The last zoo elephants: Why Johannesburg can no longer justify their captivity

The continued confinement of three elephants at the Johannesburg Zoo is often framed as a moral debate about captivity. It is now something more precise. On financial, institutional and welfare grounds, the City of Johannesburg can no longer sustain – let alone justify – the conditions required to keep them. As the last elephants held in a zoo in South Africa, Lammie, Ramadiba and Mopane represent not a legacy to preserve, but a model that has reached its inevitable end.

The end of a model

Across much of the world, the keeping of elephants in urban zoos is being reconsidered, and in many cases abandoned. The reasons are not ideological alone. They are rooted in a growing body of scientific and practical understanding about what elephants are, and what they require.

Elephants are not simply large mammals that need space. They are cognitively complex, socially structured and behaviourally dynamic beings whose lives are organised around movement, memory and relationships. In the wild, they traverse vast areas, engage in multilayered social systems and respond continuously to environmental variation.

Captivity, by its nature, cannot replicate these conditions. At best, it distantly approximates them. At worst, it severely suppresses them.

The Johannesburg Zoo elephants are now the last of their kind held in a traditional zoo setting in the country – indeed the continent. That fact alone should prompt a fundamental question: why does this system persist?

The practical burden of captivity

To keep elephants in captivity is to assume a set of ongoing, non-negotiable obligations.

First, there is the question of nutrition. An adult elephant consumes large quantities of food daily, including a substantial proportion of fresh browse – branches, leaves, bark – forming the basis of its natural diet. This is not easily substituted. It requires consistent sourcing, transport and provision.

Second, there is veterinary care. Captive elephants often experience health issues uncommon in the wild, including foot problems, joint stress and obesity-related conditions, all of which require specialised, ongoing intervention.

Third, there is the built environment. Enclosures must be designed not only for containment, but for behavioural stimulation, safety and environmental complexity. This includes access to water for bathing and submersion, varied substrates, shade and space sufficient to allow movement and social interaction.

Fourth, there is staffing. Elephants demand experienced, trained personnel capable of managing both routine care and complex behavioural situations.

These requirements are cumulative. They do not diminish over time. If anything, they increase as animals age. To keep elephants, therefore, is not simply to house them. It is to maintain a system capable of meeting these demands every day, without interruption.

A system under strain

The question, then, is whether the City of Johannesburg is currently able to meet these obligations.

Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana recently warned that Johannesburg’s financial turmoil now threatens not only the city itself, but potentially the broader national economy. In correspondence to mayor Dada Morero, Treasury reportedly described Johannesburg as being in “severe financial distress”, with liabilities vastly exceeding immediately available cash reserves.

That matters here because elephant captivity is not a static obligation. It is an expensive and permanently escalating one. The keeping of elephants depends on stable institutions, reliable long-term funding, consistent maintenance, specialised staffing and uninterrupted provisioning. These are precisely the forms of capacity that begin to erode in municipalities under financial strain.

Within such a system, resource-intensive operations become increasingly difficult to sustain at the level required. This is to recognise that systems under pressure produce gaps – gaps in maintenance, in provisioning, in oversight. And when those gaps emerge in the context of captive wildlife, they manifest as welfare concerns.

Evidence from within the enclosure

The available observations from the Johannesburg Zoo reveal precisely such gaps.

According to assessments by elephant specialists Dr Elizabeth Oriel and Dr Toni Frohoff, feeding practices with the elephants have raised particular concern. On most days observed, the elephants were not provided with fresh browse, despite its central role in their diet.

This is a significant finding. Nutrition is not an optional component of care, it is foundational. Where it becomes irregular or performative, it signals a system that is not functioning as required.

Behavioural observations align with this concern. Indicators such as inactivity, stereotypic movement and prolonged immobility – particularly in Lammie, the oldest of the three elephants – were documented. In the scientific literature, such behaviours are well established as markers of compromised welfare in captive animals, particularly those with high cognitive and social complexity. They do not reflect adaptation, they reflect constraint.

The limits of enclosure

The physical environment itself appears to compound the problem.

Reports point to inadequate shade, which restricts the elephants’ ability to regulate their exposure to heat. There are also concerns regarding the design and safety of the enclosure, including fencing that allows close contact between elephants and visitors, and internal features that may pose direct risks. One reported incident involves Lammie being pushed into a moat, with possible ongoing effects on mobility.

These are not isolated design flaws. They illustrate the broader difficulty of creating a captive environment that is both secure and appropriate for animals of this size, strength and behavioural range. In practice, enclosure design becomes a compromise between containment and welfare. In constrained systems, that compromise often tilts towards containment.

The financial contradiction

At this point, the financial argument and the welfare argument converge.

The City’s defenders may argue that the elephants represent a comparatively small budget item within a much larger municipal crisis. But that misses the point. The issue is not simply the absolute cost of keeping elephants. It is whether a municipality already struggling to sustain core governance functions can continue to justify one of the most resource-intensive forms of animal captivity imaginable.

At some point, institutional decline becomes visible in the enclosure itself.

Maintaining elephants requires a level of consistent investment that is difficult to guarantee in a financially strained municipality. When that investment falters – even intermittently – the consequences are immediate and cumulative. The result is a contradiction: a city that cannot reliably sustain the conditions required for elephant care continues to assume responsibility for animals that depend entirely on those conditions.

This is not simply inefficient. It is untenable.

A final defence often raised is that zoo elephants are necessary for education – that urban children would otherwise never encounter them. But this argument deserves closer scrutiny. What, precisely, is being taught? If the encounter is with an elephant that is confined, behaviourally compromised and removed from any meaningful ecological or social context, then the lesson is not one of understanding, but distortion. It presents the elephant not as a wide-ranging, socially complex being, but as a static object of display. The question, then: is a distressed, spatially constrained elephant an instrument of education, or evidence of its failure?

The alternative is no longer hypothetical

Another key element of the City’s position has been the claim that the elephants cannot be released, that captivity, however imperfect, is in their best interests.

This claim is increasingly difficult to defend.

The relocation of Charlie (now Duma) from the Pretoria Zoo a couple of years ago, an elephant who spent decades in captivity before being transferred to a large, natural rehabilitation environment, provides a concrete counterpoint. In that setting, Duma has been able to engage in behaviours that captivity restricts: extended movement, independent foraging and interaction within a broader ecological context.

This demonstrates that long-term captivity is not an irreversible condition, and that alternative models of care are both available and viable.

The last elephants

There is also a symbolic dimension that cannot be ignored.

Lammie, Ramadiba and Mopane are the last elephants held in a zoo in South Africa. Their continued captivity is not representative of a broader system. It is an exception. But it is precisely this exception that makes the situation more, not less, significant, because what is at stake is not only the welfare of three individuals, but the persistence of a model that has otherwise been left behind.

To maintain that model requires justification. It requires evidence that it can be sustained, that it meets acceptable standards, and that it serves a purpose that cannot be achieved by other means. On the available evidence, that justification is not evident – perhaps it never was.

The only viable outcome

There are situations in which difficult trade-offs must be made, and imperfect systems maintained. This is not one of them.

The continued confinement of Lammie, Ramadiba and Mopane rests on an assumption that their needs can be met within the Johannesburg Zoo. The available evidence suggests that this assumption is no longer secure. In such circumstances, delay is not neutral. It extends a condition that is already in question.

The alternative – relocation to a more appropriate environment – exists. It has precedent. And it aligns more closely with what is now understood about elephant welfare.

For the last elephants held in a South African zoo, the issue is not whether change will come. It is whether it will come in time.

They should be freed. DM