Authors: Thomas French
In the midst of these upheavals, Char-Lee stood next to Tillie every day and looked up into the eyes of an animal already plotting her death. Both the young handler and the elephant were trapped in a system of dominance that was already outdated. Tillie had certainly suffered under free contact. Like so many other elephants, she too had been punished over the years and was still chained every night in the elephant house. None of this was her fault, or Char-Lee’s. Lowry Park’s management was aware of the changes sweeping through elephant care at other zoos. For the moment, though, Lowry Park was sticking with the old system. In 1993, the new zoo was busy celebrating its five-year anniversary. The focus, in those early years, was the conservation of threatened Florida species such as the manatee, a cause whose importance was undeniable. Lowry Park was already receiving the highest praise.
“I consider it to be one of the very best zoological parks of its size anywhere in the country,” said the chief administrative officer of the AZA.
The zoo’s budget, even smaller in those days, was already stretched by the massive expenses involved in the manatee care. There was little chance of scraping together the millions of dollars required to build the new facilities necessary to carry out protected contact. Besides, Lex Salisbury and others believed that with two cows and no bulls, the risk was minimal and manageable. Tillie and the other female, Minyak, had been working side by side with their keepers for years without serious incident.
Maybe Char-Lee wondered why protected contact hadn’t yet been adopted at Lowry Park. Maybe not. But she knew something was wrong. Tillie’s warnings began almost immediately after Char-Lee started working with her. One day in April, the elephant tried to edge her off a platform. That June, during one of the daily shows in front of the public, Tillie ignored Char-Lee’s commands and shoved the young trainer into the hip-deep water of the moat that bordered the performance area, and kept the elephants back from the crowds.
“No,” Char-Lee told Tillie, managing to keep her balance.
The aggression worried her enough that she talked about it with her supervisors. One of them later wrote her a note referencing “your incident with Tillie.” The supervisors were concerned too—so much that they took the unusual step of flying in a nationally recognized elephant handler from a Chicago zoo to review the procedures and talk with Char-Lee and the other elephant keepers. At home, Char-Lee put on a brave face. Her mother sensed that she was scared and was not telling her everything. Char-Lee didn’t want to worry her mother and felt she could not afford to look timid in front of her fellow keepers. It made no sense to Cheryl Pejack. Why was a novice being allowed to continue working with an elephant who was clearly testing her? Char-Lee weighed 105 pounds. Tillie weighed close to four tons. One night late that July, Char-Lee’s mother asked her daughter what she would do if one of the elephants attacked. “Are there guns there?” Pejack remembered asking. “Is there a place you can hide yourself?”
Char-Lee told her mother she would do what she could. When her little brother asked about her safety, Char-Lee reminded him that she carried a buck knife on her belt. Her mother couldn’t believe it. A knife?
“What’s that going to do?” Pejack said.
Char-Lee said she’d be fine. She felt privileged to work with such magnificent creatures.
The next morning, July 30, Tillie decided the moment was right. Char-Lee had just unchained her and was preparing to lead her out of the barn when Tillie knocked her to the ground and began to kick her. Char-Lee tried to crawl to safety, but the elephant repeatedly dragged her back with her trunk. A nearby keeper fought to pull the elephant away. By the time Tillie stopped, Char-Lee’s torso and lungs had been severely injured and much of her hair and scalp had been peeled from her head. As she waited for a medical helicopter to land on the grounds and fly her to nearby St. Joseph’s Hospital, she was still conscious. She said she couldn’t breathe. She asked about Tillie.
“Don’t hurt the elephant,” she said.
By the time her family reached the hospital, Char-Lee was dead. That day, she had been carrying the knife she’d talked about with her little brother. In her wallet, her family found a folded piece of paper with several lines of verse copied in Char-Lee’s cursive. The paper was yellowed. She had been keeping it for some time.
Mourn not for us, for we have seen the light . . .
Grieve but for those who go alone, unwise, to die in darkness . . .
Ten years after her death, photos of Char-Lee Torre still hung in the break room. One showed her with the two elephants she trained, including the one that would eventually kill her. In the photo, Char-Lee is beaming. Tillie towers beside her.
