Dear John,
As we approach the end of 2025, I’ve been reflecting on the work we’ve done to expose the physical and psychological harms of the captive breeding of elephants, and the growing momentum to end this cruel practice.
This year, we focused many of our online educational campaigns on the trauma inflicted on captive elephants who are forcibly bred in zoos across the US. Through Free to Be Elephants features, World Elephant Month, and our ongoing case for Angeline, Savanna, Tasha, Victoria, and Zuri’s freedom from the Pittsburgh Zoo, we showed—again and again—how captive breeding strips elephants of their autonomy, breaks apart families, and condemns new generations of elephants to lifelong confinement.
In our effort to raise awareness of the harms of captive breeding and how recognition of elephants’ right to liberty is the way to end these harms, we reached audiences at a scale we’ve never seen before. This included widespread local coverage of our case and campaign to free the Pittsburgh Zoo elephants, which heavily focused on the suffering captive breeding has caused them. Virtually every media outlet in Pittsburgh covered our filing, with two in-depth feature stories on the elephants’ plight on the horizon.
We’ve also seen widespread public outrage in response to the footage we shared online exposing the cruelty and injustice inflicted on our clients Zuri, Savanna, and Angeline during their birthing process at the zoo. In the footage, zoo handlers are seen using bullhooks on the mothers and pulling a newborn calf away from their mother by the tail. This content reached nearly two million people—that’s two million people who now have a better understanding of what captive breeding really means for these extraordinarily cognitively complex beings.
Through our action alert, over 5,000 people have urged the Association of Zoos and Aquariums to end its captive elephant breeding program. Will you join us in demanding change?
