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The Only Harmless Great Thing

THE BEST TIME TO WATCH THE ELEPHANTS AT THE WASHINGTON Park Zoo is in the early hours of a sunny day, when their bulky bodies cast wide, dark shadows in the bright, transparent sunshine. The elephants are more energetic in the morning, more likely to wrestle in one of the wading pools or sing in a frequency that I can hear. (A variety of elephant calls are pitched too low for human ears.) The elephant barn, a complex of chambers and yards partly surrounded by a dry moat, is at the far end of the zoo, tucked along a curving terrace carved from a steep hill on the west side of Portland, Oregon. The largest of the yards, at the back of the complex, is separated by the moat from a small railroad track, travelled every half hour by the open-air zoo train, on its way to the Alaskan tundra and back to the bear grottoes; on the slope beyond the track is a thick stand of fir, vine maple, and alder, tangled with ivy and ferns, and hiding from the elephants’ sight a neat Japanese garden, tiers of award-winning roses, and a cluster of distant skyscrapers. I like the crowds in the morning, too: most of the people pressed against the glass wall of the viewing room are young mothers with children in strollers; on a hillock above the moat, toddlers waddle beside a wood-and-wire fence, oblivious of the giants below.

These are Asian elephants, slightly smaller than their African cousins and, I think, more diffident. The Asian and the African elephant not only are separate species but belong to separate genera, and are the only surviving members of the order Proboscidea, which once covered much of the planet and may have included more than three hundred species. The genesis of the modern elephant is, in fact, a point of debate; its evolutionary tree is filled with dozens of branches that failed to bloom. On the basis of the sometimes obscure elements of taxonomy, the elephant’s closest living relatives are the hyrax, a furry rodentlike animal; the rotund ocean-dwelling manatee and dugong; and the aardvark.

The Asian elephant has smaller ears than the African, one rather than two “fingers” on the tip of its trunk, a long narrow face under a giant domed skull of airy bone. The Asian has smaller tusks, if any; the popular image of the elephant—huge ears flung wide, long rails of ivory below the face—is of the African. But it is Asians we see as the centerpiece of circuses and in zoos. They are considered far easier to train—more amenable and less skittish. The Asian has been the elephant of domestic life all the years of recorded history and is sacred in many religions. It is still used as a work animal in India, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand. According to trainers, the Asian is more willing to enter the intimate, emotionally complex relationship that domesticity requires. Pliny the Elder ascribed to the elephant the senses of modesty, shame, and delight, and in this herd—the most prolific herd of elephants in the Western Hemisphere, with twenty-four births in twenty-six years—I imagine a sense of style, too. Even in the spacious, sandy backyard, they move with a jungle delicacy.

It has taken me a while to learn to distinguish one elephant from another—by noting the pattern of pink freckling on their ears, the number of creases on the lower leg (a kind of fingerprint), and the angle and set of the ears, which are shaped like ginkgo leaves. Elephants rarely stand completely still; they pass among others, lean, touch, and blend into a single, soft contour. The trunk, which is both nose and upper lip (it is also the elephant’s hand, with control fine enough to pick up a dime), never rests; it waves slowly, restlessly about. A few in the herd of eleven are easy for me to spot: Tunga, a bull, because he is the only one with tusks (they are banded in brass); Rosy, the oldest cow, who has a pleasing shape and the balance of an elder; Belle, a few years younger, who has the wrinkles. The elephants scratch themselves—foot to knee, head against pillar—and caress each other with their heads and trunks, and all this motion is oddly quiet. The elephant foot is encased in a fatty pad, and it is this wide cushion that makes elephants so silent and stealthy in the wild. They can pass undetected a short distance away from people, even at an easy lope. When standing, elephants swing their front legs one in front of the other in perfect time; sometimes two elephants will rock in rhythm, heads swaying in counterpoint to the beat.

I think it is a human trait to exaggerate difference—to imagine an odd thing as odder than it really is. I expected, when I first met elephants, to have exaggerated their size in my imagination. But elephants are so big, so much bigger than any other creature we meet on land, that I found the opposite to be true: I had actually reduced them in my mind, diminished their size and their difference. Up close, within reach, an elephant is a transcendent thing, entirely alien. Elephants resemble us in funny ways—they catch colds, get sunburns, babysit each other’s children. Rosy and I even have the same body temperature. But I am really nothing like Rosy, and she is nothing like me; still, as I watch her and her kin pass by, my strongest feeling is one of society and relation.