Outside one day, watching the elephants giving themselves another dust bath, Brian French saw something that made his heart lurch.
Msholo, the bigger of the two bulls, was testing the hot wires that created an electrified barrier around the elephant yards. The wires were so thin, they were almost invisible. But the elephants were aware of their presence and had even approached to touch them a few times, giving themselves a jolt. Now, as Brian watched, he saw Msholo weave his trunk through the space between the hot wires and reach toward a small live oak tree, planted at what everyone had thought to be a safe distance.
Brian immediately radioed the horticulture department to have the tree removed. If Msholo uprooted the oak, he could have pulled it through the hot wires, shorting them out and even possibly opening a hole. This hole would have only led the bull to another barrier—a thick cable fence, known to zoo designers as a ha-ha—that ran through the bottom of a deep trench. At Lowry Park, as at other zoos, the ha-ha served another function aside from containing the elephants. Because the fence stood lower than the rest of the grounds, it was easier to conceal it with bushes and other vegetation, reinforcing the illusion that almost nothing stood between the public and the animals.
Msholo’s reach for the tree reminded Brian just how closely the staff had to watch the elephants. His fears were far from imaginary. Elephants are skilled tool-users who pick up grass and branches to scratch their backs, clean their ears, wipe cuts, and even to cover the bodies of their dead. Sometimes, they stuff grass or leaves into the mouths of a fallen member of their herd, apparently trying to revive her. Holding a stone or a stick in their trunks, they have been known to draw in the dirt. In zoos, they can paint when given a brush and paper, and some of their abstract works have been auctioned at Christie’s and displayed in galleries. Whatever their artistic merits, elephants also have been known to wield tools as weapons, hitting people with sticks and throwing things at their cars. When park rangers in Africa opened a new road and used it for culls, elephants snapped branches and piled them into a makeshift roadblock. When the cull teams cleared away the branches, the elephants put them back, not just once but three more times.
Captive elephants have repeatedly demonstrated their ingenuity at overcoming human constraints on their freedom. They have dropped large rocks on electric fences to short them out. They’ve piled branches on similar barriers, knocked large trees onto them, even picked up smaller elephants and thrown them, just as they used Mbali as a battering ram in the boma. One morning in January 2004, not long before Brian caught Msholo reaching for the oak, an elephant named Burma hoisted a log from her paddock at the Auckland Zoo in New Zealand and dropped it onto an electric fence, shorting it out, and then broke through a gate. A married couple walking in a nearby park saw the elephant amble by and tried to talk to her, but she ignored them, possibly because they were speaking English and she only responded to commands in German, Maori, and Sri Lankan. Burma munched on leaves for about fifteen minutes before her keepers returned her unharmed, but not before she had proven once again that elephants had mastered at least the fundamentals of electricity.
“They’re so smart,” said Brian, gazing with admiration at Msholo and the others. He understood Lee Ann’s allegiance to the chimps, but he had trained primates, too, and had no doubt that elephants surpassed them. It was awe-inspiring to watch their minds process information, work out problems, experiment with solutions. The four orphans from Africa weren’t just probing the zoo’s security measures. They were testing every aspect of their new lives—the routines, the equipment, their keepers, even one another. By now, several months had passed since the four of them had been loaded off the 747 and stepped out of their crates into their stalls. For weeks, Brian had stayed with the elephants around the clock. In the other departments, his superhuman vigilance immediately entered him into the urban lore of the zoo. Noting how rarely he was seen in the rest of the zoo, people began to talk about him as though he were some phantom hybrid of the Elephant Man and Mary Poppins.
If PETA’s propaganda was right and the elephants were Brian’s prisoners, then he was their prisoner too. When he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer, he would turn off every light and crash on the cot in the hall, plummeting into unconsciousness even as he listened for movement from the stalls on the other side of the double doors. Some nights his sleep was interrupted by trumpet blasts; other times he woke to rumbles that he felt as much as heard. Whatever roused him, he would force himself out of the cot and shuffle into his office, no matter the hour, to stare bleary-eyed at the feeds from the night-vision cameras. In front of him, in the dark, a new herd was forming.
