Senator Plans Legislation Over Dunda Incident

State Sen. Dan McCorquodale (D-San Jose) said Tuesday that he will introduce comprehensive legislation dealing with discipline and abuse of captive animals as a result of the controversy over the beating of Dunda the elephant at the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

The legislation will tighten controls over zoos, which are exempt from many state animal welfare laws, McCorquodale said, but will rely largely on voluntary compliance by the institutions.

McCorquodale, chairman of the Senate Natural Resources and Wildlife Committee, said he will form a “working group” of people from zoos in California, animal interest groups and government agencies with authority over captive animals to help shape the legislation. The group will be asked to develop a definition of animal abuse and a set of guidelines for disciplining animals, McCorquodale said. The members of the group have not been chosen.

Felt Zoos Were Protectors

“Zoos are exempt from a lot of state laws that would deal with these animals because over the years it’s been felt that they are the protectors of animals,” McCorquodale said. “Generally, people felt that these are the people who care about animals, so they won’t hurt them.

“My preference would be if we could get the zoos to take care of these things themselves in their personnel policies and animal practices,” he said.

The controversy stems from an incident that occurred in February, shortly after Dunda, an 18-year-old African elephant, was transferred from the San Diego Zoo to the Wild Animal Park. Keepers at the zoo, where Dunda had spent most of her life, have complained that she was poorly prepared for the transfer and was brutally beaten by keepers at the animal park.

Keepers at the park concede that they chained Dunda by all four legs, pulled her to the ground and hit her on the head with ax handles and other instruments, but they deny that their behavior constitutes abuse. They say Dunda was dangerously out of control and that the discipline was necessary.

McCorquodale presided over a contentious committee hearing in Escondido Friday, during which keepers and animal rights activists voiced widely divergent opinions about the methods used to transfer and discipline Dunda.

Officials of the San Diego Zoological Society, which operates both the zoo and the animal park, have backed the actions of the keepers at the park and say no abuse occurred in the Dunda incident. However, they have announced more tightly controlled procedures for elephant discipline because of the controversy.

The new procedures require greater administrative oversight of disciplinary sessions, but do not spell out which procedures are acceptable and which are not.

Mary Shallenberger, the chief staff member for McCorquodale’s committee, said Tuesday that the new procedures are being studied by the committee along with several hundred pages of personnel records and other documents subpoenaed by the committee. The Zoological Society turned the records over to the committee at last week’s hearing.

“What the San Diego Zoo came up with, on the surface, looks like it’s pretty good, but maybe it could be stronger,” McCorquodale said.

He said he envisions a new policy that would say that “discipline is OK if it doesn’t break the skin and wouldn’t deprive an animal of food and water.”

The legislation, which will be introduced in January, would probably establish discipline and abuse criteria that must be adopted by zoos in formal policy statements. If a zoo failed to adopt the procedures, the institution would be subject to a range of animal welfare laws that are now on the books in California but do not apply to zoos, McCorquodale said.