At Washington Park, the elephants are guests, family, and royalty; they are by far the most popular animals on exhibit. One morning in early June, I watched as Sunshine, a five-year-old adolescent cow, bullied Chang Dee, the herd’s only calf, into fetching a ball from the wading pool in the front yard; she shoved the bristly haired, short-trunked baby toward the edge of the water until he tumbled in. The mothers and cousins nearby ignored the children, and threw leaves of lettuce on their own and each other’s backs, using each other as tables. In the backyard, Hugo, a bull, paced, and dusted himself with sand, and the people leaning on the fences sighed with pleasure. He was the Elephant, in myth an earthbound rain cloud, the beloved beast known variously as God’s messenger, earth’s egg, the carrier of the world. But Hugo is also a research animal, as they all are, and is subject to the keepers’ law. Washington Park’s elephants are participants in research aimed at protecting their species from extinction; through Hugo, Sunshine, and the others, certain essential mysteries are beginning to unravel.

The real key to recognizing elephants is personality. The keepers at Washington Park indulge in a cheerful and unapologetic anthropomorphism when discussing their charges, but this is a matter more of the conventions of language than of biological inaccuracy. All are quick to bristle at explanations of elephant behavior—such as the common assumption that Hugo dusts himself with sand in order to cool off. “We don’t know why Hugo or any of them do what they do. How could we?” says Jay Haight, who has been a keeper at Washington Park for nine years. Each man brings his own degree of familiarity to each elephant, and it varies from a rude slap on the rump or a gentle stroke and whisper to a respectfully wide berth.

Between chores, the keepers tend to gather for a cigarette or a cup of coffee in the barn’s central room, a huge, concrete-floored chamber with a cathedral ceiling split by skylights. This particular room, in spite of its size, isn’t used by the elephants; its dominant feature is an enormous pile of timothy hay. Along one wall are a counter and a dusty, paper-strewn desk below a row of dusty cupboards; elephant cartoons are tacked on the cupboard doors. This room and the viewing room next to it are part of the original barn, which was completed in 1959. Behind a hydraulic door labeled with a red danger sign is a later addition: a hallway and several large rooms. One of these contains the crush, a contraption of hydraulic barred walls, which is used to confine the animals—painlessly, despite the name—for care. Asian bull elephants are subject to a recurrent phenomenon of unknown purpose called musth, which lasts anywhere from a few weeks to several months (longer in healthy, well-nourished elephants like these) and is marked by violent, unpredictable behavior. This and an inveterate need to dominate are what characterize the bull. The keepers will go into a room with cows, mingle with them, many times a day; they generally approach a bull only after he is settled in the crush. Few zoos have the equipment, the experience, or the will to care for even one full-sized bull; there are three at Washington Park, thanks largely to the crush. It is not a new idea: log or bamboo cages have been used in Burmese work camps for hundreds of years. Every elephant here goes in and out of the crush nearly every day—it also functions as a door to the backyard—and each is rewarded for the trip with a bunch of carrots or bananas or an armful of hay. The thick walls of wide-spaced bars slide both horizontally and at angles, shifting noisily, with simple controls, to match the animal’s form. Here the periodic foot care is done, to prevent bacterial infections and overgrowth of toenails, and here medicine, vitamins, and other medical treatment are given. It is also in the crush that the trickiest part of reproduction research—sperm collection—takes place.

I have joined the keepers in the big hay room for conversation many times, and now and then one of them will go off to do an errand: move an animal or two or three from room to room or into one or another of the yards; pass out carrots. I’ve been startled to hear a sudden shout of “Bull coming through!” and see, through a crack in the hallway door, a trotting elephant, head high, trunk waving toward the scent of the hay as he heads up the hall.

One day last June, I visited the keepers to discuss elephant character. They had left open a door to a little side yard fringed with bamboo and fenced off from the backyard by a concrete wall. A group of cows in the backyard came to stare at us, leaning their great gray heads over the wall, their trunks weaving from side to side. The elephants will watch, sometimes for hours, the movements of the human beings nearby. Now and then, a bull will scoop up a pile of sand (and, occasionally, excrement) in the sinewy curl at the tip of his trunk and sling it at a keeper or a maintenance man. The damp sand flies out like a hail of buckshot and is aimed with an archer’s skill.

