Zoo Story Page 14

  “As soon as I saw it wasn’t Rango,” Lex said afterward, “I knew it wasn’t going to be a problem, because the females we can walk right up to.”

  In the zoo world, orangutans are known as escape artists. Typically much calmer and quieter than chimps, they are inquisitive and love to spend hours figuring out how to put things together or take them apart. Their species practices these engineering skills high in the jungle canopies of Indonesia, where they have been observed tying branches and vines together and manipulating the tension of saplings to move more easily through the trees. In zoos, they are famed for their ability to devise ingenious ways of slipping from their enclosures. According to Eugene Linden, author of The Octopus and the Orangutan, they sometimes make handcrafted tools to escape captivity. One orang used a wire to pick a lock, and another used a piece of cardboard to dislodge a security pin that held the doors of his cage closed. Others have proven their skill at unscrewing bolts. “Orangutans,” Linden writes, “have made insulating gloves out of straw in order to climb over electrified fences.”

  In the twelve years since Rudy’s field trip on top of the orang building, there had been no particularly memorable escapes. A turkey got out one day, and guinea fowl were known to sneak from their pens and strut with impunity through the grounds, prompting the staff to send out an alert on their walkie-talkies.

  “Code One, rooster,” they’d say, stifling giggles.

  No one joked about the possibility of an elephant Code One, especially since the arrival of the four wild juveniles from Swaziland. Elephants were extremely unpredictable, especially ones who were unaccustomed to captivity, and their size and strength made them difficult to stop or bring down. When they broke free of their handlers at circuses or in parades, they sometimes went berserk, bulldozing through fences and into traffic, killing anyone in their path, even after they had been shot multiple times. To make sure that everyone on the staff knew what to do in case one of the elephants escaped, Brian French had posted a set of Code One recommendations on bulletin boards.

  Do not approach animal, hide behind something, i.e. tree, vehicle, building, etc.

  Do not fall down when getting away. This is what they look for when attacking.

  Do not try to scare animal to direct it, it will take this as a challenge and likely charge. (Females will be more likely to complete the charge and males will likely stop about 10 feet short, but do not hold your ground, get out of sight, they can run 32 mph for about 10 minutes.)

  If elephant is out of sight of its building, it will likely have to be shot, so all gun-trained staff (ACs, curators, vet) should be equipped with appropriate weapons. (We do have tranquilizers strong enough for elephants but can only be used in certain situations.)

  Clearly the possibilities were awful. The perimeter fence, which ran only a few yards from the elephant building, would not present a serious obstacle. If an elephant went on a rampage, it would not take more than thirty seconds for the animal to break through and charge into neighboring backyards. By the time the weapons team was summoned, the elephant could easily be deep into the neighborhood.

  In case anyone at Lowry Park needed reminding as to how dangerous elephants could be, a wall of the keepers’ break room was adorned with a memorial to Char-Lee Torre, the handler killed by an elephant. Char-Lee had worked at Lowry Park in the early 1990s, not long after the new zoo opened. Like so many keepers, she grew up with animals and was constantly rescuing cormorants and turtles and iguanas. When one of her animals died, she would preside over a funeral in the backyard. When she was hired, she had just received a degree in education from the University of South Florida. She was interested in conservation.

  “The night before she died,” remembered her mother, Cheryl Pejack, “we were talking about her getting a bachelor’s degree in zoology.”

  Char-Lee wanted to be the curator of a zoo. But at twenty-four, she knew she had to prove herself. Not long after she arrived at Lowry Park, she had been offered a chance to become an elephant trainer and work with Tillie, an Asian elephant who had spent most of her life in captivity. Around Tampa, Tillie was a minor celebrity. Aside from performing in shows every day at the zoo, she starred in television commercials for Bob’s Carpet Mart, where she was shown walking across carpet to prove the fabric’s toughness. At the time, Lowry Park’s elephant handlers worked side by side with the elephants, escorting them to and from the elephant building and guiding them through their daily performances, signaling them to raise their trunks and stand on their hind legs and turn in circles. For all her obedient displays, however, Tillie had begun acting erratically, repeatedly nudging and pushing Char-Lee.

