Violation: Collected Essays. Sallie Tisdale
of problems that all complex, intelligent animals have—like the primates, and ourselves.”
Schmidt allows the elephants whatever accommodations they need, which may mean a night alone in a yard for one pair and a private room for another. Tunga, having been brought up as a show animal, won’t approach a cow in front of human beings. “Elephants—particularly the older animals—are not like cattle, where you have a female in heat and you bring in a bull and he jumps up and breeds her,” Schmidt explained. “There’s a chemistry between elephants. A really experienced bull doesn’t like it when a cow doesn’t act the way an experienced cow ought to—when her response is abnormal, to put it in scientific terms. The bull will often become immediately aggressive if the cow is behaving strangely. She may not know what to do. But a young bull doesn’t care—a young, eager, excited bull will try to breed any cow he can. The difficulty the younger bulls have is that older cows can dominate them, because they’re bigger or wiser. If the cow doesn’t want to cooperate, a young bull doesn’t have the equipment and the technique and the size to assert himself, whereas an older bull will sort the situation out in a hurry.”
By November of 1974, Thonglaw had sired fifteen calves, of whom twelve survived. He would not submit to chains in order to undergo foot care, and had consequently suffered from foot problems for years. Schmidt resolved to do something about this, and after consulting Morgan Berry he decided to tranquilize the elephant—always a risky procedure. To everyone’s dismay, Thonglaw died under sedation. (The crush was developed and built as a kind of memorial to Thonglaw, to spare future elephants the same risk.) Packy, then twelve, became the patriarch. He has since fathered seven calves.
“Packy makes it clear what he wants,” Schmidt told me. “We’d be afraid to put Tamba in with Packy, because he seems to dislike her, and he’s so much bigger than she is. She would tend to fight him a bit—to think that she shouldn’t have to do what he wants. Tamba’s sort of imprinted on people.” Neither will Packy mate with Belle, his mother. “I think that he knows she’s his mother,” Schmidt said, “but I can’t prove it.”
I have never seen a pair of elephants mate—few people have—and I suspect that if I had the opportunity I would turn my back. I was shown a series of photographs of such an occasion, and I felt like a voyeur, a trespasser into private territory. In the photographs, the bull begins by laying his trunk across the cow, guiding her gently against a wall, stroking her until she assumes a spread-leg stance. It is too intimate, this soft control, the stolid acceptance by the female, and then the unexpectedly human posture. He plants himself behind her, upright and stately. It took me a moment to place that dignity; it is Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god of wisdom. The bull stands erect and bows his head to his work with all the concentration of a man and all the power of a god.
TUESDAYS ARE BLOOD-SAMPLING days here. Early on a summer morning, before the zoo’s gates opened and the crowds arrived, I watched while Jim Sanford and Jay Haight performed their deft art. They visited Hanako and Tamba first, in a room at the far end of the hall. The giant animals seemed genuinely glad to see them and immediately moved close to greet them. Haight carried an ankus, a tool that looks something like a boathook and is used to guide and control the elephant, and laid it lightly alongside Hanako’s trunk, taking hold of her fleshy, triangular lower lip with his free hand. “She likes me to hold her,” he told me. “It keeps her calm. She’s not wrapped too tight.”
Hanako stood still and patient for a moment, then began stroking Haight with her trunk, waved it in my direction—I was standing safely outside the hydraulic door, which was opened a foot or two—and finally swung it to her side, stroking Sanford’s trousers. Sanford pulled out the fan of her thin-skinned ear, rippled with veins, and poked a small needle into the largest, a gentle line running like a riverbed from top to bottom. The needle lodged in place, and he held a vial to catch the steady drops. Hanako’s trunk continued its undulations, from Haight to the unfamiliar air around me and on to Sanford. When the vial was full, Sanford pulled out the needle, stepped through the door, and took two bananas from a box.
“Tamba, get back, get back!” he shouted at the younger cow, who had rushed forward in her eagerness for fruit. He moved to Hanako. “Trunk!” She swung the floppy member aside, and Sanford shoved the bananas in whole.