“Rosy is better than money from home,” said Roger Henneous, the head keeper. He is a short man with a graying, close-cropped beard and a gruff manner, and he has worked at the Washington Park Zoo for more than twenty years. “She used to be earth mother to all the calves, but now she’s had a bellyful. There’s no elephant you’d rather spend time with—you could trust your child with her. Now, Belle—she is so damned hardheaded. She won’t bend and acknowledge that she’s getting older and everybody else is getting better. So she proceeds to get her butt whipped up on with depressing regularity by the young cows moving up. She is not going gently into that good night. And Me-Tu, Rosy’s daughter—that’s Daughter Hog.”

“Me-Tu lives to eat,” Haight explained. “You could put four animals together and they would not eat as much as fast as she does.” Jim Sanford, the zoo’s third full-time elephant keeper, talked about his favorite, a young cow named Pet. “One of her trademarks is checking us out: ‘How far can I go? How much does this guy know? Have the rules been changed?’” he told me. “It’s one of the things you really like about her. I’d call it a sense of humor—she obviously gets pleasure out of seeing how much she can get away with. It slays her. I think the relationship between a human being and an elephant is based on mutual trust. They know what the rules are here. If one of us, particularly a new guy, chastises them for things that are okay with everybody else—well, they won’t put up with it.”

“Do they like you?” I asked.

Haight paused, considering. “Does it matter? I like them, but they piss me off a lot of the time. I know they’re hearing me, and then suddenly it’s ‘I’ve never done this before! You can’t be talking to me!’” He threw up his hands, mimicking elephant disbelief. “But you have to be the dominant animal. That’s why the bulls come after us. If we weren’t the dominant animal, they wouldn’t care.”

The herd’s daily routine is complicated, with many comings and goings and tradings of place. Every task is punctuated with sound: the deep whoosh of an elephant’s exhalation, the spray of a hose on concrete, the clang of massive hydraulic doors, the faint rustle of a scratching bull. There is sound, and there is smell—a perfume of hay and manure, and, underneath, the musky, dry, sweet smell of the elephants themselves. The air in the barn is always warm, even in this high-ceilinged central room.

Elephant cows are irrepressibly social beasts. Washington Park has two separate family herds of mothers, daughters, and female cousins. (At the time of my visits last spring and summer, Chang Dee, the male calf, was still with his mother, Me-Tu. He has since gone to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and almost to the day his five-year-old half uncle, Rama, returned to the herd from a four-year sojourn at the Point Defiance Zoo, in Tacoma.) The groups rotate and are sometimes split into smaller groups throughout nine available areas, eating periodically in different places. (A single mature cow will consume ninety pounds of hay, three pounds of oats, forty-six pounds each of carrots and lettuce, a handful of vitamins, a quarter cup of salt, and fifty gallons of water every day.) The three mature bulls are always separate and solitary, but during mating a cow and bull are given a private room for several days or, sometimes, are allowed the use of one of the outside yards.

With each move to a new area, the animals must examine the evidence of the animals that have just left; it is in the first few moments in a yard or a room that the elephants seem to merge, recognizing and reassuring each other. To prevent boredom and to ensure cooperation, the cows and calves are trained to stand, to back up, to lie down, to hold still, and to tolerate leg chains, which are necessary during feeding to prevent the dominant animals from stealing food. Both Tunga and Hugo were once show animals—Hugo belonged to the Ringling Brothers circus—and can do such tricks as walking on a ball. Chang Dee, Hugo’s firstborn, was the payment the zoo made to the circus in exchange for Hugo, and was thus trained to accept leg chains from babyhood. Sunshine (her real name is Sung Surin) was taught to lie down on command—a marvel of conditioned response. In the course of a week or two, a keeper would enter the barn while Sunshine was napping and rouse her just enough to feed her a banana. When she woke from her nap, Jim Sanford says, “it was with banana on her breath and the word down in her ears.”

The keepers are full of such stories; they say, with a certain pride, that single-trial learning is normal in elephants. They tell long anecdotes—tales of one elephant determined to pull a door apart, another playing with an electrical heating panel, a third refusing to lift a leg for a chain—and they laugh at the elephants’ cleverness and their own efforts to be a bit more clever. It is an affectionate one-upmanship; tomorrow, perhaps, the elephants will win another round.

