Zoo Story Read online

  “Hopefully,” an FBI agent wrote in an internal memo, “all of our efforts will prevent elephants on the tarmac.”

  When the 747 taxied toward the cargo area, a delegation from the zoo formed a receiving line. Lex Salisbury was there, along with David Murphy, the zoo’s veterinarian, and Brian French,* a former circus star and longtime elephant trainer recently hired as the assistant curator in charge of the new Africa section. Also on hand was Lee Ann Rottman, Lowry Park’s curator. Lee Ann was one of the zoo’s true believers. As the woman in charge of the entire animal collection and all of their human keepers, her identity had meshed so thoroughly with the institution’s that it was difficult to envision the place without her. She knew every creature at Lowry Park and often enumerated their individual qualities as though they were her own children. When the mandrills were going through a stressful time and needed reassurance, she had been known to climb into their exhibit and groom the hair on their backs, as though she were a baboon too. When a baby screech owl was orphaned, she would take the fuzzy white chick home and let him practice flying around her bedroom as she slept.

  “If animals aren’t in heaven,” she liked to say, “I’m not going.”

  That night, as the 747 rolled forward on the runway, Lee Ann was worried about the condition of the elephants. She knew that Mick Reilly and Chris Kingsley, the South African vet, had been watching over them. Still, the risks of animal transports were well documented. Over the decades some had died from shock or stress while being moved to zoos or game parks over much shorter distances. Just the year before, three wallabies had died as Dr. Murphy drove them to Lowry Park in a rental truck from Ocala, a city only ninety miles north of Tampa. With their strength and ingenuity, elephants presented a special challenge; sometimes they reacted to transports in unpredictable ways. In one case, an Asian elephant at another zoo was loaded into the back of a trailer to be moved to another facility. A zoo employee following in a car spied the animal’s trunk dangling underneath, perilously close to the road. When the truck was stopped, the workers discovered that the elephant had repeatedly dropped to her knees until she smashed a one-foot hole through the vehicle’s thick oak floor. That incident had occurred only ten miles or so into the trip with a normally docile elephant already inured to captivity. The Swazi elephants were still wild, had just been forced through a voyage of eight thousand miles, and had been confined in their crates, under extremely disorienting conditions, for more than fifty hours. In her mind, Lee Ann had listed all the things that could have gone wrong and had braced herself for the possibility that one or more of the animals had died. When the plane finally shut down its engines, she hurried into the cargo hold. The moment she saw them, the heaviness inside her lifted. They were quiet and showed no signs of distress. In fact, they seemed remarkably calm. As Lee Ann peered into their crates, saying hello and softly sweet-talking them, they extended their trunks toward her and sniffed her. There wasn’t much time to linger, though. While the plane refueled, preparing for the next leg of its flight to California, a heavy-duty forklift lowered the four crates with Lowry Park’s elephants from the hold, while a crane waited to load them onto two flatbed trucks. Customs officials and wildlife officers checked the permits and paperwork, and finally the elephants were secured on the trucks and ready for the last few miles of their marathon journey. Shortly after midnight, the long line of ground vehicles—the trucks, the unmarked cars, plus dozens of cruisers with their flashing lights—left the airport. Lee Ann, riding in the cab of one of the trucks carrying the elephants, was stunned.

  “It’s like a presidential escort,” she said.

  The convoy turned east on Hillsborough Avenue, then headed north on Dale Mabry Highway toward Lowry Park. The cruisers moved in an ever-shifting tactical formation, some weaving forward out of the line to take the lead, others suddenly dropping back. The lanes had been cleared. Cross streets had been blocked off. Sharpshooters, the zoo had been told, were positioned in undisclosed locations. Hovering above them all, the police helicopter cast the bright beam of a spotlight back and forth in the darkness.

  The neighborhood was still asleep when the two trucks rumbled through the zoo’s back gate and made their way toward the newly completed elephant barn, a big moss-green building at the northern edge of the grounds. The crates were unloaded from the trucks, and the elephants were invited to walk out, when ready, into chutes that led inside the barn toward stalls supplied with water and hay and apples and carrots and bananas.

  Brian French studied the four new arrivals taking their first steps on a new continent. The sedatives were wearing off, but still they moved cautiously, their ears pushed forward and their trunks sniffing in every direction as they absorbed a profusion of strange sounds and scents. Brian had first observed them earlier that year, during one of the zoo’s scouting trips to the game parks in Swaziland. One had been selected from Mkhaya’s herd. The others all came from Hlane and had grown up together and knew one another well. That shared history was likely to help the three of them through the transition to captivity.

  As the elephants moved into neighboring stalls, Brian noted which of them extended their trunks through the thick bars in greeting and which held back. He watched their posture, the flapping of their ears, the swishing of their tails. He wanted to see if their movements were erratic or fluid, if they were easily startled, if they seemed rattled or anxious, how one of them reacted when one of the others moved. He paid special attention to their foreheads, because he knew that when elephants communicated through the infrasonic rumbles—the same low-frequency sounds that the scientists were scrutinizing in such detail—the effort sometimes caused the muscles in their foreheads to move. Even if his human ears could not detect the rumbles, he wanted to see who was talking and who was responding, who was connecting and who was keeping to themselves. He needed to learn their respective temperaments, their habits and quirks, the things that unnerved and calmed them. Any clue that might offer even the smallest glimpse into their inner worlds.