Tamba was restless. “She knows she’s gonna get a stick and a treat,” Sanford explained. “She’s a happy camper. She’s a doll.” Tamba moved over to the door opening. She threw her trunk above her head like a lady flinging open a parasol; her mouth opened wide, presenting me with a giant pink cavity framed by two bright, intelligent eyes. Her tushes, short and dull, were at the front of a set of enormous molars, each nine inches long and weighing about four pounds. Her throat dropped away from me into blackness, the pale-pink tongue, as large as a loaf of bread, damp and vibrating with life. Sanford reached in and massaged her tongue, grabbing it with a firm hand and scratching its rough surface. Tamba seemed to sigh with pleasure at the touch. The men traded places, Haight moving to Tamba’s ear while Sanford held her trunk. As they worked, they swore cheerfully, insulting each other and the animals, disparaging clothes, looks, and heredity with equal zest. Tamba wiggled her head, trying to watch, and Sanford, tall enough to meet her at the eye level, yelled in her ear, “Get your head down, or I’ll get all over you like a cheap suit!”
Roger Henneous ducked in the door, carrying an electronic thermometer. Steadily, half bored, he took Tamba’s skin temperature while Haight drew blood. Behind Henneous, Hanako bobbed gracefully. She rubbed her head against his back, the bulbous gray easily dwarfing the man in his brown uniform. Henneous ignored her, but I couldn’t: I ventured too close to the door, and she was distracted by me, by my new smell, and came to press her trunk against me. It was a wet, bristly live thing, like the head of an anxious reptile, and she inhaled me in a rush of wind. By the time Haight stepped between us, scolding me for my reckless move, she had kissed tight to my shoe and was marching purposefully up my leg.
More cows were waiting in the viewing room, and the keepers rushed to finish before the zoo gates opened. This is the first place that people come, to see the elephants. Several feet inside the glass panel are widely spaced bars as thick as a man’s arm; because Chang Dee was small enough to slip through the bars, four chains were strung between them. Sunshine held perfectly still while the keepers bled her ear. “She loves being treated like a grownup,” Sanford said, and rewarded her with two bunches of blackened bananas. Chang Dee reached for the fruit with his undersized trunk, and Sunshine marched away, bananas held high.
Elephants have many voices: they trumpet, rumble, squeal, growl, roar, snort. While Haight was patting Rosy under the “forearm,” a high metallic whine began. “I gotta get some grease—she needs oiling,” he said, laughingly, and only then did I realize that the whine was elephant speech. Rosy, Pet, Me-Tu, and Sunshine began to cry together, a shrill, stridulous, and very loud clamor rolling through the high-ceilinged room. It was an almost painful yet beautiful noise, split by belly rumbles, birdlike eeks and squawks, and the ululating song of whales. The men paid no attention and drew blood from Rosy’s wrinkled ear, their voices raised above the din. Sanford scratched his back with the ankus and watched Chang Dee try, for the hundredth time, to climb over the chains strung between the bars. As suddenly as it had started, the squealing stopped. In the silence, Sanford began singing a Chuck Berry song to Sunshine, and the elephants joined in. There were wet exhalations, belches, growls and grunts, a repeating sonar blip, a keening whistle. The men passed out rewards, and Sanford gave Pet three bunches of bananas. Why three, I asked him, when the other cows got two?
“Because she’s Pet,” he answered with a grin. “They don’t get any better than that.”
IN ALL WORK with Asian elephants, there is one limit—the puzzling circumstance of musth. Cow elephants, and bulls out of musth, can be dangerous; the casual motions of the keepers in stroking an unchained cow mask a constant caution. But musth bulls are deadly. Knowing this, one sees in a new light historical references to the use of elephants. In the Rome of Pliny’s time, people would sit down to a banquet, and then a ceremonially dressed elephant, picking its way through the crowd, would come and take its place at the table. I’m sure it was an uncommon spectacle—the gargantuan guest swaying past the seated diners. But what a risk! I thought of