“One day, Rog and I came back from a break, and there’s Tamba, who had been with the herd in the backyard, all by herself over in the bamboo,” Jay Haight recalled. At the time, Tamba, a seventeen-year-old cow born in Thailand, wasn’t fully grown, and she had somehow managed to squeeze through a gap at one end of the wall between the two yards and was harvesting the bamboo, an elephant delight. “So she’s really conspicuous, but as soon as she heard us coming she turned around and faced the other way, rock-still, holding her trunk in her mouth.” Haight pretended to whistle, gazed at the ceiling. “‘I’m not really here, don’t mind me. It’s just Mr. Squirrel.’” Another time, Tunga swung one of the elephants’ playthings, a chained log, over the moat, climbed out along it as if he were on a balance beam, and fell in. It was not his first such mishap: an erstwhile performer, Tunga can balance on one leg, and he was once seen to “waltz,” or spin on his hind legs, around the backyard until he tripped and tumbled into the moat.

Roger Henneous believes that the elephants are well aware of their keepers’ expectations. “You ought to be here on a day when the routine is hopelessly screwed up and get a look at the expressions on their faces,” he said. “If they had a watch, they’d be checking it. And asking you, ‘Look, buddy, what’s the problem? Have you forgotten everything we ever taught you?’”

“Come on and see the big guy,” Jim Sanford said, and he led me down the hall, a narrow concrete alley lined with dusty pipes, to a room with a window about three feet wide and screened with heavy wire mesh. He was referring to Packy, the undisputed master of the herd. Packy, who stands more than ten feet high and weighs 13,320 pounds, is the largest known Asian elephant in the world. He is only twenty-six—young for an elephant—and he will continue to grow throughout his life.

When I peered through the window, the room at first seemed empty. Then, as in a dream, I saw a trunk float by, far above my head, and then I saw a leg—a tall pillar of dirty velvet—and another, another, another. He was moving past the window with a ponderous grace, outsized. I felt that he needed not a bigger room but a bigger planet. He turned when he picked up my strange new scent, his trunk weaving a hypnotic dance against the mesh, up and down. His tushes—the upper incisors, which in Tunga had grown to tusks—were rough points against the thick wire. Several years ago, a keeper was walking past Packy, who was in a barred room. The bull casually reached through the bars with his trunk, grabbed the keeper’s arm, pulled him close, and crushed the limb against the bars with his skull, splintering the bone. Even with the heavy mesh protection, that sinuous trunk is disconcerting; Packy was looking me right in the eye, in a leisurely kind of way. Out of musth, he is usually a placid boy. But he is every inch the king of all the beasts.

There are between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand Asian elephants left in the world. Their gradual elimination in the wild is the result of a number of changes, most of them recent and a few subtle. The invention of the chain saw, for instance, made forest-clearing much easier and quicker work. But basically there is just not enough room in Southeast Asia for both elephants and people. The elephant’s jungle habitat is being replaced by cropland, and many of the crops are delectable to the now homeless elephant. The elephant raids the millet and sugarcane, and is killed for his efforts, and kills in turn: in India, nearly a hundred and fifty people are killed by elephants every year. Wild elephants are found from India to Indonesia; most inhabit shrinking parks and preserves, in shrinking populations, separated from each other by human settlements as uncrossable as an ocean. Bulls, being more aggressive, are killed far more often than cows. Not only does this deplete the gene pool, but the cows’ opportunities to breed grow fewer, and as the birthrate falls their mean age increases. Because elephants will feed on the youngest, most tender trees available, finding them the most appetizing, herds quickly denude small parks beyond the point of natural recovery. Several countries, notably Thailand and India, are attempting to conserve these insular environments and to confront the problems of the diminished gene pool and male-to-female ratio, but quite a few people in elephant biology wonder whether the wild elephant is past saving. (There are estimated to be a million elephants left in Africa; however, their numbers are also dropping.) Certainly its future, one way or another, resides in zoos.

The Washington Park Zoo is a century old. Its origin dates back to a pharmacist named Richard Knight, who found himself in Portland—then still something of a frontier city—with a brown bear and a grizzly on his hands. He gave them, with some relief, to the city, and thus began a zoo. In 1953, Austin Flegel, a Portlander who was working as an economic adviser in Thailand, was given a four-year-old female elephant as a gift, and sent her to Washington Park. She was housed in the zoo’s dilapidated camel barn and—Portland being the city of roses—was immediately named Rosy. Rosy’s advent caused the voters to approve a bond issue to build a new zoo—she led parades, attended store openings, and threw out the first ball at a Portland Beavers baseball game.

The zoo’s director, Jack Marks, wanted to build the ultimate modern zoo, where the animals would live in natural settings and rarely require handling by their keepers. Together with the architects Abbott Lawrence and Ernest Tucker, Marks travelled the country in search of ideas, and Lawrence and Tucker eventually designed a large, open zoo with grottoes and moats in place of cages and bars. In September of 1956, before the new zoo was finished, another elephant arrived. A Portland engineer named Orville Hosmer had gone to Vietnam to help rebuild a village destroyed by a flood, and in gratitude the villagers gave him a female calf named Tuy Hoa (pronounced Tee Wah).

