The sad thing is that in the long run PETA may have won this fight but they will lose the war. If people are not exposed to the elephants then how can they have an appreciation of them to want to do anything to save them? You can say they can be seen in zoos but PETA is also against elephants in zoos. Even the new huge elephant habitat the Oregon Zoo just finished is not good enough for them. They say they should be at wildlife preserves. That's fine, but how many of wildlife preserves are there in the US that are suuitable for elephants? How many elephants can they hold? Most of all, how many people will ever see an elephant again?

It's like steam engines. We all would like to see them in the "wild" pulling a fast passenger train or slugging upgrade with a heavy freight. But those days are gone. So we get to see them in parks as static displays (zoos) or on tourist railroads pulling a train that they never would have pulled in regular service. Purists complain about the tourist trains, but they do keep steam engines alive and just about everyone in the US is within a days drive of a chance to see a live steam engine. But what if all the steam engines in the nation were moved to "locomotive parks" in southern California, Texas and Florida? How long would it be before no-one thought about steam anymore? How long before the number of people financially supporting those locomotive parks decline to the point where the parks cannot stay open? The only reason steam is alive today is that people who were exposed to it wants to keep it around. By the same token, the only reason people in the US care about elephants is that they have seen them in the circus or the zoo. Without exposure to elephants future generations won't care about them anymore. If you don't care then why spend any effort to save them?