Why Hogle Zoo, after 107 years, is bidding a fond (and reluctant) adieu to its elephants

Better than anyone, Doug Lund knows the gigantic void Christie and Zuri are leaving as they depart Hogle Zoo.

Christie, 37, and Zuri, 14, are the mother-and-daughter elephants the zoo decided to ship to another zoo that can provide more room, more elephants, and most importantly, a boyfriend for Zuri.

Doug, 61, is president and CEO of Hogle Zoo. He has spent most of his life there, ever since his father worked at the zoo as a builder in the 1960s and as a boy Doug used to volunteer taking tickets at the front gate.

He knows the zoo’s history well; he knows elephants are a big reason Salt Lake even has a zoo.

It all began, Doug explains, back in 1911, when local animal lovers assembled a collection of “goats, deer, ducks and other odds and ends animals” and put them on exhibit at Liberty Park.

Five years later, a circus came to town and advertised that its resident elephant, a female named Princess Alice (after former President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter), was for sale.

A grassroots fundraising campaign — fueled largely by pennies, nickels and dimes from Salt Lake schoolchildren who really wanted the elephant — raised $3,250 (equivalent of $94,000 in 2023 dollars), and when the circus left town, Princess Alice didn’t.

“Having an elephant really put Salt Lake City on the map for having a zoo,” says Doug.

The elephant’s new home was an enclosure where the Tracy Aviary now stands on the southwest side of Liberty Park.

It was not nearly big enough, or secure enough, and Princess Alice kept getting loose.

“There are stories of her blocking traffic on 7th East,” says Doug, “or running through clothes lines, dragging laundry and eating flowers and trees along the way.

“By the 1920s the citizens were getting pretty fed up and said, ‘Enough. If we’re going to have a zoo here we need to have a reputable one that can contain the animals it’s caring for.’”

That’s when the Hogle family, in 1931, stepped forward and donated the acreage at the mouth of Emigration Canyon that has been home to the zoo — and the elephants — ever since.

It’s been a beautiful zoo-pachyderm relationship. Hogle Zoo’s elephants are famous for living well past the average age for elephants (an elephant in the wild lives about 35-45 years). When Princess Alice died in 1953 at 69 she was believed to be the oldest Asian elephant in captivity. Her replacement, Kali, lived to age 59, the third oldest Asian elephant in North America. Another long-term resident, Dari, was the oldest African elephant in North America when she died at 55.

In 2008, Hogle Zoo was the first zoo to successfully use artificial insemination when Christie was impregnated, resulting in the birth of her daughter Zuri in 2009.

But artificial insemination hasn’t worked with Zuri, who is now in her prime reproductive years. And there aren’t any bull elephants within 800 miles.

This is a problem not only for Hogle Zoo and zoos in general, but for the elephant species as a whole. The elephant population is in a free fall. Lund points out that 100 years ago there were five million elephants in Africa; 50 years ago that number had dropped to 1.3 million; and now it’s lowered to just 400,000. Poaching for ivory tusks and other human encroachment keeps taking a big toll. “We’re losing 100 elephants a day in Africa,” he says.

In North American zoos, the total population is just 160 elephants.

The hope is that in a new environment, Zuri can help raise that number.

Doug Lund put together a coalition of elephant experts to study the situation before the decision was made to make Hogle Zoo elephant-free.

“In the beginning we were going to double down and keep our elephants,” he says, “try and see how we could build a larger facility that could house a bull and then bring in a bull. But that’s likely five years down the road, and there’s no guarantee there’d be an elephant available, and Zuri is in the prime of her reproductive years. As you start peeling away the layers of that onion and understand the challenges and then look at the opportunities for these two elephants and the impact they can make for the collective population of elephants in the United States — it became the hardest easy decision I’ve made.”

A going-away party that was held for Christie and Zuri on Sept. 23 attracted more than 8,000 people, the largest attendance at the zoo this year. The zoo kept the date of Christie and Zuri’s departure a well-guarded secret for the safety of the animals. They left without fanfare this past Tuesday when 8,300-pound Christie and 6,000-pound Zuri were hoisted in huge 10,000 pound crates onto a waiting truck. (Only after they arrived at the Kansas City Zoo & Aquarium was their destination made public.)

“It’s a tearful day for sure,” said the zoo president as Salt Lake was left without an elephant for the first time in 107 years. “I think more tearful than anyone can imagine.”