In those first days, wildness radiated off the new arrivals. Msholo and the others didn’t act like circus elephants or zoo elephants such as Ellie. Though they allowed their keepers to draw near, they were restless and uncertain. Brian kept them in separate stalls so they wouldn’t take out their anxieties on one another. Three of them—Msholo, Sdudla, and Mbali—had grown up together in Hlane. Matjeka came from Mkhaya and was relatively new to the others, though they had spent months together in the boma. Ellie didn’t know what to make of any of them and kept her distance. When they drew close to the thick bars that divided their stalls and extended their trunks to smell her, she’d cry out and back away. Who could blame her? Though they were from the same species, Ellie and the Swazi elephants spoke entirely different languages. She was attuned to humans and to their commands, while they communicated as though they were still on the savanna. After a few days, though, they all began to relax. Soon Brian was putting the two bulls together at night, giving them a chance to bond like other young males in a bachelor herd back in the bush, and pairing Matjeka and Mbali in a single stall too. He tried different configurations, looking to see which was the most harmonious. As Ellie calmed down and got to know the others, Brian tried putting her with Mbali, and then with Matjeka. Brian was already memorizing everything about the elephants—the way each of them moved, the way they thought, the sounds they made when they were hungry or irritated. He didn’t need to peer up at their faces to know who was who. By now he recognized them from the curve and color and length of their tusks, from their posture and attitude and the notches and veins on their ears and the way they held their trunks.
“I can tell ’em apart,” he said, “even by looking at their legs.”
When Brian wanted to read their mood, he didn’t look to their faces first. The anatomy of an elephant’s face renders it much less expressive than, say, the face of a human or a chimp or even a dog. Their eyes are small and not particularly revealing, although an experienced handler or trainer can judge the level of alertness by how wide the eyes are open. Because elephants have no tear ducts, excess secretions flow down their cheeks, often giving the mistaken impression that they are crying. Any facial expression is typically overshadowed by the movement of the elephant’s ears and trunk. Elephants that are excited or angry tend to flap their ears with more vigor. When they relax, their ears relax as well. They signal wariness by raising their heads, spreading their ears and holding them open, and extending their trunks in a “J” shape, with the tip pushed forward to gather olfactory information about whatever or whomever has raised their guard. When they want to show slight irritation, they tap their trunks on a smooth flat surface, similar to how humans drum their fingers when they’re bored.
Day after day, Brian pieced together the clues, gaining traction on the personality and character of each elephant. Msholo, the big bull, was strong and already showed interest in breeding. Whenever possible, he gravitated toward the females and sniffed their urine to see if they were in estrus. Early on, though, Brian noticed that Msholo deferred to the other bull. Sdudla was extremely smart and a fast learner. Already he was finding his way through the routines of the zoo and the expectations of his keepers. As the dominant bull, Sdudla was more aggressive and did not let Msholo or any of the elephants boss him. Everywhere he went, his presence carried an extra charge.
“There’s a little more pressure around,” said Brian. “He pushes back.”
Msholo and Sdudla had been competing almost since the day they arrived. In elephant herds, only the dominant male has breeding privileges. Out in the yards, the two bulls would butt heads to impress the females. The contest swung back and forth. Sdudla ruled at first, but then one day he pushed his rival too far. They got into a brawl, and Msholo stood up for himself, and suddenly the balance of power tipped in his direction.
Mbali provided comic relief to the male posturing. At first she acted shy, almost demure. In the mornings, when the staff opened the gates to the yards and the other elephants hurried forward, Mbali hung back. She’d take a step or two out into the sunlight, then change her mind and turn around. For hours, she would stand at the doorway, reluctant to either venture out or return to her stall. She soon got past her timidity and assumed the role of the group’s spoiled and slightly mischievous teenager. She liked to snatch things out of the keepers’ hands and sometimes out of the other elephants’ trunks. When the bigger animals were browsing on a tree branch that had been cut for them, she would sneak up and grab the branch and run away.
