Beginning in January of 1962, when Belle’s breast development made her pregnancy undeniable, a vigil was kept at Washington Park; no one knew when she might deliver, or how difficult the labor might be. It was a long wait. At 5:58 a.m. on April 14—a gestation, according to Morgan Berry’s dates, of 635 days—Belle delivered a male calf in good health, after an hour of active labor. Mother clamped the umbilical cord with her trunk, and Thonglaw promptly ate his congratulatory cigar. The event was front-page news across the country. Less than twenty-four hours after the birth, Berry received an offer for Belle and her baby—$30,000 from the Brookfield Zoo, outside Chicago. The next day, Berry offered the two suddenly famous elephants to the city of Portland for $20,000, payable within a month. 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 gr
ab 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 stand for a certain bull, whereas they will stand nicely for another one. Elephants are capable of forming that kind of relationship. They tend to have the same sorts 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 the Romans when I found a photo of Morgan Berry and Thonglaw the other day. Berry stood in front of the bull, who was seated on the ground, his front feet dangling high and Berry’s son, Kenneth, clinging to his back. All three seemed in a kind of repose, still for the camera, waiting to do the next trick.
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