Don't ask Lowry Park Zoo spokeswoman Heather Sitton what it costs to "buy" an elephant. What she'll tell you is that Lowry Park Zoo is not in the business of buying elephants. They "rescue" them. Within the last year, she says, the zoo rescued four elephants that were slated for destruction at a game reserve in Swaziland.
One expects a certain amount of publicist-speak from any institutional mouthpiece-type personage, so I, intrepid news beast that I am, pressed on.
OK, so what's it cost to rescue an elephant?
Wrong question. The problem was with the word "cost." Ms. Sitton told me that she wasn't really the person to ask about the "cost" of an animal, since (she reminded me) Lowry Park Zoo wasn't in the business of buying animals, and that Lowry had only gotten the elephants in question after making a "pledge" to the game reserve, called Big Game Park, in Swaziland. And, she was eager to add, the pledge proceeds were earmarked for anti-poaching and elephant conservation programs in Swaziland.
So how much was the pledge?
$48,000, Ms. Sitton told me. But I wasn't to suppose that I could get a price tag for an elephant by simply dividing the total pledge ($48,000) by the number of elephants Lowry Park got (four), because that would imply a sale price, and it had been a pledge, and if the zoo hadn't paid the pledge the elephants would have been killed.
If I wanted to know what an elephant costs, she said, I might want to call a circus. Lowry Park Zoo, she added, is managed by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association.
Is it my imagination, or was the spectre of PETA hovering over this discussion?
—David Bramer
This article appears in Nov 10-16, 2004.