Musth occurs in Asian males beginning around the age of ten, and recurs once or twice a year. (Whether or not musth occurs in African elephants is a subject of considerable debate.) It is both a physical and a behavioral phenomenon. The first sign is usually drainage from the temporal glands (once called “musth vents”), which are on either side of the skull. The glands swell and then drain continuously; the distinctive dark streaks along the sides of the face are cues for caution. The ancients believed that elephants had pearls in their skulls, because the fluid can have a crystalline appearance, like salty tears. It was variously thought to be an antidote for poison, an aphrodisiac, an antiseptic, a tonic to grow hair.
A musth bull also dribbles urine constantly, and ceases to bathe himself, leaving his legs streaked and dirty. His blood levels of testosterone become abnormally high—high enough, Mike Schmidt believes, to interfere with healthy sperm production. The most immediate symptom of musth, though, and one that keepers are often able to spot before the temporal glands begin to drain, is a change in behavior. The bull will first exhibit restlessness, then aggression; finally, in musth’s full power, there is a drowsy, abstracted melancholy, full of motion. “As the intensity of musth increases, the elephant becomes more peevish and aggressive of temper,” reports the Indian naturalist Ramesh Bedi in his book Elephant: Lord of the Jungle, continuing, “He resents everyone. Even those who were nearest him and on whom he depended annoy him.” The elephant is “seized with frenzy and becomes ferocious,” wrote Strabo. The Encyclopædia of Islam describes the elephant character this way: “Normally of a playful disposition, and in fact addicted to jokes, it is terribly vindictive and has the ability to choose the best moment to wreak its vengeance.” The mahouts of Burma and Thailand tie their musth bulls near water and let them eat the ground bare; malnutrition eventually keeps the animals from sustaining musth. The mahouts of old had other remedies, such as feeding a bull in musth a pound of tobacco a day, or a coconut with opium hidden inside. Musth bulls are ur-elephants, restless with the need to orbit, pacing, swaying, swinging, searching, peering, ramming their heads against pillars and walls, their great sides heaving, tails swishing, trunks blowing—not in confusion but with a glittering concentration. They are psychotic.
In the wild, musth bulls range and fight; never still, they track their territory. In circuses and zoos, they must be isolated. Musth has condemned bull elephants—and, to a very large extent, elephant breeding—in this country. Dozens of young, healthy males have been executed, by gunshot, poison, and even hanging, and a few bulls are still executed each year for threatening or killing a keeper. Some of the dozens of bulls (and a few cows) that have been put to death in this country never hurt anyone; they simply frightened people too many times. They were guilty of making the obvious too glaring. Even at Washington Park, with the hydraulics, the crush, and the keepers’ experience, musth means danger. A cow named Susie had the end of her tail bitten off by Tunga in musth. A few years ago, when both Hugo and Packy were in musth, Hugo stuck the end of his trunk into Packy’s room. Packy—who is ordinarily, according to Roger Henneous, “an easily intimidated wimp”—immediately bit it off. For the next month, Hugo lived in the crush and was dosed with antibiotics, watered with a hose down his mouth, and fed. (“A bale of hay every day, by the handful,” Jay Haight recalls. “There’s a lot of handfuls in a bale of hay.”) Hugo, lightly dubbed Master of Disaster, once made a nearly successful murderous assault on Haight, who was standing in an empty room next to Hugo’s when the bull rammed the steel door between them with all his strength and barreled through it. “I jumped in time, or I would have had two broken legs from the door,” Haight told me. “I looked up and saw Hugo standing there with a ton of door on his head, still trying to harvest me.” Yelling for help, Haight grabbed a pellet gun and fired it at Hugo’s feet. (“Then he really got mad.”) The stinging pellets made the bull retreat, and other keepers were able to distract him while Haight escaped. But no grudges are held against the demented. Recently, I watched Haight give Hugo a massage in the crush, grabbing fistfuls of the dusty gray skin, an inch thick in places, and crooning fond obscenities. Hugo’s healed trunk, wormlike and deformed but still useful, scooped up carrots by the pound.
