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A moving article on the relocation of Mara from Buenos Aires to Brazil, amid the pandemics.
She found in Rana, another Asian elephant at the sanctuary, a soul mate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0…ephants-wildlife-zoo.html
Videos of Mara and Rana First encounter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n65db-ARwe0
Opening the Gate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puMh-D0bkXs
This is THE BEST article, amid 6 months of downers.
I loved this :
“And so Mara, after a long and complicated life, found herself in a box, in a pandemic, waiting at the closed border between nations. Only four of the humans were allowed to cross with her and make the final journey to the sanctuary. But once the smaller party was safely through the border, Mr. Sciolla began to feel some relief from, as he put it, “all the pressures you feel when you’re thousands of kilometers from home with an elephant.”
I'd rather see animals in a sanctuary than a zoo, I just don't like the idea of wild animals of being caged up
This article made me shed a few tears. She spent half her life caged. There are a several zoos in Argentina. The Palermo zoo was converted into an Ecoparque but it looks like most of the animals are still there. The zoo in La Plata was quite big, but animals were neglected and it has been closed for a few years now. However, 'closed' means closed to the public: the animals are still there and still in poor conditions.
Last time I was in La Plata, about 1 year ago, there were many graffiti from animals activists denouncing the animals deplorable status. It was really saddening.
serafina , I was really surprised to read that Mara had only now been relocated. We’ve been to the former zoo, now ecoparque, in Palermo a couple of times in the past year, and we never saw any animals besides the free-roaming Patagonian mara (everywhere), geese, peacocks and a couple of capybaras. The elephant house looked deserted.
How did they hide the elephants?
Maybe the part of the zoo with caged animals was not accessible to the public? I don't think there was another place where to keep Mara. It is very stressful to move for animals, especially for caged ones, so if the plan was to relocate Mara, she would have gone from her former location to the her destination directly.
You are right: what I wasn’t thinking about was that large areas of the park were roped off for construction (and, probably, to separate the public from the remaining caged animals).
