ELEPHANT STORIES

So I finally asked Burgwin about his Great Elephant Adventure when he was managing Animal Control in the Hawaiian Islands. I’d run across the story when I was Googling. According to the newspaper snippet I found, there was a huge male elephant who went into musth, which is a sort of state of breeding insanity and ran through town creating havoc until the cruel policemen -- too stupid to cope -- shot the creature dead.

In the first place this was a female elephant -- a very much abused elephant over a long period of time, who had been kept chained and rocking in her tracks for her decades of lifetime. She was not an Asian working elephant bred in captivity, but an African elephant captured as a “calf,” six months old, from her wild family group. At the time of the incident she was owned by a mid-western man who specialized in acquiring troublesome and damaged animals which he “reformed” through the use of electric shocks and behavior modification techniques and rented out for various purposes. This man was known by the authorities. He would have needed many permits to ship an elephant.

I’m unclear about why the elephant was in Hawaii -- some kind of promotion, I think -- and how it was that she got loose, but it was clear -- when she stepped on a car and smashed it flat -- that she was a hazard. As soon as the news media began to tell the story in progress, people showed up with children in tow, all agog to see what would happen, unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. The shouting, running people panicked the elephant further. She would stop, out of oxygen because of being constantly chained down (the necropsy showed a very small heart), and then the pressing crowds would give her a new shot of adrenaline. It’s unclear where her keepers had gone.

The police, armed only with handguns in the beginning and unable to get the zoo veterinarian there with his tranq gun and chemicals in time, discovered that their pistols would sting the elephant enough to steer her a bit but not bring her to a halt. They shot over eighty times. Finally a rifle was authorized, brought out of its lock box, and ended the miserable life of the captive elephant. When she fell over, she crushed another car. I submit that the death was possibly one of the happier events in her life.

All the onlookers were both exhilarated and appalled. They loved being where something exciting was actually happening, though they didn’t understand it, and were each convinced that THEY could have spoken a few calming words to the elephant that would have solved everything. At least no people were hurt.

So what we have here is an animal story on two continents and an archipelago: Africa where baby elephants are captured, America where elephants are considered to be sort of like teddy bears -- benign but spectacular charismatic megamammals -- and Hawaii where the story finally came to its tragic end. Burgwin says that a female federal prosecutor was pursuing the case and they collaborated to try to understand how to go about addressing the cause of this sad story, most clearly the man who traffics in animals, but Burgwin left animal control before the case came to a conclusion. Such cases take years. Probably it just fizzled out. No national humane society that I know of picked up the case, though an investigator in white shorts was there to be interviewed while the case was still hot.

In some ways, as Pogo pointed out long ago, the real culprit was us. Not just you and me, but a whole culture that considers big animals something to see, in the same way that Sam in the “Lord of the Rings” was so impressed by the slightly fantasized version of 4-tusked elephants. It’s a 19th century fascination with the old idea of collecting wonders of the world -- but this is the twenty-first century and we can see elephants up close and explained on television any time we want to. Zoos, coming out of the same Victorian impulse, are now quietly returning elephants to settings closer to their native climates and relieving them from standing on concrete all the time. The fact that we know so much more about elephants -- their family structures, their big brains, their ability to communicate through low rumbles that travel for miles through the ground, and that we have now read books vividly portraying the world of the elephant -- has helped us get away from this gawkers’ need to see for ourselves. Not enough yet.

But getting back to the point, Animal Control is sometimes asked to respond to situations far beyond the norm. With huge potential for human damage and loss, without proper equipment, in a moment’s crisis that will probably never be repeated, we want responders to have both judgment and courage. We do need to examine the culture that sets up tragedy through sentimentality and sensationalism and that’s very nearly a religious problem. We need to look at the economic factors that create profit from animals at the expense of the animals, sometimes human animals.

Having made my point, I’ll clear the air with a lighter-hearted elephant story which may or may not be apocryphal. There is an animal “drive-through” in Winston, OR, and naturally they had to have an elephant. In these places one drives in through a gate, actually travels among the animals with the proviso that one stay in the car with the windows rolled up, so as to satisfy the gawker craving at close range.

The problem was that their token elephant was an old circus elephant that had been part of a clown act where it sat down on a specially reinforced VW beetle. One day this elephant sat on a tourist VW beetle, crushing in the top. (They had not thought to reinforce it.) Luckily it wasn’t a very big elephant and stood up again when the people inside screamed at it. After that, someone always went along with the elephant carrying a sharp stick and, if it showed signs of sitting down, poked it in the rear.

But wait, there’s more. The Beetle remained operational, so after putting in their insurance claim, the tourists headed home towards Portland. On the way up the Willamette River valley they ran into one of the infamous “tule fogs” that reduce visibility to zero and bring traffic to a standstill. Sure enough, there was a tremendous pile-up of reckless vehicles and the highway patrol was there, waving flares and going from car to car, taking reports. When they got to the Beetle, the officer said, “So -- rolled your car in the pileup, eh? Pull over there.”

“No, no, officer, we weren’t in any accident -- we just want to get home.”

“If you didn’t get this damage on top of your car in a crash, what happened?”

“Um...” In a very small voice, “An elephant sat on it.”

They were in the police station until late. Everyone wanted to hear the story one more time. (There WERE people killed in that tule fog. Drivers kill people all the time.)