Amahle, Nolwazi, and Mabu

Nolwazi is a female African elephant believed to be 27 years old. She was born in Hlane National Park in eSwatini (formerly known as Swaziland).

Amahle is a female African elephant believed to be 12 years old. She is Nolwazi’s daughter and was also born in Hlane National Park.

Nolwazi and Amahle were among 39 elephants who roamed approximately 12,000 acres of the 54,000-acre park. In 2016, they and 15 other elephants, most of them breeding-age females, were taken from their natural habitat and imported to US zoos–a highly controversial arrangement which Charles Siebert detailed in a 2019 investigative essay for The New York Times Magazine (“Zoos Called It a ‘Rescue.’ But Are the Elephants Really Better Off?”).

As Siebert wrote:

Conservation managers in Swaziland determined that the increasing number of elephants in two of the country’s three Big Game Parks (B.G.P.) reserves were overtaxing the already drought-stricken landscape and posing a threat to the planned growth of their populations of both black and white rhinos. In response, the founder and executive director of B.G.P., Ted Reilly, decided to reduce the elephant population. Relocating them elsewhere in Africa was deemed, in the wording of the exhibit, ‘not feasible,’ and thus Reilly declared that they would have to be slaughtered if alternate homes couldn’t be found.

Three US zoos–the Dallas Zoo in Texas, the Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita, Kansas, and the Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium in Omaha, Nebraska–then agreed to donate $450,000 to Big Game Parks as part of a relocation deal, with B.G.P. ignoring offers to give refuge to the elephants in Africa, according to Siebert.

In 2016 the US Fish & Wildlife Service approved the zoos’ request despite global public outcry, including from 80 respected elephant and conservation expertsaround the world and in the face of a lawsuit filed in the US by Friends of Animals to try to stop the importation. Nolwazi, Amahle, and the other elephants were sedated, crated, and loaded onto a cargo plane and split up across the three zoos. Nolwazi and Amahle spent two years in captivity in the Dallas Zoo before they were transferred to the Fresno Chaffee Zoo, where they remain today. The zoo’s deputy director has said the zoo plans to use them for breeding: “We have been looking to grow our African elephant herd. Having Nolwazi and Amahle join enables us to do that.”

Mabu was born in 1990 in the Kruger National Park in Kenya. At some point between his birth and 2003, he was transported to the Mkhaya Game Reserve in eSwatini. In 2003, he and ten other elephants were imported to the US despite public outcry and legal opposition. Mabu was sent to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park where, between 2006 and 2011, he fathered ten offspring with the female elephants held in captivity with him.

In 2012, Mabu, two of his young sons, and two adult female elephants were transferred to the Reid Park Zoo in Tucson, AZ to establish a new group of captive elephants there. In 2014 an elephant he was held captive with gave birth to an elephant he fathered. In 2016 he was transferred back to San Diego to again breed with the adult females at that zoo. In 2018, two elephants he fathered were born in San Diego. That same year he was transferred back to the Reid Park Zoo to again breed with the female elephants held captive there. Shortly after, his eleven-year-old son died in Tucson. In 2020 an elephant he fathered was born at the Reid Park Zoo. According to the zoo, Mabu formed close bonds with his offspring at the Reid Park Zoo; the elephants he lived with missed him when he would be separated from him while being crate trained before one of his transports.

In November of 2022, upon the recommendation of the AZA, he was transferred to the Fresno Chaffee Zoo to breed with Nolwazi and Amahle.

Vusmusi (also known as Moose and Musi) is an 18-year-old male African elephant. He was born in the San Diego Zoo Safari Park to an elephant named Ndulamitsi, who was pregnant with him when she was imported to the US from eSwatini in 2003, also despite global public outcry and with zoo and eSwatini officials making the same claims about the elephants needing to be killed otherwise.

Vusmusi was transferred from San Diego to the Fresno Chaffee Zoo in 2015. In 2017, after he cracked and broke his tusks numerous times, the zoo had metal covers made for them, which other zoos have also done. “He had a history of being tough on his tusks, and he would break them on things,” Fresno Chaffee Zoo’s curator for elephants told the Sacramento Bee in 2017. As Keith Lindsay writes in his affidavit (but the zoo has not acknowledged in news stories touting the metal covers), this behavior is “an unnatural behavior indicative of stress and/or boredom” (elephants living freely in their natural habitats use their tusks “to pry bark off trees or dig for roots, and in social encounters as an instrument of display or as a weapon”). The zoo planned to use Vusmusi for breeding but were not successful in their efforts. Upon the recommendation of the AZA, they transferred him back to San Diego. He is now out of the jurisdiction of this lawsuit but we’ll continue to fight for his freedom.