Rosy and Tuy Hoa moved into their spacious new quarters in November of 1959. The move from the camel barn had to be effected by truck, and neither of the animals was particularly willing to clamber aboard. They finally did so only with the guidance of a pair of more experienced elephants—Belle and a bull named Thonglaw, both of whom belonged to an animal importer named Morgan Berry, a friend of Jack Marks. Berry was destined to play an essential role in Portland’s elephant future. He had imported four baby elephants (and a large number of other wild and exotic animals) some years before, and raised them in the basement of his house, in a residential neighborhood in Seattle. He later made a living with his own travelling elephant show and such odd jobs as helping to move Portland’s elephants. By 1961, when Belle was nine and Thonglaw fourteen, Berry wanted a little break. He lent both, along with Pet, then six years old, to Washington Park for a few winter months, planning to retrieve them in the spring. Berry suspected that Belle was pregnant by Thonglaw, and he thought he knew the date of conception; he had, after all, stood right next to Belle while Thonglaw mounted her. But the conventional wisdom of the time held that both animals were too young to breed successfully, and Berry kept his suspicions to himself. No elephant had been born in the United States in the previous forty-four years; no elephant bred in captivity here had ever survived.

Elephant reproduction is rather simple and elegant, and resembles human reproduction in certain ways: elephants bear single babies; assist each other in labor, birth, and the rearing of the young; and live in family groups. The cows have two human-size breasts on the upper chest. Males reach sexual maturity at the age of nine or ten; females can conceive as young as six. A cow’s most fertile years are from twenty-five to forty-five, after which she reaches menopause. The heavy, hidden matings of elephants have inspired fantastic and beautiful ideas; long treatises on the nature of love, lust, fidelity, and adultery among pachyderms; tales of poetry, yearning, and faith. Elephants were once said to have died from a broken heart; in fact, they do sometimes die suddenly, with no apparent cause, after separation from their loved ones. It is still widely believed that they mate only in privacy, or only under water, and in ancient times it was believed that male elephants fell in love with human women, particularly those who sold flowers or perfume. One such elephant courted a woman by laying apples on. her bosom. J. H. Williams, in Elephant Bill, his 1950 memoir of twenty years in Burmese elephant camps, wrote:

The mating of wild elephants is very private. The bull remains, as usual, outside the herd, and his lady love comes out where she knows she will find him.… They fall in love, and days, and even weeks, of courtship may take place.… When they have knocked off from the day’s work, they will call each other and go off together into the jungle.

In a more comprehensive work, Richard Carrington’s Elephants, the author states that the ancients believed that elephants copulated face to face: “This was regarded as additional proof of the animal’s wisdom and intelligence.… They will indulge in innocent dalliance, much as young human couples in spring.… Dalliance turns to serious love play, the female using all her wiles to bring the male to the peak of his desire … Anyone who has studied the way a female elephant encourages her lover by alternate advances and retreats, by provocative gestures of her body, and a teasing and erotic use of the trunk, will recognize her prowess as the Cleopatra of the animal world.”

Some elephant keepers wondered if elephants could breed successfully in captivity; Morgan Berry told anyone who would listen that they would breed only in natural conditions. Elephant science was an esoteric and undeveloped field in the early 1960s. No one was certain of the length of the gestation period, and almost nothing was known of the estrous cycle, because cows show no overt signs of fertility. Wild bulls were thought to mate throughout the year, since elephant calves are born in all seasons; what may appear to be a season—a preponderance of births in a few months’ time, for instance—can be tied to drought and famine, rather than to seasonal ovulation.

The only real experience with elephant reproduction came from the work camps of Southeast Asia, but the animals in such camps have never been systematically bred. Traditionally, they are released from their chains at night to wander the nearby forests and eat; the mahouts round them up each morning, having tracked each one by the sound of the bell around its neck. (After Jim Sanford returned from a trip to Thailand, he told me that the elephants sometimes used their trunks to stuff mud in the bells, which muffled the sound. “I wondered why they didn’t just tear the bell off,” he said. “Well, they get chastised for that. But stuffing mud in it isn’t against the rules.”) The cows mate at night with wild bulls, and the resulting calves are genetically sound and born to work. The working bulls are conditioned not to mate, according to Dr. Michael Schmidt, the Washington Park veterinarian. “Riders are afraid that if the bulls have total freedom of action and express sexual behavior, they will inevitably turn on the riders and kill them—which the bulls often do anyway,” he told me. “The riders will do whatever they can to control that. A young bull who has an erection is beaten. So young bulls get the idea that being interested in cows is too painful, and their libido decreases to the point where they are just not interested in mating if there are people around.”

