Violation: Collected Essays. Sallie Tisdale
A citizens’ committee was formed, and money began to trickle in: schoolchildren donated nickels; unions made donations from pension funds; charity car washes, bowling tournaments, square dances were held. The thriving baby, already accustomed to long lines of sightseers willing to wait hours for a two-minute view, was named Packy in a radio-station contest. Before the deadline had passed, Berry closed the deal and threw in Thonglaw and Pet for nothing. Thonglaw, during his extended winter vacation, had mated several times, and almost immediately the keepers realized that Rosy was pregnant; a few weeks later, they discovered that both Tuy Hoa and Pet were pregnant as well. Thonglaw’s dynasty had begun.
WHEN MICHAEL SCHMIDT, fresh from the University of Minnesota, arrived at Washington Park in 1973 to serve as the veterinarian, there were eight elephants in residence: Rosy and her daughter, Me-Tu; Tuy Hoa and her daughter, Hanako; Thonglaw; Belle; Packy; and Pet. Both Pet and Hanako were pregnant. Thonglaw had sired ten calves; eight had survived, and all but Hanako and Me-Tu had been given or sold to zoos and circuses. Portland was elephant-happy. Packy had a birthday party every year, at which thousands of people cheered him on as he ate a forty-pound cake of whole wheat, carrots, and peanut butter. The zoo was developing an adoption program, encouraging businesses and groups to pay the cost of feeding a particular elephant for a year at a time.
“When I arrived, I had no special interest in elephants,” Schmidt confessed to me one morning. We were in his office at the animal hospital, a flat-roofed inconspicuous building set in a draw filled with ferns and willow trees, behind the beaver and otter exhibits. “But you have to, here. This place was unique—the only place in the Western Hemisphere actually breeding elephants, and it had been the only place for years. We’re still the only zoo with second-generation births. This was the biggest thing that this small zoo in the West was doing, and it was outdoing the Bronx Zoo and the San Diego Zoo and all the others in a very difficult task. So it wasn’t a matter of whether or not to get involved—you’d better get involved.”
Schmidt began teaching himself elephant medicine. He quickly discovered that Washington Park’s success was something of an accident; no one really knew why Portland’s elephants bred and other zoos’ elephants did not. Schmidt began the first methodical testing of the elephants, making daily observations. He wanted to understand their reproduction and ultimately—by still undiscovered techniques of artificial insemination—increase it. One of the few things that were known about elephant reproduction by that time was the estrous cycle. In 1971, three biologists who had studied plantation elephants in Sri Lanka published a paper concluding that the elephant ovulates every twenty-two days. A second paper described a behavior seen in the bulls—an elaborate gesture in which the trunk is placed in a spot of urine and curled into the mouth. The authors called it urine testing, and suspected that the bull was checking cow urine for signs of fertility. Schmidt began seeing the gesture, too. “No one was paying any attention to this behavior,” he told me. “I looked at it and thought, Well, that’s certainly a way to tell if the bull is interested in a particular cow.”
Schmidt thought that the attractant had to be a pheromone of some kind, and he invented the sniff test, making use of the elephant barn’s hydraulic doors, which can be opened an inch at a time. The sniff test is a rather impolite but simple method of allowing a bull contact with a cow without endangering either cow or keeper. In a sniff test, Schmidt and the keepers place a bull on one side of a door opened wide enough for a trunk, and back a cow up to the opening on the other side. The cow holds still—usually with a placid patience but sometimes with a keeper’s encouragement—while the bull checks her urine and urogenital secretions with his trunk. Schmidt keeps track of the length of time the bull seems interested. “We didn’t know if the cows would get upset by being backed up to a bull, or what the bull would do, and so forth,” he told me. “It turned out that young Packy was quite interested in breeding and in the cows, and very happy to check them. And the cows, once they’d figured out what we were doing—well, it was fine with them, no big deal. I started to make daily observations, which we have done, with only a handful of missed days, since the fall of ’74.” Schmidt was surprised by what he found: peaks of intense interest in a particular cow for a few days, followed by months of indifference. “And these were known breeding cows,” he explained. “They’d all been pregnant and given birth, so they had estrous cycles. Something was fishy about the published estrous cycle. It sure couldn’t be twenty-two days.”
