New York Times & Other Jenny Media. Cross Post Widely

[Guest guest]

Concerned Citizens for Jenny is building a case with City Hall for retiring Jenny to The Elephant Sanctuary (TES) and slowly winning over City Council one member at a time by presenting irrefutable truth. This is an agonizingly laborious and time-consuming process.

At present, three things are keeping the Dallas Zoo from shipping Jenny post haste to Mexico: 1. The summer heat 2. Jenny supporters attending City Council meetings 3. Your telephone calls and emails to the Mayor and City Council Please attend City Council each Wednesday and repeatedly call and write the Dallas mayor and city council urging that Jenny be retired to TES in TN. For contact information, go to: www.concernedcitizensforjenny.netMany thanks to all who have attended City Council so far and telephoned and written the Mayor and City Council. Thanks also to friend to animals (and to us) Lily Tomlin for helping Concerned Citizens for Jenny to keep our dear Jenny in the news.Speaking of news, scroll down to read

shocking insights into Jenny's life as published in the New York Times, the most widely read newspaper in the USA. Thanks very much.Margaret MorinFounder, Concerned Citizens for JennyA few of this week's vast number of media stories on Jenny follow:Channel 33 from 8/13/08 "Mexicans Urge Jenny to Keep Jenny" (to view this video, click on More for drop down menu and select Local News Archive)This story shows a little bit of what really happened at City Council yesterday. If you missed it, tt was an amazing experience. Please attend future City Council meetings with Concerned

Citizens for Jenny and see what Dallas City Government is really like. http://cw33.trb.com/news/Channel 5 from August 13: Note that the media has picked up Concerned Citizens for Jenny's slogan "SAVE JENNY" as the headline for reporting Jenny's story.http://video.nbc5i.com/player/?id=285222wOwOwow Blog from August 13 "Lily Tomlin to the Rescue of a Special-Needs Elephant"http://www.wowowow.com/post/lily-tomlin-jenny-elephant-79334New York Times from August 14 (Section A) See yellow highlighted text (below) that explains why Jenny has such extreme emotional problems, including crippling bouts of depression and self-mutilation. Jenny has been much abused by the hand of man. She desperately needs rehabilitative healing at TES. We must not let her down. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/us/15elephant.html?ref=todayspaperWhat to Do With Traumatized Elephant

Stirs Up Dallas

 

 

 

 

Donna McWilliam/Associated Press

 

Jenny, a troubled elephant at the Dallas Zoo, being cooled by Reanna

Streater and fed treats by Gavin Eastep. The zoo wants to send her to

Mexico.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By JAMES C. McKINLEY JR

Published: August 14, 2008

DALLAS — Jenny has had a hard life, even

by elephant standards. She was orphaned at a tender age, stolen from

Africa, shipped to America and sold to a circus, where a trainer

notorious for his cruelty beat her to coerce her to perform.

Skip to next paragraph

 

Enlarge This Image

 

 

 

Angela Hunt

 

A protest group in Dallas wants to send Jenny to a sanctuary in Tennessee rather than to a wildlife park in Puebla, Mexico.

 

 

Enlarge This Image

 

 

 

Angela Hunt

 

The Africam Safari Park in Puebla plans a new enclosure of five acres for Jenny, but now has about an acre for Asian elephants.

 

 

 