In this country, bulls with erections are sometimes punished, but for a different reason. The mature bull elephant’s penis, which weighs more than forty pounds, is long and flexible; this enables it to reach the female’s cervix, at the end of a twisting, back-angled tube and well hidden from the world. The penis has tendons that allow it to make “searching” motions, from side to side and up and down, in the vaginal canal. I’ve watched Packy roaming around the yard with his penis fully extended and bumping against his hind legs as he seems to swagger for the viewing public. Such an unabashed offering by the male is deemed too great an embarrassment in most zoos and circuses. But the principal disincentive to elephant births in the United States is environmental. Many zoos keep only one or two elephants, and these are almost always cows; there have never been many mature bulls in this country. An unsocialized cow and a skeptical bull will be brought together as strangers, by keepers with no understanding of fertility; little wonder that the attempt has seldom been successful.

Beginning in January of 1962, when Belle’s breast development made her pregnancy undeniable, a vigil was kept at Washington Park; no one knew when she might deliver, or how difficult the labor might be. It was a long wait. At 5:58 a.m. on April 14—a gestation, according to Morgan Berry’s dates, of 635 days—Belle delivered a male calf in good health, after an hour of active labor. Mother clamped the umbilical cord with her trunk, and Thonglaw promptly ate his congratulatory cigar. The event was front-page news across the country. Less than twenty-four hours after the birth, Berry received an offer for Belle and her baby—$30,000 from the Brookfield Zoo, outside Chicago. The next day, Berry offered the two suddenly famous elephants to the city of Portland for $20,000, payable within a month. A citizens’ committee was formed, and money began to trickle in: schoolchildren donated nickels; unions made donations from pension funds; charity car washes, bowling tournaments, square dances were held. The thriving baby, already accustomed to long lines of sightseers willing to wait hours for a two-minute view, was named Packy in a radio-station contest. Before the deadline had passed, Berry closed the deal and threw in Thonglaw and Pet for nothing. Thonglaw, during his extended winter vacation, had mated several times, and almost immediately the keepers realized that Rosy was pregnant; a few weeks later, they discovered that both Tuy Hoa and Pet were pregnant as well. Thonglaw’s dynasty had begun.

WHEN MICHAEL SCHMIDT, fresh from the University of Minnesota, arrived at Washington Park in 1973 to serve as the veterinarian, there were eight elephants in residence: Rosy and her daughter, Me-Tu; Tuy Hoa and her daughter, Hanako; Thonglaw; Belle; Packy; and Pet. Both Pet and Hanako were pregnant. Thonglaw had sired ten calves; eight had survived, and all but Hanako and Me-Tu had been given or sold to zoos and circuses. Portland was elephant-happy. Packy had a birthday party every year, at which thousands of people cheered him on as he ate a forty-pound cake of whole wheat, carrots, and peanut butter. The zoo was developing an adoption program, encouraging businesses and groups to pay the cost of feeding a particular elephant for a year at a time.

“When I arrived, I had no special interest in elephants,” Schmidt confessed to me one morning. We were in his office at the animal hospital, a flat-roofed inconspicuous building set in a draw filled with ferns and willow trees, behind the beaver and otter exhibits. “But you have to, here. This place was unique—the only place in the Western Hemisphere actually breeding elephants, and it had been the only place for years. We’re still the only zoo with second-generation births. This was the biggest thing that this small zoo in the West was doing, and it was outdoing the Bronx Zoo and the San Diego Zoo and all the others in a very difficult task. So it wasn’t a matter of whether or not to get involved—you’d better get involved.”

Schmidt began teaching himself elephant medicine. He quickly discovered that Washington Park’s success was something of an accident; no one really knew why Portland’s elephants bred and other zoos’ elephants did not. Schmidt began the first methodical testing of the elephants, making daily observations. He wanted to understand their reproduction and ultimately—by still undiscovered techniques of artificial insemination—increase it. One of the few things that were known about elephant reproduction by that time was the estrous cycle. In 1971, three biologists who had studied plantation elephants in Sri Lanka published a paper concluding that the elephant ovulates every twenty-two days. A second paper described a behavior seen in the bulls—an elaborate gesture in which the trunk is placed in a spot of urine and curled into the mouth. The authors called it urine testing, and suspected that the bull was checking cow urine for signs of fertility. Schmidt began seeing the gesture, too. “No one was paying any attention to this behavior,” he told me. “I looked at it and thought, Well, that’s certainly a way to tell if the bull is interested in a particular cow.”

