Emily, a 62-year-old Asian elephant, has endured decades of confinement, deprivation, loneliness, and trauma. For the nearly 60 years since her capture from the wild, she has been held in a tiny enclosure that comprises less than an acre at the city-owned Buttonwood Park Zoo in New Bedford, Massachusetts.  As the zoo's sole remaining elephant, she will continue to languish in her bleak man-made exhibit unless she is transferred to an accredited elephant sanctuary—the closest possible alternative to freedom and the only environment capable of providing her the chance to live as an emancipated  elephant since her capture 58 years ago. 

Born in India, Emily was captured in the wild as a calf when she was just four years old, taken from her family and natural home, and eventually ended up in Buttonwood in 1968. She has remained confined there ever since, save for a two-year stint in the Baton Rouge Zoo in Louisiana, where she was sent in 1983 while her barn was being rebuilt because it was found to be in violation of Department of Agriculture regulations governing the minimum standards of care required in the keeping of captive wildlife. 

In the wild, female elephants live together in their familial herds their entire lives. Raised by their mothers, aunts, and the herds’ matriarchs in a social structure passed down from generation to generation, young elephants are taught age-old wisdoms that have defined elephant behavior and have preserved and underpinned their unbreakable family bonds for millennia. 

Elephants are enormously intelligent and sentient beings who form deep emotional attachments within their communities. Emily was denied those connections so vital to an elephant’s social and emotional wellbeing when she was ripped from her herd as a baby. It has been shown that such deprivation can cause severe psychological and physical distress and create difficulties in forming new healthy relationships with other captive elephants. 

Emily’s two-year captivity in Baton Rouge, from 1983-85, was marked by pain and rejection: she was introduced into an already-established group of elephants which did not accept her, and she was attacked several times by at least one of the elephants. This trauma, along with the mental and physical anguish she experienced when she was forcibly captured as a baby, left deep, abiding scars. Deprived of all natural social bonds and the freedom of autonomy, captive Emily suffers as humans do when incarcerated.

Wild elephants in their native lands travel vast distances every day foraging for food and in search of water. The environment provided Emily in Buttonwood cannot begin to adequately meet the needs of any elephant. Emily's habitat in the small urban zoo (one of the oldest in the US) is not only tiny: it never changes or offers new experiences.  Her enclosure’s limited space does not allow room for the exercise needed to maintain an elephant’s physical and emotional health, and it provides no opportunities for enrichment that elephants require for mental and physical wellbeing. 

Always on view as a curiosity, Emily cannot escape from the relentless sounds (often shouts) of zoo visitors. Brutally cold and require that Emily spend long, boring days, if not weeks, inside her barn, exacerbating physical and mental deterioration. Her life is a "Groundhog Day" of tedium and melancholy.

The zoo maintains that Emily is a loner, preferring human handlers to the company of other elephants, but she has never been offered the chance to make connections freely, on her own terms. She is dependent on her handlers and demonstrates affection towards them because they provide for all her physical needs, offering her the treats she enjoys and a form of companionship forged out of necessity, not out of choice.  We have the chance to give her choice--in all her daily decisions, whatever they may be.

There is still time for Emily to be transferred to an accredited elephant sanctuary offering once-captive elephants expansive, natural environments that most closely replicate their homelands, provide specialized care tailored to their needs, and offer them the autonomy to make all the daily decisions about their lives that they have never enjoyed in captivity. Relocating Emily to such a sanctuary will ensure that she receives the social and environmental enrichment she desperately needs. And she will be able to make her own decisions about her daily life, roam and forage naturally, and choose to make new bonds with other sanctuary elephants, or not if that is her choice. 

Ask the management at the Buttonwood Park Zoo and the city of New Bedford to make this ethical and humane decision for Emily and give her the retirement she so richly deserves. Add your name to this petition and urge Mayor Jonathan Mitchell and City Council President Ryan Pereira to send Emily to an accredited elephant sanctuary—before it is too late!

Emily is in remarkably good health. But, as long as she continues to merely exist, confined and displayed as a spectacle and entertainment for humans under the guise of conservation and education and held in an environment that is inherently unjust and inhumane, her life will continue to be defined by deprivation, loss, and loneliness. 

It is crucial to act now to provide Emily with the life and the company of other elephants she deserves and has more than earned before it becomes too late to reverse--or a least mitigate-- the negative impacts of prolonged isolation and years of captive living. This is not just beneficial but essential for Emily's long-term health and happiness. If she remains alone at Buttonwood, she will never again hear the voice of another elephant or feel the comfort of the herd that she has been so long denied.

Please speak up for Emily's wellbeing by signing this petition to send her to an accredited elephant sanctuary. Your signature can make a significant difference in Emily's life and set a precedent for the ethical treatment of elephants everywhere. Let us make compassionate choices and create a better world for Emily and other elephants like her. Sign now to support this vital cause.