Nolwazi
Fresno Chaffee Zoo (Fresno, CA)
Nolwazi is a wild-born African elephant currently held at the Fresno Chaffee Zoo in Fresno, CA.. Nolwazi is confined with 4 other elephants, who all suffer from their facility’s lack of sufficient space and from being unable to engage in their natural behaviors.
Nolwazi's Story
Nolwazi is an African elephant who was born around 1993 in Hlane National Park in Eswatini. Nolwazi, along with her daughter Amahle, were among 39 elephants who roamed approximately 12,000 acres of the 54,000-acre park.
In 2016, she and 16 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.
Three AZA-accredited US zoos–the Dallas Zoo in Texas, the Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita, Kansas, and the Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium in Omaha, Nebraska–had 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 experts around the world and in the face of a lawsuit filed in the US by Friends of Animals to try to stop the importation. Nolwazi and the other elephants were sedated, crated, and loaded onto a cargo plane and split up across the three zoos. Nolwazi spent two years in captivity in the Dallas Zoo before she and her daughter Amahle were transferred to the Fresno Chaffee Zoo in 2018, where they remain today.
In 2023 the Fresno Chaffee Zoo announced that Nolwazi was pregnant and due to give birth in fall of 2024. She gave birth to her son Thando on August 16, 2024.
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