I have joined the keepers in the big hay room for conversation many times, and now and then one of them will go off to do an errand: move an animal or two or three from room to room or into one or another of the yards; pass out carrots. I’ve been startled to hear a sudden shout of “Bull coming through!” and see, through a crack in the hallway door, a trotting elephant, head high, trunk waving toward the scent of the hay as he heads up the hall.
One day last June, I visited the keepers to discuss elephant character. They had left open a door to a little side yard fringed with bamboo and fenced off from the backyard by a concrete wall. A group of cows in the backyard came to stare at us, leaning their great gray heads over the wall, their trunks weaving from side to side. The elephants will watch, sometimes for hours, the movements of the human beings nearby. Now and then, a bull will scoop up a pile of sand (and, occasionally, excrement) in the sinewy curl at the tip of his trunk and sling it at a keeper or a maintenance man. The damp sand flies out like a hail of buckshot and is aimed with an archer’s skill.
“Rosy is better than money from home,” said Roger Henneous, the head keeper. He is a short man with a graying, close-cropped beard and a gruff manner, and he has worked at the Washington Park Zoo for more than twenty years. “She used to be earth mother to all the calves, but now she’s had a bellyful. There’s no elephant you’d rather spend time with—you could trust your child with her. Now, Belle—she is so damned hardheaded. She won’t bend and acknowledge that she’s getting older and everybody else is getting better. So she proceeds to get her butt whipped up on with depressing regularity by the young cows moving up. She is not going gently into that good night. And Me-Tu, Rosy’s daughter—that’s Daughter Hog.”
“Me-Tu lives to eat,” Haight explained. “You could put four animals together and they would not eat as much as fast as she does.” Jim Sanford, the zoo’s third full-time elephant keeper, talked about his favorite, a young cow named Pet. “One of her trademarks is checking us out: ‘How far can I go? How much does this guy know? Have the rules been changed?’” he told me. “It’s one of the things you really like about her. I’d call it a sense of humor—she obviously gets pleasure out of seeing how much she can get away with. It slays her. I think the relationship between a human being and an elephant is based on mutual trust. They know what the rules are here. If one of us, particularly a new guy, chastises them for things that are okay with everybody else—well, they won’t put up with it.”
“Do they like you?” I asked.
Haight paused, considering. “Does it matter? I like them, but they piss me off a lot of the time. I know they’re hearing me, and then suddenly it’s ‘I’ve never done this before! You can’t be talking to me!’” He threw up his hands, mimicking elephant disbelief. “But you have to be the dominant animal. That’s why the bulls come after us. If we weren’t the dominant animal, they wouldn’t care.”
The herd’s daily routine is complicated, with many comings and goings and tradings of place. Every task is punctuated with sound: the deep whoosh of an elephant’s exhalation, the spray of a hose on concrete, the clang of massive hydraulic doors, the faint rustle of a scratching bull. There is sound, and there is smell—a perfume of hay and manure, and, underneath, the musky, dry, sweet smell of the elephants themselves. The air in the barn is always warm, even in this high-ceilinged central room.
Elephant cows are irrepressibly social beasts. Washington Park has two separate family herds of mothers, daughters, and female cousins. (At the time of my visits last spring and summer, Chang Dee, the male calf, was still with his mother, Me-Tu. He has since gone to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and almost to the day his five-year-old half uncle, Rama, returned to the herd from a four-year sojourn at the Point Defiance Zoo, in Tacoma.) The groups rotate and are sometimes split into smaller groups throughout nine available areas, eating periodically in different places. (A single mature cow will consume ninety pounds of hay, three pounds of oats, forty-six pounds each of carrots and lettuce, a handful of vitamins, a quarter cup of salt, and fifty gallons of water every day.) The three mature bulls are always separate and solitary, but during mating a cow and bull are given a private room for several days or, sometimes, are allowed the use of one of the outside yards.
