ASHEBORO - The N.C. Zoo opens the gates today on its first major addition in more than 10 years, an expansion of its elephant and rhinoceros exhibit called the Watani Grasslands Reserve.

The $8.5 million project, paid for mostly with private donations, increases the number of elephants from three to seven, triples the rhinos and will allow for quadruple the antelopes. What the average visitor to the park will notice, however, is a sudden proximity to the pachyderms.

"It's unbelievable how close the elephants are," said Christina Villa, 17, a high school senior who attends a public school based at the zoo and was at a preview of the grasslands Friday. "You can smell them."

The expansion comes as some U.S. zoos are getting out of the business of keeping captive elephants. Animal advocacy groups have argued that all those animals should be retired to sanctuaries and allowed to live out their lives in relative comfort with room to move.

David Jones, director of the N.C. Zoo, says exhibiting elephants is important to promote animal conservation. Seeing the world's largest land mammal in a setting that approximates its habitat, as the Watani Grasslands aim to do, helps visitors appreciate what is in danger of being lost, Jones says. It's something the most beautiful magazine spread or documentary film can't replicate, he said, and the impact can be life-changing.

Wow the kids

"You've got to wow the kids and impress everybody else," Jones said Friday, as three of the zoo's elephants stood behind him. "You've got to have that emotional attachment that leads the child to become the young conservationist."

There are 284 elephants in 79 accredited American zoos, about half Asian elephants, the other half African, like those at the N.C. Zoo, according to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

With the pressure on elephants in the wild from poaching and habitat destruction, no more elephants are expected to be captured for the purpose of being put on display. So the only way to assure that zoos will have elephants for people to see is to breed them from animals they already have. Changes at the N.C. Zoo are designed to help that process.

Captive breeding programs for elephants have not been highly successful, in part, researchers now think, because elephants are a social lot and in their captivity have not been allowed to form natural family groups. With their enlarged space -- 7 acres, up from 3.5 -- the females in the N.C. Zoo's collection should be able to form one or two groups. Once they do, elephant curator Guy Lichty said, the hope is that one or more will become pregnant by the breeding bull.

So confident is the zoo that it will have pregnant pachyderms that it included a sort of maternity ward within its new $2.5 million elephant barn, part of the $8.5 million in improvements. Inside the barn, where the animals take shelter when they are off exhibit, one holding area was placed squarely in front of the keepers' office window so any expectant female can be closely monitored.

Elephant amenities

While the more than 600,000 annual visitors to the zoo never see the barn, designers worked hard at building a facility that allows safe and humane handling of the mammoth animals. The concrete floor is heated, while the walls have garage-door openings to let in natural light and air. The elephants will be taught how to trigger an infrared sensor to activate an overhead shower.

As much as possible, they also worked cheap, Lichty said, explaining that the steel bars that form the holding pens were made from used oil pipes.

Since it was conceived in the 1960s, the zoo has had only intermittent funding from the state. The N.C. Zoo Society, the private fundraising group that supports the park, raised money for the Watani Grasslands Reserve over a period of years. The funds came in large grants from corporations and in handfuls from small events.

To stretch those dollars, zoo staff designed and built nearly all the new exhibits in Watani, within the park's Africa section. Besides the new viewing area, Watani has paintings and bronze sculptures along a winding footpath, an "elephant tracking station" that features a helicopter for children to climb on, and interpretive materials drawing a connection to the wild elephants in the national parks of Cameroon. The N.C. Zoo has observed those elephants for a decade and is credited with helping prevent animal and human deaths by using satellite technology to track their migration.

Martin Tchamba, director of conservation for the World Wildlife Fund in Cameroon, attended Friday's preview and gave a blessing on the Watani Grasslands Reserve in his native language. Later, he stood inside the elephant tracking station, where dollar bills lay in a collection box for the elephants of Cameroon.

As far as it goes, Tchamba said, the exhibit is a fine tribute to these noble, intelligent animals. But he will be working with the zoo to make an even stronger connection for visitors between the captive animals in the park and their relatives that are chased down in Africa and slaughtered for their tusks.

"It's a beginning,'' he said. "More and more as we walk closely together, we will get there.''

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