  “Learning to read the animals,” Brian called it, and he had plenty of practice. Although he was only twenty-nine, he had been around elephants since before he could walk. Born into a family of circus performers known as the Cristianis, he was the seventh generation to work with animals, the fourth to train and perform with elephants. By age three, he was being lifted onto their sloping backs; at six, he was riding them in the ring in Japan. Under the performing name of Brian Cristiani, he trained elephants at Ringling Bros. and other circuses around the world. Like many circus people, he starred in a variety of acts, working not just with elephants but with horses and tigers. He rode a motorcycle inside the Globe of Death and walked the high wire in a seven-man pyramid. When asked about it now, he shrugged. “It was normal life to me.”

  It was hard to picture Brian balancing on a wire forty feet in the air, because he suffered from a fear of heights—a liability he’d overcome with many hours of practice—and because he did not have an acrobat’s typically waifish physique. Just as dog owners often resemble their pets, Brian was built uncannily like an elephant. He was big and powerful, with a hulking presence and a low center of gravity, but also surprisingly graceful and nimble on his feet. All his life he had felt a special connection to elephants. He admired their intelligence, the complexity of their character, the way each had a distinct personality waiting to be discovered underneath that thick gray skin. Working with them required empathy, the patience to form a rapport. Bigger and stronger than their human keepers, elephants always had the power to say no.

  “Everybody thinks they have to respect you,” Brian said. “Well, you have to respect them, and they know it. They actually learn to like you, and that’s what binds everything.”

  He described the relationship in almost mystical terms. When the training went well, he grew to know certain elephants in such depth that it seemed as though he could sense what they were thinking and as though they could read his thoughts in return. In th
is blissful affinity, the divide between man and animal fell away. He called it “the flow.” Achieving such intimacy with the Swazi elephants would not be easy, however. Brian had never worked with elephants freshly taken from the savanna. In his experience, African elephants, even those who had grown up in captivity, were often more challenging than the Asians. “It’s like the difference between a mustang and a quarter horse,” he explained. The African species tended to be more high-strung and fidgety, even stubborn. If they didn’t get their way, they sometimes pouted like children.

  Despite the emotional bonds that developed between elephants and their human keepers, both the African and Asian species remained extremely dangerous to work with. One study showed that over a fifteen-year period, one elephant handler was killed in the United States every year—a fatality rate three times that of coal miners, the most deadly occupation tracked by the federal labor department. The job was especially hazardous when their human keepers worked side by side with the elephants under a protocol known as free contact. To survive under free contact, which called for them to enter the same space as the elephants, many keepers believed they had to not only join the herd but maintain dominance. Essentially they had to become a human version of the matriarch. This was never easy, given the differential in size and strength, but it became particularly hazardous when the lead handler was off-duty and a subordinate had to take over. As elephants maneuvered for position in the hierarchy, they would push or bump their handlers to test them. If the person wasn’t experienced enough or fell down in front of them or showed another sign of vulnerability, one of the elephants would sometimes see an opening and attack.

  Lowry Park had been using free contact in 1993 when an Asian elephant killed Char-Lee Torre, a young keeper who had only recently begun working at the zoo. Char-Lee’s death had been the most disturbing moment in Lowry Park’s history. Lex Salisbury, the zoo’s CEO, had been curator at the time and still remembered the awful chaos after the attack as other handlers tried to get the elephant under control and the paramedics fought to keep Char-Lee alive long enough for her to reach a hospital. A decade later, as Lex and the rest of the management prepared to exhibit elephants again, they were determined to prevent another tragedy. Even before the four newcomers arrived from Swaziland, the zoo had instituted an elephant management system called protected contact. Used increasingly in zoos around the country, protected contact required staff members to maintain a barrier between themselves and the animals, even when they had to get close enough to check the pads of their feet or exfoliate their skin or perform other tasks crucial to the everyday care of captive elephants. The alternative protocol was also considered more humane for the elephants, since it relied on positive reinforcement. The elephants were not dominated or prodded or punished, as they often were with free contact. Through a system of food rewards, they were encouraged to follow the trainers’ commands, not intimidated into compliance. The new protocol did not allow for the same intimacy between the elephants and their handlers, but in zoos where it was used, keeper injuries and fatalities had virtually disappeared. San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park would also be relying on protected contact with their seven Swazi elephants arriving on the 747. Although protected contact had been in use for more than a decade, the approach had never been tested with wild elephants. Some critics were already predicting that it was doomed to fail. Elephants who had spent their lives in the bush and who had never been trained before, the skeptics said, would not be bribed by a few treats as if they were overgrown collies.

