captive elephant welfare. Although elephants are kept in various forms of captivity, including circuses, temples, and work camps, the authors focused primarily on accredited Western zoos, as these tend to follow more rigorous welfare standards.

The Current State Of Captive Elephant Welfare

While much progress has been made from the facilities of the past, the current state of elephant welfare still leaves much to be desired. Captive elephants tend to have shorter lifespans and higher mortality rates than wild elephants, and the authors found evidence of widespread physical and mental health issues. Common ailments include:

• Stereotypies: These are repetitive movements in captive animals that often indicate stress, boredom, frustration, and a general lack of stimulation. For elephants, examples include pacing, trunk sucking, and bar biting. The authors found that stereotypies are observed in 47 to 85% of zoo elephants, and that these behaviors’ frequency is second only to feeding.
• Obesity: Lack of exercise and inadequate diet both contribute to high rates of obesity in captive elephants, with almost 75% of elephants at accredited North American zoos being overweight or obese.
• Foot problems: Studies in North America and the U.K. have found that between 66 and 85% of captive elephants suffer from foot issues such as cracked nails and infections. Lack of roaming space and hard enclosure substrates are contributing factors.
• Dental issues: Around 31% of elephants in North American zoos have tusk injuries. The presence of hard materials, like concrete and metal, make these injuries more common in captive elephants, while inadequate diet can lead to tooth pain and oral infection.

These are just some of the many ailments frequently documented in captive elephants. To investigate these issues, the authors examined studies about captive and wild elephants to reveal the differences between zoo enclosures and elephants’ natural surroundings. They found that extensive space, enrichment, and social groups are critical for elephant welfare yet extremely difficult to provide with the inherent limitations of the zoo environment.

Physical Space

Given their resource constraints, one of the greatest challenges for elephant-keeping facilities is providing adequate space for the world’s largest land animal. Space is crucial for allowing elephants to act out their natural behaviors and for encouraging them to exercise. Elephants in the wild have territories of up to 10,000 square kilometers, and they commonly walk up to 50 kilometers per day. Even the best zoos barely approach the minimum range size of wild elephants, with enclosure sizes at accredited zoos as low as 17 square meters per elephant.

This severely reduced range makes it less likely that elephants get an adequate amount of daily exercise. While strategic feeder placement and varied areas of interest can encourage walking, the authors found that most elephants in captivity walk far less than their wild counterparts, putting them at greater risk for obesity.

Complex Enrichment

The physical area of an enclosure is only part of the picture. Some research suggests that space complexity may be even more important for elephant welfare. Elephants are highly intelligent and require mental stimulation for optimal well-being. In the wild, they experience a diverse range of stimuli as they travel through their territories.

Most accrediting organizations acknowledge elephants’ need for enrichment and require that enclosures include features like pools and scratching posts. While these features are an important step in the right direction, captive elephants rarely experience anything near the full range of stimulation that they would achieve in the wild.

One key reason is feeding. Wild elephants spend most of their time searching for food, and their diets consist of an incredibly diverse assortment of vegetation. Feeding in the wild mixes problem-solving, social bonding, sensory engagement, and physical activity, making it a multidimensional and central behavior to elephants’ lives.

In contrast, captive elephants typically consume a relatively homogenous, high-calorie diet from a handful of feeders around their enclosure. These diets contribute to high rates of obesity and other health issues, but they also prevent elephants from engaging in one of their most important behaviors to the fullest extent, contributing to a more static daily experience for these animals.

While the authors found that enrichment activities such as toys, puzzle feeders, and problem-solving tasks could help in some circumstances, they noted that these interventions were time consuming and expensive, so zoos generally didn’t use them enough to make up for the captive environment’s deficits.

Social Interaction

Providing the right enclosure size and complexity is already difficult, but fulfilling elephants’ social needs is perhaps the greatest challenge for zoos. Wild female elephants form complex and extremely strong family bonds, while males separate and find new herds. Thus, both sexes have important social needs that are difficult to maintain in captivity.

Captive elephant herds are often composed of unrelated elephants, and relocations due to zoos’ breeding programs or logistical needs can further disrupt this fragile social structure. Male elephants in particular pose challenges like higher aggression levels and a greater need to roam.

For optimal captive well-being, the authors found that groups with higher numbers of related individuals and calves tended to show greater social connectedness and less aggression. The authors also suggest that young male elephants may benefit from the presence of mature males, so that they may learn appropriate behaviors and thus have better social ties with the whole herd. Despite this observed importance of large and multigenerational family groups, the resources and strategies required to maintain these groups is more than what most zoos are equipped to handle.

Limitations

While the conclusions may seem clear, the authors stress that more data is needed to provide a more complex picture of elephant welfare. They note that many of the studies they evaluated are older or limited by small sample sizes, and they encourage further research on the topics they covered as well as the question of how elephants fare in other captive settings, like sanctuaries.

A New Era For Elephants

Given elephants’ physical, social, and environmental needs, providing the level of care needed for positive well-being is extremely difficult, if not impossible. In fact, the overall number of U.S. zoos with captive elephants has declined over time, likely due to the challenges involved with keeping these animals. Some countries, like the U.K. and Canada, have even begun to consider banning elephants kept in captivity for zoos or entertainment purposes.

For elephants who can’t be released into the wild, welfare-focused spaces like sanctuaries and conservation centers may provide spaces that better suit elephants’ natural needs. The authors call for more research to examine how welfare indicators in these spaces compare to welfare in zoos. However, the studies evaluated in this paper pose a compelling argument for phasing elephants out of captivity where possible.