~ "Twenty-three baby elephants imported to China from Zimbabwe in July 2015 are being held in tiny cages at the Qingyuan Quarantine Facility in Guandong with only a tiny, barred, concrete slab as their exercise yard. To make it worse the elephants are unable to reach through the bars to reach a water pool.

Network for Animals has discovered that the elephants are destined for a new zoo being built in Qingyuan, a city in southern China, but the zoo will only be ready to take them in 2018, at the earliest. Until then the babies will be held in conditions so bad that they are unlikely to survive.

Network for Animals’ African director David Barritt has just returned from China where he tried to persuade Chinese authorities to provide better living conditions for the elephants. “The elephants are all sick and display serious wounds and other signs of being in poor condition,” said Barritt. “The chances of them surviving in these conditions are very poor. We have visual evidence that the elephants are crammed together in tiny cages and are allowed out for one or two hours a day into a barred concrete yard that gives them no room to exercise. These are appalling conditions that are deadly for their health and mental well-being. If disease and ill-treatment doesn’t kill them, the mental anguish they are enduring will.”

Mr Zhou Zhihua is Deputy Director of The Endangered Species Export and Import Management Control Department at the State Forestry Commission in Beijing. Join us now, and implore him to intervene in this matter. Otherwise these twenty-three baby elephants are destined to die, one by one.