Now that’s a phrase you probably thought you’d never hear – on public radio, or anywhere else for that matter. For one reason, that’s because nobody’d done one until last year – that’s when a team of scientists led by the chief veterinarian at Disney’s Animal Kingdom successfully pioneered the surgery.
The same team recently returned from South Africa where members performed five more of the operations and started teaching vets there how to do the procedure themselves. But as Judith Smelser reports, elephant sterilization is costly, challenging … and even controversial.
