No more elephun at the zoo for one woman

The most specific activist group ever, Friends of Philly Zoo Elephants, has been protesting the zoo off and on since Dulary, the zoo’s Asian elephant, was injured (naturally, by one of those bully African elephants). They want the elephants shipped to a sanctuary.

Fair enough. The Zoo, however, is so worried about the group that they’ve been monitoring chat rooms for several months to keep tabs on them. (Perhaps they got tips from the Bush administration.)

And, of course, the zoo read the group’s leader, attorney Marianne Bessey, wrote that zoo director Pete Hoskins will have “nightmares every night until you die, which should be very soon.” And now she’s banned from the premises. This is odd, because if you were to actually believe Bessey was serious — which, uhm, it seems 100 percent likely she’s not — you’d want to ban her from Hoskins’ bedroom, since it seems like she’d kill him in his sleep.

Bessey, though, in her best lawyerly argument, comes up with an excuse for the lame comment:

In making the remarks about Hoskins’ demise, Bessey said she had not been threatening him but simply calculating what Hoskins’ “life expectancy” would be in sub-Saharan Africa, homeland of three of the zoo’s four elephants. That would be 51, she said, adding, “You have outlived your life expectancy by some 10 years.”

This is what’s known as the “Life Expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa Defense,” which has not once been believed by a listener since it was invented in 1867. I’m not quite sure why it keeps getting used.

Zoo banishes elephant activist over Web posting [DN]
Photo by Thomas Sly