Free Billy, the Elephant

Who is Billy?

Billy is a 27-year-old male Asian elephant. He arrived at the Los Angeles Zoo in 1989 as a young calf, caught in the wild and forcibly taken from his native home of Malaysia, as part of a trade between the L.A. Zoo and the Malaysian Game Department. Billy lives on approximately one-quarter acre at L.A. Zoo.

L.A. voters and the City Council approved a forty-two million dollar, 3.6 acre elephant exhibit at the L.A Zoo. In the wild, elephants can walk 30 miles in a day. There are roughly 640 acres in one mile.

Thirteen elephants have died in L.A. just since the 1970s.

As reported in the L.A. Times, Zoo officials say Billy will have “waterfalls, pools, mud wallows and various surfaces to tread, all of which would encourage natural behaviors and exercise.”

What if a complete stranger offered you a nice place to live and entertainment for your pleasures? Good, eh? The only exception is that you would never have the chance to interact with any other human being, family or friends; you’ll be solitary for the rest of your life and held captive as an exhibition? You’ll have to be ripped away from your family and accommodations and live your life as an attraction to others with only a place to live and your daily food in return.

While male elephants are often kept separate from other elephants in zoos, in the wild, males can display social connections, residing in bachelor herds or frequenting areas with female elephants, sometimes moving from family to family.

With no other elephants near him, Billy lives an unnatural, solitary life at the Zoo. For many years Billy has been displaying stereotypic behavior in the form of repetitive head bobbing that goes on for extended periods of time. Stereotypic behavior is often viewed as an indicator of poor welfare, caused by factors such as restriction of movement, size of enclosure, social isolation, and lack of complexity in the physical environment.

Billy has experienced all of these factors at the L.A. Zoo. In fact, Billy was routinely chained each night, likely from the time of his arrival at the L.A. Zoo in 1989 until 1994, for approximately 12 to 14 hours each night. It was during this period that a keeper reportedly physically abused Billy by using electric shock on him. Experts state that stereotypic behavior can lead to foot problems such as nail cracks (which Billy already has), and abscesses and abrasions to the sole of the foot. Foot-related problems are one of the leading causes of euthanasia in captive elephants in the United States.

In 2009, Cher, Bob Barker and Lily Tomlin were among the celebrities who turned up to a L.A. City Council meeting to urge council members to abort plans to complete an elephant habitat at the zoo, and to see that the zoo’s lone elephant, Billy, is transferred to an animal sanctuary.

They left the L.A City Council with no success.