Statement: Shanghai Wild Animal Park Elephants

The following statement is attributed to PETA Senior Vice President Jason Baker:

Elephants are complex, intelligent animals with deep emotional lives, strong social bonds, and a natural need to roam across vast distances. Forcing them—or any animal—into small, unnatural enclosures—like those at the Shanghai Wild Animal Park, which is nothing more than a zoo profiting off the suffering of confined animals— always leads to stress, frustration, and aggression, as it would for anyone you put in prison.

 

Whether it’s in Shanghai or anywhere else in the world, imprisoning animals for human entertainment is cruel. They’re shoved into artificial social groups with no room to escape when tensions rise, often resulting in deadly confrontations. It’s time to recognize that no animal belongs behind bars—for profit, curiosity, or any other reason.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETAAsia.com or follow PETA Asia on X, Facebook, or Instagram.