When the Dallas Zoo took her

in 22 years ago, she was a mess. For years, she suffered from

depression and something like post-traumatic stress disorder,

mutilating herself with her tusks, snapping steel cables, slamming her

head into walls and requiring heavy medication. Now, Jenny has

become the focus of a boisterous debate about what to do with an aging

elephant with a troubled mind. In May, after her latest companion died

of heart failure, the zoo quietly made arrangements to send her to the

Africam Safari Park in Puebla, Mexico, where she would be placed in a

new five-acre exhibit with another female elephant. But that

decision sparked a firestorm in Dallas. Local protesters,

world-renowned elephant experts and national animal rights groups are

crusading to have her sent to a 2,700-acre sanctuary in Tennessee where

17 other traumatized elephants are kept in seclusion.“Jenny is a

special-needs elephant,” said Margaret Morin, a Dallas nurse who leads

Concerned Citizens for Jenny. “She’s unique; she’s afflicted with

crippling depression. The elephant sanctuary is the right choice.”Beyond

the debate about what to do with Jenny lies a national struggle between

zoos and animal rights groups who, frankly, would rather see a world

without elephant exhibits. The fight pits a loose coalition of elephant

experts and animal rights advocates against the Association of Zoos and

Aquariums, a powerful private group based in Maryland that accredits

zoos in North America. Animal rights advocates have long argued

that elephants in most zoos lack enough space and, as a consequence,

suffer from foot ailments, arthritis and psychological problems. For

its part, the zoo association has clung to its traditions, saying the

size of an enclosure matters less than the care elephants receive from

zookeepers. It has also tried to keep the 300 elephants in its network

of more than 78 zoos from being sent to sanctuaries, where the zoos

could no longer use them for breeding.All of a sudden, Jenny is at the center of this conflict.The

citizens’ group that Ms. Morin leads was formed this summer to hold

protests in Dallas against sending Jenny to Mexico. Elephant experts

across the country and national animal rights groups have also weighed

in, urging that she be sent to the sanctuary. The City Council and The

Dallas Morning News have been inundated with letters.The uproar

has put the Dallas Zoo on the defensive. The director, Gregg Hudson,

had said in June that sending Jenny to Mexico was a done deal, but now

zoo officials are backpedaling. Mayor Thomas C. Leppert, who

could cancel the plan, has artfully ridden the fence. “There is really

not a position to take yet,” Mr. Leppert said.But a spokesman

for the zoo, Sean Greene, said Africam Safari Park remained the zoo

director’s top choice. Founded in 1972, the Mexican animal park uses

the same hands-off, gentle handling techniques that the Dallas Zoo

adopted in 1996, after one of Jenny’s worst periods. Indeed, keepers

from Dallas helped train the Africam staff several years ago. The Mexican zoo also plans to acquire another African elephant, to live with Jenny, as well as a bull elephant in the future. But

some Dallas residents say the zoo’s arguments do not hold up. The

Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tenn., has 300 acres just for African

elephants, and Jenny, who is 32, would be the fourth to arrive, said

the founder, Carol Buckley. No one except the staff visits the animals,

who range freely. “Why would we want her last years to be in a

drive-through zoo in Mexico when she could have 300 acres in the lush

Tennessee countryside?” said Councilwoman Angela Hunt, who has visited

both destinations. Experts in the field say zoo directors are

cliquish and tend to move animals to other zoos in their association

rather than considering the benefits of a sanctuary, which many zoo

officials see as part of an anti-zoo movement. The association can also

make or break a zoo director’s career“If we stripped everything

away and say what is in the best interest of Jenny, the sanctuary would

win hands down,” said Les Schobert, a retired curator of animals at the

Los Angeles Zoo. “But then you have to add in all the politics.”Amy

Camacho, general director of Africam, said the transfer seemed to make

sense. Her park, which was recently accredited, was seeking African

elephants to strengthen its collection, and the Dallas Zoo had a

troubled elephant. Mike Keele, a curator at the Oregon Zoo who

is also chairman of the zoo association’s elephant “species survival

program,” signed off on the deal. “I like keeping these elephants

within the A.Z.A. where they meet our standards,” Mr. Keele said.

“Space is just a catchphrase. It’s what you do with that space.”Nonsense, say animal rights advocates. No zoo or drive-through safari park can match the peace of the Tennessee countryside. On

a recent sunny afternoon, Jenny stripped branches tossed to her by one

of her keepers, Gavin Eastep, who said that Jenny’s mental health had

improved in recent years.“Most of the time she’s pretty calm, pretty relaxed,” Mr. Eastep said. On

a bench facing the steel-cable enclosure, David and Heidi McGuire sat

with their two children and marveled at Jenny’s size and the graceful

swing of her slow gate. “I would rather her stay in the United States,”

Heidi McGuire said. “You just never know what’s going to happen to them

down in Mexico.” Mr. McGuire, a grocer, said, “I hope they are going to get someone to replace her.”