With each move to a new area, the animals must examine the evidence of the animals that have just left; it is in the first few moments in a yard or a room that the elephants seem to merge, recognizing and reassuring each other. To prevent boredom and to ensure cooperation, the cows and calves are trained to stand, to back up, to lie down, to hold still, and to tolerate leg chains, which are necessary during feeding to prevent the dominant animals from stealing food. Both Tunga and Hugo were once show animals—Hugo belonged to the Ringling Brothers circus—and can do such tricks as walking on a ball. Chang Dee, Hugo’s firstborn, was the payment the zoo made to the circus in exchange for Hugo, and was thus trained to accept leg chains from babyhood. Sunshine (her real name is Sung Surin) was taught to lie down on command—a marvel of conditioned response. In the course of a week or two, a keeper would enter the barn while Sunshine was napping and rouse her just enough to feed her a banana. When she woke from her nap, Jim Sanford says, “it was with banana on her breath and the word down in her ears.”
The keepers are full of such stories; they say, with a certain pride, that single-trial learning is normal in elephants. They tell long anecdotes—tales of one elephant determined to pull a door apart, another playing with an electrical heating panel, a third refusing to lift a leg for a chain—and they laugh at the elephants’ cleverness and their own efforts to be a bit more clever. It is an affectionate one-upmanship; tomorrow, perhaps, the elephants will win another round.
“One day, Rog and I came back from a break, and there’s Tamba, who had been with the herd in the backyard, all by herself over in the bamboo,” Jay Haight recalled. At the time, Tamba, a seventeen-year-old cow born in Thailand, wasn’t fully grown, and she had somehow managed to squeeze through a gap at one end of the wall between the two yards and was harvesting the bamboo, an elephant delight. “So she’s really conspicuous, but as soon as she heard us coming she turned around and faced the other way, rock-still, holding her trunk in her mouth.” Haight pretended to whistle, gazed at the ceiling. “‘I’m not really here, don’t mind me. It’s just Mr. Squirrel.’” Another time, Tunga swung one of the elephants’ playthings, a chained log, over the moat, climbed out along it as if he were on a balance beam, and fell in. It was not his first such mishap: an erstwhile performer, Tunga can balance on one leg, and he was once seen to “waltz,” or spin on his hind legs, around the backyard until he tripped and tumbled into the moat.
Roger Henneous believes that the elephants are well aware of their keepers’ expectations. “You ought to be here on a day when the routine is hopelessly screwed up and get a look at the expressions on their faces,” he said. “If they had a watch, they’d be checking it. And asking you, ‘Look, buddy, what’s the problem? Have you forgotten everything we ever taught you?’”
“Come on and see the big guy,” Jim Sanford said, and he led me down the hall, a narrow concrete alley lined with dusty pipes, to a room with a window about three feet wide and screened with heavy wire mesh. He was referring to Packy, the undisputed master of the herd. Packy, who stands more than ten feet high and weighs 13,320 pounds, is the largest known Asian elephant in the world. He is only twenty-six—young for an elephant—and he will continue to grow throughout his life.
When I peered through the window, the room at first seemed empty. Then, as in a dream, I saw a trunk float by, far above my head, and then I saw a leg—a tall pillar of dirty velvet—and another, another, another. He was moving past the window with a ponderous grace, outsized. I felt that he needed not a bigger room but a bigger planet. He turned when he picked up my strange new scent, his trunk weaving a hypnotic dance against the mesh, up and down. His tushes—the upper incisors, which in Tunga had gro
wn to tusks—were rough points against the thick wire. Several years ago, a keeper was walking past Packy, who was in a barred room. The bull casually reached through the bars with his trunk, grabbed the keeper’s arm, pulled him close, and crushed the limb against the bars with his skull, splintering the bone. Even with the heavy mesh protection, that sinuous trunk is disconcerting; Packy was looking me right in the eye, in a leisurely kind of way. Out of musth, he is usually a placid boy. But he is every inch the king of all the beasts.
