"The zoo is hoping Chai is pregnant again?"

Answers on Hansa

Editorial swept aside issues

Editor, The Times:

Your editorial sweeps the elephant in the room under the rug ["Seeking answers about the littlest elephant," June 12].

While zoo staff searches for answers about the cause of Hansa's death, the fact that medical records indicate two other elephants at the zoo have suffered repeated bouts of colic is telling us plenty: Something is awry at Woodland Park Zoo.

In Defense of Animals would be remiss had we not provided background information that could be important to an investigation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Meanwhile, the zoo has carefully manipulated Hansa's life and death into a public relations opportunity by calling her a "little princess" even though she was, in the past, beaten (for eating dirt); portraying her death as being in her sleep when no zoo personnel were there to observe her, as they should have been if she was ill; and glorifying the pathetic life she led in an inadequate and unnatural environment.

The public may forget, but the elephants won't and neither will those of us working to improve their conditions.

— Kristie Phelps, communications director for In Defense of Animals, San Rafael, Calif.

Donation doesn't cover suffering

Woodland Park Zoo donating $8,500 to an elephant-conservation project in Borneo has nothing to do with the suffering of elephants in zoos today.

These sentient, highly intelligent animals are a shell of a being, stripped of everything that is instinctual. How can anyone with any ounce of compassion believe this is righteous when we know elephants need to walk 10 to 30 miles a day for their physical and mental health. The four elephants at our zoo only had parts of a mere acre, which takes about a minute to walk the length.

Only 17 out of the past 37 babies born in zoos have lived. Most telling of all is that elephants live only half their natural lifespan in captivity.

It is time we acknowledge our selfish need to see elephants for the few minutes we stare at them and instead watch the plethora of TV programs that show them as they really are. The most compassionate and unselfish option is to let Chai, Bamboo, Watoto live out their life at the 2,700-acre Elephant Sanctuary, where they can live like elephants for the first time in their life.

— Alyne Fortgang, Seattle

Give elephants space

The zoo is hoping Chai is pregnant again? So that another captive elephant will suffer the same fate that Chai's last baby, Hansa, did?

When will the Woodland Park Zoo realize (as more enlightened zoos have) that elephants cannot thrive, much less survive, in the close quarters of captivity?

Experts and concerned citizens have been begging WPZ to close its elephant exhibit and send these animals to sanctuaries.

These facilities are willing to pay for transport and can provide a more natural environment with room to roam (more than 2,700 acres at the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, more than 2,300 acres at the Performing Animal Welfare Society in California), permanent companionship where friendships — very important to these social creatures — cannot be torn apart by shipping elephants away to breed yet more captive creatures.

— Nancy Pennington, Seattle

Nuclear power

Consider all options

John Abbotts and the Hanford Task Force of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility are doing wonderful work as independent watchdogs of Hanford remediation, but I disagree with his June 14 guest column in one respect ["Nuclear power's not the answer"].

The potential consequences of unrestricted buildup of greenhouse gases are so dire and the difficulties of reducing emissions to the levels necessary to stop buildup are so severe that no approach to solving the problem — including nuclear energy — should be rejected out of hand.

It may be that nuclear power will, in the long run, not be an option, but before writing it off, we need to try harder to solve the problems in the way of making it safe and effective.

The first and most difficult of these problems is nuclear-weapons proliferation. For this and other obvious reasons, all nations, beginning with the U.S., need to work much harder to strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Regime.

— Conway Leovy, Seattle

Safe, clean, cheap

John Abbotts commentary about nuclear power not being the answer is rather self-serving. His use of the term "global glowing" identifies him as being opposed to nuclear power no matter what advantages it offers.

One of the reasons that nuclear power plants cannot get built in less than 10 years is that people like Abbotts fight hard to delay them out of existence.

Abbotts' main objection to nuclear power seems to be in the storage and disposal of the end product of its use. Yes, that is a problem, but no more and no less than problems associated with other fuel sources, and certainly solvable.

While it is true that there are certainly conservation measures that we can and should take full advantage of, it is by no means the final answer to our energy woes. Nuclear power is one of the safest, cleanest and cheapest sources of energy we've ever invented.

— Charles George, Stanwood

Budget credit

Goes to Locke, not Rossi

Times editorial columnist Bruce Ramsey does Times readers a disservice when he uncritically accepts the notion that Dino Rossi deserves credit for balancing our state budget in 2003 ["Rossi ponders the future — his own and the state's," June 13].

The Times' own 2003 coverage of Rossi's budget proposal was headlined "Senate budget in line with Locke's." Then-state Sen. Rossi had just unveiled the Senate Republicans' proposal at a news conference featuring a presentation titled "Following the Governor's Lead."

Our Democratic governor had already done all the political heavy lifting with his session-opening budget proposal to defy voter-mandated teacher pay raises, freeze state employee salaries and make the other social-service cuts necessary to resolve the projected $2.6 billion revenue shortfall. Rossi merely tweaked Locke's no-new-taxes proposal.

The myth that Rossi "wrote" our state's 2003 budget is the bare thread upon which his entire political career continues to dangle. The Times should not continue to let the revisionist histories of politicians — declared or just pretending — go unchallenged.

— David Groves, Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO

Nail in the rail

Reuse the tracks

What a shame it is that given all the billions in cost associated with building tracks for light rail, King County is ever eager and anxious to rip up existing track and tear down existing railway bridges ["Dinner train makes tracks to Tacoma," Local News, June 14].

How about instead putting a commuter trolley on those tracks? It'll be several orders of magnitude cheaper than the light-rail project on the west side of the lake, and it can serve from Renton to Woodinville.

It'd be even better if the Renton end were connected to the Seattle side light rail, then the Eastside will have commuter rail from Woodinville to Sea-Tac to downtown Seattle.

— Walter Bright, Kirkland