It is a zoo irony that musth lasts longer in a well-fed bull. “Our elephants are in superb physical condition,” Mike Schmidt says. Their condition is so good, in fact, that Tunga once held musth for eight months. For all the potential danger, the keepers are clear on one point: if a human being is hurt by an elephant, it’s the human being’s fault. The bulls “can’t help themselves,” the keepers tell me; musth is a force beyond the bulls’ reckoning.
After Morgan Berry turned Thonglaw, Belle, Pet, and Packy over to Washington Park, he moved to an eighty-acre farm near Woodland, Washington. In his sixties, living alone, he took with him ten elephants, seven of them bulls, and allowed them the freedom to roam much of the property. Berry’s friend and fellow animal trainer Eloise Berchtold used Teak, one of Berry’s bulls, in her traveling act. In 1978, she was in Toronto, due to perform, and all three of the bulls with her were showing signs of musth. Rather than cancel, she decided to work with Teak, who was normally a relaxed animal. Teak performed in front of several thousand people, and then, while he spun in a pirouette, Berchtold tripped and fell in front of him. Teak immediately turned and gored her with his tusks, pinning her to the ground. He stood guard over her body, refusing to move, and was finally shot by Canadian Mounties who had been called to the scene. Berry was grief-stricken. Berchtold had been his closest friend, and Teak a favorite. Thirteen months later, it was his turn.
No one witnessed his death. A neighbor, worried when Berry didn’t phone—as he did regularly—visited the farm with Kenneth Berry, and in a meadow by the barn they found the battered, flattened body under a bull named Buddha. Buddha was a big animal, very good at tricks. He could stand on his head and a single foreleg. But he had a reputation for unpredictability and bad temper. That day, his temporal glands were draining. Perhaps (as some of Berry’s friends believe) Berry had had a heart attack and the bull had tried to revive him; such things have happened. Kenneth Berry, who at the time was a primate keeper with the zoo in Seattle, was left with nearly a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of elephants to babysit, feed, and find homes for. Finally, with real regret, he destroyed Buddha, after months of trying to place him somewhere and failing. Washington Park—the only facility likely to be able to handle Buddha—refused. Tunga, a far more even-tempered bull, was the zoo’s legacy from Morgan Berry.
“Everyone wants to believe that he has the special secret to working with a musth bull,” says Schmidt. “But you can be with elephants until the day they decide to go after you and kill you, and that’s it. And when you go to Asia and look at the working elephants the mahouts will say, ‘This one’s killed four men, this one’s killed two, this cow’s killed three.’ And you say, ‘My God, what do you do?’ Well, they put another guy on, and back to work they go. We used to think that the mahouts knew how to work with these animals and that if we could only learn their secrets everything would be all right. But it’s a calculated risk. Our philosophy here is that you treat bulls pretty much the way you treat cows, except that you can go in with the cows and handle them, and you can’t do that with the bulls. But the bulls here are at least able to go anywhere in the facility, at any time. No other zoo in the world is run this way.”
THOUGH MUSTH HAS been recognized as long as human beings have been near Asian elephants, its biological purpose remains unknown. Some biologists have speculated that it constitutes a rut, or mating season, like the aggressive sexual period of the deer. This notion has recently been given play by Cynthia Moss and her associate Joyce Poole, who study African elephants on a small preserve in Kenya. In Moss’s book Elephant Memories, published in 1988, and in articles by Moss and Poole, the claim is made not only that musth is a rut but that a true musth occurs in African elephants, who also exhibit temporal gl
and secretion. Moss further states in her book that fertile females exhibit overt estrous behavior, including a particular gait. She also believes that musth bulls employ characteristic patterns of ear-waving and trunk gestures, and that they emit special sounds. She writes:
Both my data and Joyce’s on mating behavior indicate that females prefer mating with musth bulls and that they may actually exercise some choice in the matter.… I think it is worth considering that a female might come into estrus in response to a particular male being in musth, and in that case she may be exercising choice.