As the only elephant from Mkhaya, Matjeka was having trouble fitting in. When she stood near the others, she almost always positioned herself with her tail facing them, a sign of submission. Even though she was bigger and older than Mbali and should have outranked her, Matjeka had been relegated—or had relegated herself—to the bottom of the hierarchy.
“An outcast,” Brian called her.
Ellie, so accustomed to humans, was the easiest to read. Brian kept a mental inventory of her likes and dislikes. Ellie didn’t like female keepers. She quavered if a grasshopper landed near her feet. If she heard a truck driving by, she was fine. But the sound of a tractor set her on edge. As the months passed, Brian had also noted an empathy in Ellie not unlike what the primate keepers had observed so often with Herman. Perhaps this was not surprising, given that both the elephant and the chimp had been raised by humans and had imprinted on them instead of their own species. Herman’s empathy had led him to reach out to the lowly Bamboo. Now Ellie’s declared itself in the kindness she offered to the most woeful member of her group. The keepers saw Ellie browsing beside Matjeka, standing close to her, even looking out for her. When little Mbali grew feisty and tried to take advantage of Matjeka, Ellie would step in to defend her companion.
Although Ellie still had a great deal to learn about being an elephant, the keepers could see her confidence surging, especially with Matjeka. Though they had come from opposite corners of the world and had known each other only a short time, the two females were rapidly growing into sisters. Every day they walked out together into the sun-drenched yards. At night, they were content when the keepers placed them in adjoining stalls and allowed them to sleep side by side. One had been in exile all her life. The other was an outsider. It was possible that they recognized something in each other—a social awkwardness, a sense of not belonging. Lifelong friendships had been built on less.
Ellie was guiding Matjeka and the others through the basics of zoo life, showing them how to stay calm when the humans touched their trunks or exfoliated their skin with brushes. For captive elephants to remain healthy, skin care was almost as important as their foot care. One of the most crucial things Ellie demonstrated was how to relax inside the ominously named Elephant Restraint Device, better known as an ERD. Located in the back of the elephant building, behind the stalls, the ERD was an updated version of the handmade equipment the behavioral specialists in San Diego had used to work safely with Chico. A giant metal box with thick bars and moveable walls, the ERD looked a bit like a big cage, except that nobody at the zoo uttered that word out loud anymore. The staff preferred to call the ERD by its more common nickname, the Hugger. To help the elephants grow accustomed to the Hugger, Brian and the other keepers made it an inescapable part of their daily routine. The elephants ate some of their food while standing in it. They walked through it to reach the yards and back through it again to return to their stalls. Every time an elephant entered the Hugger, a keeper pushed a green button, and the side walls closed in so that the elephant couldn’t make any big movements. Keeping the animal relatively still was essential if the staff was to safely work up close, reaching through openings in the bars to bathe it, to train it with conditioning, to draw blood and urine and work on its feet and skin, to teach it how to inhale water into its trunks and then exhale it back again so that the fluids from inside could be tested for tuberculosis. Elephants are at special risk for TB. Over the years, several have died from it in captivity.
In a few weeks the zoo would use the Hugger to hold Ellie in place while the German specialists performed her artificial insemination. To some, it might have seemed odd to go to such lengths to produce another elephant calf in the United States when southern Africa overflowed with elephants. But Lowry Park’s recent experience, importing the four juveniles from Swaziland, had shown just how complicated and controversial, not to mention expensive, that process could be. For months, the zoo had been monitoring the level of luteinizing hormone (LH) in Ellie’s blood. Many female mammals experience an increase in LH just before they ovulate. Female elephants are unusual because their menstrual cycle, which lasts from fourteen to sixteen weeks, is keyed to a double LH surge. When the first surge hits, the second wave typically follows twenty-one days later, triggering ovulation and preparing the uterus for implantation of a fertilized egg. Researchers do not yet fully understand the function of the first LH surge; possibly it alters the cow’s scent to alert bull elephants that she will soon be ready to conceive. Whatever function nature intended, the first surge was tremendously useful to any zoo hoping to schedule an artificial insemination. Once the initial surge showed up in the blood tests, it was almost certain that the cow would ovulate exactly three weeks later.