The plight of baby elephants in Zimbabwe

The cruelty of the capture of baby elephants from their families in the wild has been revealed in disturbing photos and videos secretly taken in Zimbabwe last month, writes Adam Cruise. They show newly captured elephants being repeatedly kicked in the head.

Since 2012, over eighty elephants (including last month’s batch of fourteen) have been captured from Hwange, Zimbabwe’s largest National Park and sold by the Zimbabwean Government to Chinese zoos. The process is both cruel and violent.

For the capture, a family herd is selected and a helicopter sent in to dart the baby elephants with tranquilizers from the air. As the young elephants collapse, the helicopter dive-bombs the distressed mothers to keep them away while a ground-team with trucks, tractors and trailers rapidly moves  in to bundle the elephants into crates.

The young elephants, some yet to be weaned from their mothers, were then moved to holding pens at an off-limits facility within the park. Here, as the video and photographic evidence reveals, they spent a few confused months terrified, underfed, and abused.

From secret observations of the previous captures of live elephants, this latest batch, after a few months in the holding pens, will be transported in small crates by truck a 250 kilometers to Victoria Falls Airport. Here the elephants will be airlifted to China. Once there, they will be placed in quarantine before they are separated and shipped to zoos and safari parks across the country.

In 2012, three young elephants died after arriving in China, and one died in transit during the flight from Zimbabwe to China in 2016. The actual captures are particularly brutal. According to internal reports from ZimParks, there was at least one death during the capture operation in 2016 presumedly after being crushed by the stampeding herd, while three very young elephants were severely injured during the captures in 2014 – one with a broken leg, another with a damaged trunk and a third with a damaged trunk and tail.

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