Mike Schmidt is impatient with these claims. “This is a problem in working with exotic animals in the field, and even in zoos,” he told me. “For some reason, people think they can get away with a lesser test of the validity of what they’re doing. If you have a theory stating that musth is rut, then you should have data that are in agreement with the theory—you should be able to demonstrate that all the bulls you are studying come into musth at the same time, because that’s what a rut is. It’s a seasonal thing. All the females will come into heat at that time, too.” Seated behind his desk, thinning hair neatly combed, his lab coat freshly pressed, Schmidt seemed the picture of reason. On a cupboard door behind him hung a calendar tracking the estrous cycles of the cows (“Pet OV, Hanako OV”)—a random overlay of sixteen-week periods. “We know that isn’t true of Asians,” he went on. “The females have independent cycles. They give birth all through the year—that’s been observed in both species, in the wild. So musth is not a rut. It’s primarily a phenomenon of aggression. When bulls are in the depths of musth, they’re absolutely incapable of breeding. We see a decline in the quality of the sperm late in musth. Now, that is certainly contrary to rut. They physically cannot bring normal mating to successful completion. They’re dopey, they’re somnolent. They may develop an erection, but they’re unable to control it.”
The temporal-gland secretion itself is fairly complex, with twenty major components in a changing ratio. “The gland is a chemical-communication gland, and it may also function as a means of excreting testosterone,” says Dr. Lois Rasmussen, a biochemist with a Ph.D. in neurochemistry who is working with the Washington Park elephants. “It may be multifunctional.” Dr. Rasmussen is Lois on academic papers, and Betsey or Bets face to face. For the past eight years, she has been searching for the elephant sex pheromone, that odd thing that tells Packy or Tunga when Pet or Hanako is ovulating, the occult substance that Mike Schmidt measures in his sniff tests. Bets Rasmussen looks less like a biochemist than a high-school physical-education coach. Thin and wiry, with close-cropped sun-bleached hair, she is also an avid scuba diver and wildlife photographer, and her skin is tanned a nut brown from long spells under the equatorial sun. In addition to her pheromone work, she is deeply interested in musth, and has collected references to it from all periods of recorded history. Even a prehistoric cave drawing of a mammoth shows the dark streaks of temporal-gland secretion.
“It’s important to note that there are two species of elephants, in separate genera,” she told me one hot afternoon last August. We were sitting, shoulder to shoulder, in her tiny office at the Oregon Graduate Center, a private research institute outside Portland. The walls were covered with posters and photographs of elephants—elephants mating, elephants walking, fetal elephants, elephants in various stages of dissection. “In one of these species—the Asian—musth has been recognized for hundreds and hundreds of years. In the other species, there has been some recent evidence of a musth-like phenomenon. But you can’t conclude that the two are the same, because the evidence is only starting to be gathered. You don’t just take a term out of the dictionary and plug it in somewhere else.” The first false assumption is that musth is a rut, she says, and the second is the application of that term to another species.
“Now, my experience is with Asians,” she continued. “If these two states are the same thing, we should see the same behavior in both species, and we don’t. If I take urine at certain times in the musth cycle, and make an extract, I get several reactions from the cows. There’s an intense reaction at first—the cow checks the spot out. After that, there’s an avoidance. Such data are not consistent with a cow’s being attracted to a male, or signaling that she’s getting ready to go into estrus. I remember watching Hugo in the viewing room when he was in very heavy musth. He was dribbling urine. We let him out and let the cows in, one by one. The first one in was Pet. Normally, she strolls around while she’s waiting for the others to come in. This time, she stopped dead, and she seemed—well, it’s anthropomorphizing, but she looked nervous, timid. She went around the room practically on tiptoe. Okay, in the early days of the attempts at breeding the elephants she was bred several times to Hugo when he was well into musth, and he tends not to breed then but to beat up the cows. He almost killed her one day. So she remembers the smell of that musth urine—which does smell horrible. Males avoid each other in musth. Cows avoid musth bulls, too. If cows are afraid of a musth bull, then how is musth a rut? It doesn’t make sense. Musth is not a rut.”
