When I was a kid, people used to ask me if Bob was my uncle. In high school, in the middle of intense conversations, friends would turn to me and ask what I thought were the truth or consequences of the situation. My friends thought it was funny that I shared my last name with a game show host. Commiserating with my cousin, who grew up in a different town, I learned that his friends told the same stupid jokes. Low hanging fruit, I guess.
Through most of my life, Bob Barker stuck to California, and I stuck to Toronto, and the two of us were happy. As his TV career faded away, the “Bob’s your uncle” jokes faded away, too. But then, in 2011, he showed up in Toronto as the lynch pin of a campaign to move three elephants from the Toronto Zoo to a wildlife refuge in California. All of a sudden, acquaintances started asking me again if Bob was my uncle. Only now, they included their opinions of the retired game show host turned animal rights activist: why can’t you tell him to mind his own business?
I have ambivalent feelings about the decision to haul the elephants by truck across the continent. Yes, the facilities in Toronto were inadequate. It puzzled me that although the Toronto Zoo is on a huge property, they allocated only two acres to an elephant paddock. On the other hand, a wildlife refuge in California isn’t much of a step up. While it protects three elephants from poaching and gives them a little more room to move, it still keeps them in captivity. There really is no good solution to the problem of managing an endangered species except for humans to stop doing the things that endanger it. It seems disingenuous to offer anything as a solution to a problem we caused in the first place.
The elephants departed in October, 2013. Three months earlier I visited the Toronto Zoo to photograph them in Toronto for the last time. As I view it, the greater concern is that, one day, photographs (and skeletons) may be the only evidence we have that we once shared our planet with elephants. A recent census indicates that there are less than 500,000 elephants left on the planet. While we have had some success against poaching, the chief threat against elephants is habitat loss caused by the encroachment of growing human populations. Moving a handful of elephants by truck isn’t going to do much about that.
