The dataset is the achievement here: more than 3,000 African and Asian elephants, across over 1,400 institutions in more than 100 countries, with records running from 1960 to 2024 [1].
Across that span, female elephant life expectancy in zoos rose by as much as 21 percent and male by as much as 44 [1]. Among African elephants, infant survival improved 6 percent for females and 7 for males; juvenile survival 7 and 8 percent [1].
The comparison the authors draw is the one that matters. 'In the most recent period,' they write, 'the survival of zoo elephants was comparable to, or higher than, that of the wild African elephant populations studied in Amboseli and Samburu in Kenya and the semi-wild Asian elephants working in Myanmar's timber industry' [1].
The work was published in Scientific Reports, led by the Zoological Society of London with Species360, the University of Southern Denmark and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology [1].
Sixty-four years of records is long enough to show a practice changing. Whatever zoos were doing to elephants in 1960, they are measurably doing something different now.