Schmidt thought that the attractant had to be a pheromone of some kind, and he invented the sniff test, making use of the elephant barn’s hydraulic doors, which can be opened an inch at a time. The sniff test is a rather impolite but simple method of allowing a bull contact with a cow without endangering either cow or keeper. In a sniff test, Schmidt and the keepers place a bull on one side of a door opened wide enough for a trunk, and back a cow up to the opening on the other side. The cow holds still—usually with a placid patience but sometimes with a keeper’s encouragement—while the bull checks her urine and urogenital secretions with his trunk. Schmidt keeps track of the length of time the bull seems interested. “We didn’t know if the cows would get upset by being backed up to a bull, or what the bull would do, and so forth,” he told me. “It turned out that young Packy was quite interested in breeding and in the cows, and very happy to check them. And the cows, once they’d figured out what we were doing—well, it was fine with them, no big deal. I started to make daily observations, which we have done, with only a handful of missed days, since the fall of ’74.” Schmidt was surprised by what he found: peaks of intense interest in a particular cow for a few days, followed by months of indifference. “And these were known breeding cows,” he explained. “They’d all been pregnant and given birth, so they had estrous cycles. Something was fishy about the published estrous cycle. It sure couldn’t be twenty-two days.”

Schmidt’s wife, Anne, who is a research biologist at the zoo, had done serum-hormone assays on the zoo’s African lions, and had mapped the lion ovulatory cycle by noting changes in the levels of hormones in the blood. She suggested that the same might be done with the elephants, and Mike began drawing blood from the cows. He used a vein in the leg or the ear, laboriously bleeding each cow himself once a week, until Roger Henneous couldn’t stand it any longer. “Roger said, ‘I could do that.’ I said, ‘Okay, Roger, go ahead,’ sure that he couldn’t. But damned if he didn’t get a vein the first time. After that, the keepers did it.”

Over several months, Schmidt noticed patterns in the hormone levels, including a sixteen-week cycle of progesterone. The sniff-test results correlated with the progesterone cycle in a ratio “too good to be true,” Schmidt told me. “The bull is interested in the cow at the nadir of progesterone—about a four-week period—and especially at the few days around ovulation. The cow ovulates, and the progesterone starts to climb. The estrous cycle turns out to be about sixteen weeks long—the longest of any mammal by far.” The cow is willing to be bred for only a few days during her cycle: ovulation is a brief event, and the egg is viable for only about twelve hours. Schmidt tried mating three cows by cycle, placing each with a bull in a private room for several days of the magic period. All three became pregnant. “The pheromone was exactly, beautifully inverse to the progesterone,” he said. “You never see anything that clear, ever. There were some jokes about it, actually, because it did look too good to be true. But we had enough data so that we didn’t have to worry.”

Schmidt is a careful man, never without a neat lab coat, and slow to offer a smile. But now he did. “At this time we were doing this work, the San Diego Zoo was using elephant urine to determine hormone levels,” he continued. “One of its endocrinologists presented a paper on this work at a conference, in the course of which he said, ‘Well, we all know that you can’t get blood samples from elephants.’ Now, that’s true of okapis and hippos and rhinos, and I think it’s great to develop urinary techniques for animals like that, because trying to get a weekly blood sample would be impossible. But elephants are domesticated animals as well as wild animals. The people in San Diego couldn’t get blood samples from elephants, so they assumed that nobody could. But a veterinarian can do much more with elephants than with other animals. Elephants are intelligent; they have an arm and a hand, and being able to manipulate the environment accelerates the development of that intelligence. You can go into the cages with them. You can’t do that with tigers, or polar bears, for example. You can’t do that kind of work with a lot of species. You certainly can’t get a bird to stand still and hold its wing up while you get a blood sample every week. You have to grab the bird, hold it down, it’s struggling—whereas an elephant can be trained to stand there while you get a blood sample, and you give her an apple when you’re done, and she thinks she’s getting a bargain.”

