President

June 12, 2006

Dear Mayor Villaraigosa:

I recall your reassuring me on Richard Pryor day back on Dec.16, 05, that you would “make sure the ELEPHANT situation was taken care of”…I also recall your campaign promise to do right by the elephants at the LA Zoo. Now Gita is dead…and she suffered a painful, lonely death, lying on the floor alone all night. She suffered in life as well…and YOU know it!

Melya Kaplan, myself and others went to visit many of the council members over the last several months and met with your right hand man, Blackman. I told Melya then: “THEY ARE NOT LISTENING TO US. THEY THINK WE ARE ALL IDIOTS.” But the disrespect we endured was nothing compared to that of Gita, Ruby and Billy.  I recall sitting in Bernard Parks office trying to help educate him on the issue and he was falling asleep in front of all of us. He was especially bored by the part about compassion for these majestic creatures; his lids became exceptionally heavy then!

I am sad, I am angry and I am so terribly disappointed in you. Can you now understand that Gita’s death is a wake up call?????? Can you not find in your heart to reawaken your compassion. A compassion that once existed for these animals, enough to make you promise to help them! Can you stop playing politics for one moment and operate from your soul, your heart and allow these animals some peace and freedom? The freedom to live a life with wide open space and green grass and trees and serenity and each other!

Do you not understand how wrong it is to do this to these amazing animals???????

Please make an effort to find it in you, your compassion existed once…it is now dormant and hiding, but still in you!

With anger, disappointment and total outrage,

Jennifer Lee Pryor