There are between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand Asian elephants left in the world. Their gradual elimination in the wild is the result of a number of changes, most of them recent and a few subtle. The invention of the chain saw, for instance, made forest-clearing much easier and quicker work. But basically there is just not enough room in Southeast Asia for both elephants and people. The elephant’s jungle habitat is being replaced by cropland, and many of the crops are delectable to the now homeless elephant. The elephant raids the millet and sugarcane, and is killed for his efforts, and kills in turn: in India, nearly a hundred and fifty people are killed by elephants every year. Wild elephants are found from India to Indonesia; most inhabit shrinking parks and preserves, in shrinking populations, separated from each other by human settlements as uncrossable as an ocean. Bulls, being more aggressive, are killed far more often than cows. Not only does this deplete the gene pool, but the cows’ opportunities to breed grow fewer, and as the birthrate falls their mean age increases. Because elephants will feed on the youngest, most tender trees available, finding them the most appetizing, herds quickly denude small parks beyond the point of natural recovery. Several countries, notably Thailand and India, are attempting to conserve these insular environments and to confront the problems of the diminished gene pool and male-to-female ratio, but quite a few people in elephant biology wonder whether the wild elephant is past saving. (There are estimated to be a million elephants left in Africa; however, their numbers are also dropping.) Certainly its future, one way or another, resides in zoos.
The Washington Park Zoo is a century old. Its origin dates back to a pharmacist named Richard Knight, who found himself in Portland—then still something of a frontier city—with a brown bear and a grizzly on his hands. He gave them, with some relief, to the city, and thus began a zoo. In 1953, Austin Flegel, a Portlander who was working as an economic adviser in Thailand, was given a four-year-old female elephant as a gift, and sent her to Washington Park. She was housed in the zoo’s dilapidated camel barn and—Portland being the city of roses—was immediately named Rosy. Rosy’s advent caused the voters to approve a bond issue to build a new zoo—she led parades, attended store openings, and threw out the first ball at a Portland Beavers baseball game.
The zoo’s director, Jack Marks, wanted to build the ultimate modern zoo, where the animals would live in natural settings and rarely require handling by their keepers. Together with the architects Abbott Lawrence and Ernest Tucker, Marks travelled the country in search of ideas, and Lawrence and Tucker eventually designed a large, open zoo with grottoes and moats in place of cages and bars. In September of 1956, before the new zoo was finished, another elephant arrived. A Portland engineer named Orville Hosmer had gone to Vietnam to help rebuild a village destroyed by a flood, and in gratitude the villagers gave him a female calf named Tuy Hoa (pronounced Tee Wah).
Rosy and Tuy Hoa moved into their spacious new quarters in November of 1959. The move from the camel barn had to be effected by truck, and neither of the animals was particularly willing to clamber aboard. They finally did so only with the guidance of a pair of more experienced elephants—Belle and a bull named Thonglaw, both of whom belonged to an animal importer named Morgan Berry, a friend of Jack Marks. Berry was destined to play an essential role in Portland’s elephant future. He had imported four baby elephants (and a large number of other wild and exotic animals) some years before, and raised them in the basement of his house, in a residential neighborhood in Seattle. He later made a living with his own travelling elephant show and such odd jobs as helping to move Portland’s elephants. By 1961, when Belle was nine and Thonglaw fourteen, Berry wanted a little break. He lent both, along with Pet, then six years old, to Washington Park for a few winter months, planning to retrieve them in the spring. Berry suspected that Belle was pregnant by Thonglaw, and he thought he knew the date of conception; he had, after all, stood right next to Belle while Thonglaw mounted her. But the conventional wisdom of the time held that both animals were too young to breed successfully, and Berry kept his suspicions to himself. No elephant had been born in the United States in the previous forty-four years; no elephant bred in captivity here had ever survived.