  The incidents followed a pattern frequently observed with Asian elephants contemplating a fatal attack on a keeper. According to a survey of elephant care managers from around the country, African elephants tend to lash out suddenly, while Asian elephants typically show more patience, waiting for the right moment to strike. Often they give warnings, shoving their keepers against a wall or flicking them with their tails. Sometimes the elephants are testing their keepers, assessing whether they’re weak enough to be nudged aside in the hierarchy; sometimes they simply don’t like the human assigned to care for them. New trainers, still learning the moods and personalities of their elephants, are particularly vulnerable. It would not have been surprising, then, if Tillie was contemplating a move against her new trainer. Char-Lee was not just the most inexperienced member of the elephant-care staff but also the youngest and smallest. And although she tried to be as commanding a presence as possible, Char-Lee exuded a gentleness that would have made it difficult for her to assert dominance over a thirty-three-year-old elephant. By the time she was introduced to Char-Lee, Tillie had spent three decades in captivity and was infinitely more experienced at judging the power dynamics between her species and humans. Tillie had been at Lowry Park, watching keepers come and go, for more than five years. Moved between institutions and owners most of her life, she had been studying a long line of handlers and had been assessing their strengths and weaknesses literally since Char-Lee was in kindergarten. How long would it have taken Tillie to size up her new trainer? A week? A day?

  That spring, as Char-Lee struggled to assert her authority over Tillie, elephant-care managers across the country were sounding warnings at the alarming rate of deaths among keepers working free contact. The movement was already under way to abolish free contact and replace it with protected contact. Originally developed by animal behavioral specialists at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, the new protocol radically challenged the methods humans had used to train elephants for thousands of years.

  San Diego had decided to try the new safety protocol after the death of one of their own elephant keepers and after a particularly ugly scandal over the park’s treatment of its elephants. In 1988, the city erupted over the revelation that some of San Diego’s handlers had beaten a disobedient elephant for days with ax handles while she was chained and screaming. Backed up by their superiors, the handlers defended the beating by arguing that it had been necessary to bring a dangerous elephant to heel. Without physical discipline, they said, more keepers would die.

  Protected contact, modeled after training methods used with killer whales, showed another way. Keepers would not step into an enclosure with the elephants. A barrier would always stand between them, allowing a handler to back safely away if an elephant became aggressive. Positive reinforcement and operant conditioning would guide every action. If an elephant followed a command, he would be rewarded with an apple. No more beatings. No more screaming. The worst thing that would happen to an uncooperative elephant would be for the keeper to withhold attention. Essentially, physical discipline would be replaced by a time-out. The elephant would always have a choice, and the keeper would no longer have to become the matriarch. The system was more humane for the elephants and much safer for the humans.

  Skeptics scoffed, saying that elephants were not cocker spaniels who could be bribed
with a biscuit. But a test run, conducted over months with some of San Diego’s most intractable elephants, proved otherwise. One subject, a twelve-thousand-pound African bull named Chico, was considered the park’s most dangerous elephant. He was so aggressive, his keepers risked their lives every time they went near him. He had been chained for years. Inside a zoo, caring for an elephant’s feet is essential. Their toenails and the thick skin on the soles of their feet require regular pedicures, because elephants tend to walk much shorter distances than they would in the wild, and their foot pads grow faster than they wear down. If the pads aren’t trimmed, the skin can crack and develop an infection that sweeps through the rest of the body—the leading cause of mortality in captive elephants. The San Diego staff was so terrified of Chico, no one had dared give him a pedicure in years.

  When the team of behavioral specialists decided to try protected contact with Chico, they cut some openings, fitted with doors that locked, in the high gate of the African bull yard. A bar was welded over the top of the gate so Chico couldn’t get to them with his trunk. Then, using sliced apples and carrots and praise, they trained Chico to raise his feet, one at a time, into a cradle fashioned beside one of the openings in the gate, so the staff could reach his toenails and footpads. Sometimes the bull reverted to his old aggression and charged. When he was truly angry, he would lunge up onto the wall, roaring and rearing up like Godzilla. It didn’t matter. The keepers would back away and let him have his tantrum. When he calmed down, they’d lure him back with another treat and return to their work. By the time they were done, Chico had a pedicure on all four feet, and San Diego was ready to switch to protected contact for good. The behavioral specialists wrote papers detailing their methods and results—pamphlets for the revolution—and the word spread.

  Resistance was apocalyptic. Veteran keepers insisted that the new protocol would not work, that it was unacceptable to erect a permanent barrier between them and the animals. They understood that free contact was dangerous, and believed it was their right to take that risk. Elephant handling was one of the few departments of the zoo where male keepers outnumbered the women, and the men responded the way male primates often do when confronted with a challenge. At San Diego, the elephants adapted quickly to the new system, but the humans did not. At first the old guard tried to ignore the specialist heading the conversion. Then they debated him. Then they vandalized his car. In the end, they lost anyway. Every keeper who had worked in free contact quit or was transferred. Soon the revolution reached other zoos, and protected contact gradually began to supplant the old system.

  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.

  Chapter 8

  Berlin Boys

  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 t
he 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.