  Lex was not swayed by the arguments. He believed that protected contact would work, even with what were commonly referred to as “naïve elephants,” and he had gone to great lengths to make sure that the transition went as smoothly—and safely—as possible. Lowry Park had spent five million dollars constructing the elephant building with state-of-the-art equipment designed for protected contact, including hydraulic doors and gates that opened by remote control, chutes that helped the staff to move the elephants indoors and outdoors, and a giant metal box known as a Hugger that gently restrained an elephant whenever the staff needed to get close to perform an exam or work on the animal. Outside the building, the zoo had created several acres of exhibit space, including two yards to separate the bulls when their hormones were raging and a massive pool where the animals would eventually swim and spray themselves with their trunks.

  To help the four newcomers adjust, the zoo had acquired a fifth elephant, an eighteen-year-old female named Ellie who was also born in Africa but who had been taken into captivity as a young calf and then spent almost her entire life in American zoos. Because she was older than the four young adults from Swaziland, the zoo hoped Ellie would assume the role of matriarch and teach the others how to live inside the confines and structure of a zoo. The new arrivals, it turned out, would almost certainly be teaching Ellie a few lessons of their own. In her early years, Ellie had lived at the Gulf Breeze Zoo in the Florida Panhandle. But as the only elephant in the small zoo’s collection, she had never learned the social skills required to maneuver within a herd. Eventually she had joined a group of elephants at the Knoxville Zoo. But she was so awkward, the other elephants bullied her. Finally Ellie’s keepers decided to separate her for her own protection, leaving her even more isolated. By now she was more comfortable with humans than her own species.

  “She doesn’t really know how to be an elephant,” said one of her keepers at Lowry Park.

  Now that Ellie was in Tampa, the zoo had done what it could to tilt the odds in favor of her dominance. Her transport from Knoxville had been arranged several months before, so that when the newcomers arrived she would have already established the elephant building and the adjoining yards as her territory. Ellie was at least two feet taller than the others and had the natural advantage of already being familiar with zoo routine. Still, elephants have a gift for defying human plans. There was no way to guarantee what would happen inside the hierarchy that would take shape in the months ahead. It was possible that Ellie might never summon the confidence to become the matriarch. After years of growing up in the bush, learning how to jockey for position and status among their native herds, the wild elephants might simply prove too strong.

  That first night, Brian French stayed up to watch over the four new arrivals, who were clearly exhausted from their long journey. If anything went wrong—if they stopped eating or drinking, if they battered their bodies against the thick metal bars that enclosed their stalls—he wanted to know immediately. He had already set up a cot in the hall outside the barn. He planned to babysit them around the clock for the next couple weeks, or however long it took for him to be sure that they were settling in safely.

  Night-vision cameras had been installed inside the barn, hooked up to monitors in the office, so Brian could see how the elephants were doing even when the lights were turned off. He wanted to know which of them was dozing and which stayed awake. Elephants can sleep either while standing or lying on their sides, but if they lie down, it usually means they’ve dropped their guard. In those first hours, Brian watched the grayish-green feeds from the cameras and was pleased to see that three of the four newcomers felt relaxed enough to lie down. They were on their feet soon enough, but it was a start. It was possible that they were suffering from an elephant version of jet lag and that their body clocks, set to the passage of the sun and moon over the savanna on the other side of the globe, would need a couple days to reset. Ravenous after their long journey, the four of them devoured their hay and slurped gallons of water—another good sign. As morning arrived, they were already comfortable enough with Brian and other staff members that they were slipping their trunks through the bars of their stalls, the moist ovals of their nostrils opening and closing at the tips of the trunks as they inhaled the signature scent of each human. Soon they were eating from the keepers’ hands.

  The first critical hours of the transition were unfolding about as well as the zoo could have hoped. Even so, it w
as impossible not to wonder what the elephants made of this strange new tableau.

  To say they had never been in captivity before does not fully describe how alien these experiences must have been to them. Until now they had never set foot inside a building; there was no way for them to have any notion of what a building was. All they had known was the open vault of the African sky above them, the dirt and grass of the savanna beneath their feet, the wind from the Indian Ocean blowing through the knobthorn trees. They had never stood on cement floors, enclosed by walls and a roof, or been asked to walk through a doorway, or shivered in the artificial breeze of ventilation fans. For years they had drunk from streams and rivers and reservoirs. Now, for the first time, they were tasting water drawn from the Florida aquifer and poured for them into stainless-steel containers. From birth onward, the soundtrack of their lives had been the bellows of hippos, the cries of snake eagles, the snorting of wildebeests. At the zoo, all of that auditory context was gone, replaced instead by siamang duets and tiger roars and a host of other calls from species they had never heard or seen before. Although they had grown up in the presence of the rangers and the tourists in the Swazi game parks, their daily movements around the parks had been directed almost entirely by the matriarchs of their herds. Now they were stranded in an environment created and controlled by humans.

  What exactly did this monumental shift in circumstance mean to them? What inner calibrations had they made to retain any sense of a life they recognized as their own? How much did they understand of what had happened to them and how they had been brought to this place? Contemplation of these questions required a leap of empathy into the elephants’ inner world—a landscape many people believed was inaccessible. For centuries, ethicists and philosophers had debated whether humans could fathom the internal lives of animals.