Schmidt’s wife, Anne, who is a research biologist at the zoo, had done serum-hormone assays on the zoo’s African lions, and had mapped the lion ovulatory cycle by noting changes in the levels of hormones in the blood. She suggested that the same might be done with the elephants, and Mike began drawing blood from the cows. He used a vein in the leg or the ear, laboriously bleeding each cow himself once a week, until Roger Henneous couldn’t stand it any longer. “Roger said, ‘I could do that.’ I said, ‘Okay, Roger, go ahead,’ sure that he couldn’t. But damned if he didn’t get a vein the first time. After that, the keepers did it.”
Over several months, Schmidt noticed patterns in the hormone levels, including a sixteen-week cycle of progesterone. The sniff-test results correlated with the progesterone cycle in a ratio “too good to be true,” Schmidt told me. “The bull is interested in the cow at the nadir of progesterone—about a four-week period—and especially at the few days around ovulation. The cow ovulates, and the progesterone starts to climb. The estrous cycle turns out to be about sixteen weeks long—the longest of any mammal by far.” The cow is willing to be bred for only a few days during her cycle: ovulation is a brief event, and the egg is viable for only about twelve hours. Schmidt tried mating three cows by cycle, placing each with a bull in a private room for several days of the magic period. All three became pregnant. “The pheromone was exactly, beautifully inverse to the progesterone,” he said. “You never see anything that clear, ever. There were some jokes about it, actually, because it did look too good to be true. But we had enough data so that we didn’t have to worry.”
Schmidt is a careful man, never without a neat lab coat, and slow to offer a smile. But now he did. “At this time we were doing this work, the San Diego Zoo was using elephant urine to determine hormone levels,” he continued. “One of its endocrinologists presented a paper on this work at a conference, in the course of which he said, ‘Well, we all know that you can’t get blood samples from elephants.’ Now, that’s true of okapis and hippos and rhinos, and I think it’s great to develop urinary techniques for animals like that, because trying to get a weekly blood sample would be impossible. But elephants are domesticated animals as well as wild animals. The people in San Diego couldn’t get blood samples from elephants, so they assumed that nobody could. But a veterinarian can do much more with elephants than with other animals. Elephants are intelligent; they have an arm and a hand, and being able to manipulate the environment accelerates the development of that intelligence. You can go into the cages with them. You can’t do that with tigers, or polar bears, for example. You can’t do that kind of work with a lot of species. You certainly can’t get a bird to stand still and hold its wing up while you get a blood sample every week. You have to grab the bird, hold it down, it’s struggling—whereas an elephant can be trained to stand there while you get a blood sample, and you give her an apple when you’re done, and she thinks she’s getting a bargain.”
It is also Mike Schmidt’s job to act as matchmaker to the elephants. One of his concerns is genetics; the herd at Washington Park represents a limited gene pool. Of the twenty-four calves born there, nineteen have survived. Two of the dead were the offspring of Packy and Hanako, who are brother and half sister, and one was the offspring of Thonglaw and his daughter Hanako. (The two other deaths were apparently due to random congenital defects.) Such close genetic pairings are no longer made, although Packy and his half sister Me-Tu have twice reproduced without any problems. Schmidt must consider not only the elephants’ degree of relatedness but also the age and experience of both cow and bull, their relative size, whether the bull is in musth, and the personalities involved. Some cows have expressed strong opinions about certain bulls, and the bulls, while somewhat less discriminating, also have their preferences.
“When mating goes on, the cow has to cooperate,” Schmidt said. “The bull has to be on good terms with that cow. We’ve seen enough cases where a bull doesn’t like a specific cow, or cows won’t