Be a Voice for a Asha at the Natural Bridge Zoo

Visit our website for more information: http://voicesforasha.org/.

Making its first appearance on IDA’s Ten Worst Zoos foElephants list with a straight-to-the-top (or is that the bottom?) entrance, the Natural Bridge Zoo, a largely overlooked zoo has got it all wrong. It keeps a lone female African elephant, Asha, who has been without the company of other elephants for nearly a decade. Elephants are highly complex and social animals who naturally live in extended family networks, making it cruel to keep an elephant alone. Asha is forced to give rides in sweltering heat under threat of physical abuse from bullhook-wielding handlers. The bullhook is a steel-tipped baton with a hook at the end that is used to control elephants through fear and painful punishment.

Natural Bridge Zoo elephant handlers are so brazen in the use of their bullhooks that members of the public complained after seeing Asha cruelly and repeatedly jabbed in the mouth with it. In the off-season, Asha spends the freezing, snowy Virginia winters alone in a barren barn, chained to a concrete floor. Asha’s profound deprivation is evident in her repetitive swaying back and forth, an abnormal behavior indicative of poor welfare. In the past, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has fined this dreadful roadside zoo for violations of the Animal Welfare Act. At IDA, we can confidently say that the Natural Bridge Zoo has outdone itself when it comes to keeping an elephant in the most atrocious of conditions.