THE STUDY OF pheromones is a new one, as scientific studies go. The name wasn’t invented until 1959, and then only after considerable argument. The roots of the word are Greek for “carry” and “excite”—a good term for the myriad roles of these substances. Pheromones are chemicals used for communication among individuals of a single species. They are secreted as liquids and usually received as volatiles, and they constitute a conversation of sorts. Slime molds, algae, and fungi all use pheromones. Social insects, such as ants and bees, may use a dozen or more pheromones in a typical day—one to raise an alarm, another to mark a trail or a particular plant, another to signal social status or group membership. Barnacles collect on rocks and boats by following pheromone signals. When a honeybee stings, it releases a chemical that alarms nearby honeybees.
Pheromones are also used in combination. Research on the Oriental fruit moth shows that not just one chemical but five must be present in a critical ratio in order to attract a male. There are releaser pheromones, which (like the honeybee sting) cause rapid behavioral responses, and primer pheromones, which affect physiology and trigger developmental changes; the most famous example of these is the pheromone that enables a queen bee to suppress ovarian development in worker bees. One of the most dramatic characteristics of pheromones is what the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson calls their “efficiency”: they are among the most potent biologically active chemicals known, able to transmit complex information in tiny amounts over long distances for long periods. The Texas leaf-cutting ant, for instance, can point the way to food by leaving a trail some hundred yards long, which can be found and followed for months. The extreme dilution of the chemicals makes their identification exceedingly tedious for the researcher. The silkworm moth responds to only a few molecules of a certain chemical; hundreds of thousands of moths are needed to produce ten milligrams. Two hundred thousand fire ants must be sacrificed to collect a quarter of a milligram of a pheromone. Furthermore, many of the pheromones isolated so far have been new compounds.
Mammalian pheromones have proved much more difficult to identify than insect pheromones. Among mammals, pheromones have been clearly identified only in male pigs, in female marmosets and springboks, and in both male and female guinea pigs, hamsters, and mice—though it is thought that all mammals (with the possible exception of human beings) use them. In every species, it is the sex pheromones—with all they imply about behavior and free will, and the potential for use in husbandry—that are of the most interest. The typical exchange involves chemicals used by the female to attract the male; occasionally, the male will draw the female. Another insect example is that of an arrestant chemical found in certain mites and mosquitoes: it calls the male to an immature female and forces him to attend her until she is ready to mate. Pheromones exert a disturbing amount of control, fostering attraction, repulsion, a willingness to wait, to consort, to surrender. I was delighted when I first read of the male
pig’s pheromone: his salivary glands secrete a steroid related to testosterone, and when he spits in a sow’s face she immediately takes up a spread-leg position, ripe for the taking. (This same steroid, it happens, is found in truffles.) But, being a mammal myself, the longer I considered the possibilities the more uncomfortable I became.
Much of what I know of pheromones I have learned from Bets Rasmussen. If she succeeds in isolating an elephant sex pheromone, it could be a turning point in the fight to restore and preserve the species. She talks of the possibility of chemical “fences” in the wild to attract elephants to preserves and hold them there, and of a stimulant to encourage breeding in zoos and facilitate sperm collection for artificial insemination. There is, too, she admits, the joy of solitary research: the voyage into the unknown and the delight of discovery. “Mammalian pheromones are just now being isolated,” she explained. “Substances that were identified as pheromones in some of the early work have turned out to be impurities. Mammals are more complicated organisms than insects, and they have pheromones doing a variety of things. Even if you’re thinking just sex pheromones, you have to separate the mating process into its components: attraction, pre-copulatory behavior, actual copulation. There may be more than one pheromone acting at each stage.”
In 1976, Bets Rasmussen was raising two children while she did independent research on the interaction, in sharks and other primitive fish, of the brain and the cerebrospinal fluid. She lived in Pullman, Washington, where her husband, an atmospheric scientist, was teaching at Washington State University. In the lab one day, she met a biologist named Irven Buss, who was looking for an assistant.
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