Elephant reproduction is rather simple and elegant, and resembles human reproduction in certain ways: elephants bear single babies; assist each other in labor, birth, and the rearing of the young; and live in family groups. The cows have two human-size breasts on the upper chest. Males reach sexual maturity at the age of nine or ten; females can conceive as young as six. A cow’s most fertile years are from twenty-five to forty-five, after which she reaches menopause. The heavy, hidden matings of elephants have inspired fantastic and beautiful ideas; long treatises on the nature of love, lust, fidelity, and adultery among pachyderms; tales of poetry, yearning, and faith. Elephants were once said to have died from a broken heart; in fact, they do sometimes die suddenly, with no apparent cause, after separation from their loved ones. It is still widely believed that they mate only in privacy, or only under water, and in ancient times it was believed that male elephants fell in love with human women, particularly those who sold flowers or perfume. One such elephant courted a woman by laying apples on. her bosom. J. H. Williams, in Elephant Bill, his 1950 memoir of twenty years in Burmese elephant camps, wrote:
The mating of wild elephants is very private. The bull remains, as usual, outside the herd, and his lady love comes out where she knows she will find him.… They fall in love, and days, and even weeks, of courtship may take place.… When they have knocked off from the day’s work, they will call each other and go off together into the jungle.
In a more comprehensive work, Richard Carrington’s Elephants, the author states that the ancients believed that elephants copulated face to face: “This was regarded as additional proof of the animal’s wisdom and intelligence.… They will indulge in innocent dalliance, much as young human couples in spring.… Dalliance turns to serious love play, the female using all her wiles to bring the male to the peak of his desire … Anyone who has studied the way a female elephant encourages her lover by alternate advances and retreats, by provocative gestures of her body, and a teasing and erotic use of the trunk, will recognize her prowess as the Cleopatra of the animal world.”
Some elephant keepers wondered if elephants could breed successfully in captivity; Morgan Berry told anyone who would listen that they would breed only in natural conditions. Elephant science was an esoteric and undeveloped field in the early 1960s. No one was certain of the length of the gestation period, and almost nothing was known of the estrous cycle, because cows show no overt signs of fertility. Wild bulls were thought to mate throughout the year, since elephant calves are born in all seasons; what may appear to be a season—a preponderance of births in a few months’ time, for instance—can be tied to drought and famine, rather than to seasonal ovulation.
The only real experience with elephant reproduction came from the work camps of Southeast Asia, but the animals in such camps have never been systematically bred. Traditionally, they are released from their chains at night to wander the nearby forests and eat; the mahouts round them up each morning, having tracked each one by the sound of the bell around its neck. (After Jim Sanford returned from a trip to Thailand, he told me that the elephants sometimes used their trunks to stuff mud in the bells, which muffled the sound. “I wondered why they didn’t just tear the bell off,” he said. “Well, they get chastised for that. But stuffing mud in it isn’t against the rules.�
�) The cows mate at night with wild bulls, and the resulting calves are genetically sound and born to work. The working bulls are conditioned not to mate, according to Dr. Michael Schmidt, the Washington Park veterinarian. “Riders are afraid that if the bulls have total freedom of action and express sexual behavior, they will inevitably turn on the riders and kill them—which the bulls often do anyway,” he told me. “The riders will do whatever they can to control that. A young bull who has an erection is beaten. So young bulls get the idea that being interested in cows is too painful, and their libido decreases to the point where they are just not interested in mating if there are people around.”
In this country, bulls with erections are sometimes punished, but for a different reason. The mature bull elephant’s penis, which weighs more than forty pounds, is long and flexible; this enables it to reach the female’s cervix, at the end of a twisting, back-angled tube and well hidden from the world. The penis has tendons that allow it to make “searching” motions, from side to side and up and down, in the vaginal canal. I’ve watched Packy roaming around the yard with his penis fully extended and bumping against his hind legs as he seems to swagger for the viewing public. Such an unabashed offering by the male is deemed too great an embarrassment in most zoos and circuses. But the principal disincentive to elephant births in the United States is environmental. Many zoos keep only one or two elephants, and these are almost always cows; there have never been many mature bulls in this country. An unsocialized cow and a skeptical bull will be brought together as strangers, by keepers with no understanding of fertility; little wonder that the attempt has seldom been successful.
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