It is also Mike Schmidt’s job to act as matchmaker to the elephants. One of his concerns is genetics; the herd at Washington Park represents a limited gene pool. Of the twenty-four calves born there, nineteen have survived. Two of the dead were the offspring of Packy and Hanako, who are brother and half sister, and one was the offspring of Thonglaw and his daughter Hanako. (The two other deaths were apparently due to random congenital defects.) Such close genetic pairings are no longer made, although Packy and his half sister Me-Tu have twice reproduced without any problems. Schmidt must consider not only the elephants’ degree of relatedness but also the age and experience of both cow and bull, their relative size, whether the bull is in musth, and the personalities involved. Some cows have expressed strong opinions about certain bulls, and the bulls, while somewhat less discriminating, also have their preferences.

“When mating goes on, the cow has to cooperate,” Schmidt said. “The bull has to be on good terms with that cow. We’ve seen enough cases where a bull doesn’t like a specific cow, or cows won’t stand for a certain bull, whereas they will stand nicely for another one. Elephants are capable of forming that kind of relationship. They tend to have the same sorts of problems that all complex, intelligent animals have—like the primates, and ourselves.”

Schmidt allows the elephants whatever accommodations they need, which may mean a night alone in a yard for one pair and a private room for another. Tunga, having been brought up as a show animal, won’t approach a cow in front of human beings. “Elephants—particularly the older animals—are not like cattle, where you have a female in heat and you bring in a bull and he jumps up and breeds her,” Schmidt explained. “There’s a chemistry between elephants. A really experienced bull doesn’t like it when a cow doesn’t act the way an experienced cow ought to—when her response is abnormal, to put it in scientific terms. The bull will often become immediately aggressive if the cow is behaving strangely. She may not know what to do. But a young bull doesn’t care—a young, eager, excited bull will try to breed any cow he can. The difficulty the younger bulls have is that older cows can dominate them, because they’re bigger or wiser. If the cow doesn’t want to cooperate, a young bull doesn’t have the equipment and the technique and the size to assert himself, whereas an older bull will sort the situation out in a hurry.”

By November of 1974, Thonglaw had sired fifteen calves, of whom twelve survived. He would not submit to chains in order to undergo foot care, and had consequently suffered from foot problems for years. Schmidt resolved to do something about this, and after consulting Morgan Berry he decided to tranquilize the elephant—always a risky procedure. To everyone’s dismay, Thonglaw died under sedation. (The crush was developed and built as a kind of memorial to Thonglaw, to spare future elephants the same risk.) Packy, then twelve, became the patriarch. He has since fathered seven calves.

“Packy makes it clear what he wants,” Schmidt told me. “We’d be afraid to put Tamba in with Packy, because he seems to dislike her, and he’s so much bigger than she is. She would tend to fight him a bit—to think that she shouldn’t have to do what he wants. Tamba’s sort of imprinted on people.” Neither will Packy mate with Belle, his mother. “I think that he knows she’s his mother,” Schmidt said, “but I can’t prove it.”

I have never seen a pair of elephants mate—few people have—and I suspect that if I had the opportunity I would turn my back. I was shown a series of photographs of such an occasion, and I felt like a voyeur, a trespasser into private territory. In the photographs, the bull begins by laying his trunk across the cow, guiding her gently against a wall, stroking her until she assumes a spread-leg stance. It is too intimate, this soft control, the stolid acceptance by the female, and then the unexpectedly human posture. He plants himself behind her, upright and stately. It took me a moment to place that dignity; it is Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god of wisdom. The bull stands erect and bows his head to his work with all the concentration of a man and all the power of a god.

TUESDAYS ARE BLOOD-SAMPLING days here. Early on a summer morning, before the zoo’s gates opened and the crowds arrived, I watched while Jim Sanford and Jay Haight performed their deft art. They visited Hanako and Tamba first, in a room at the far end of the hall. The giant animals seemed genuinely glad to see them and immediately moved close to greet them. Haight carried an ankus, a tool that looks something like a boathook and is used to guide and control the elephant, and laid it lightly alongside Hanako’s trunk, taking hold of her fleshy, triangular lower lip with his free hand. “She likes me to hold her,” he told me. “It keeps her calm. She’s not wrapped too tight.”

Hanako stood still and patient for a moment, then began stroking Haight with her trunk, waved it in my direction—I was standing safely outside the hydraulic door, which was opened a foot or two—and finally swung it to her side, stroking Sanford’s trousers. Sanford pulled out the fan of her thin-skinned ear, rippled with veins, and poked a small needle into the largest, a gentle line running like a riverbed from top to bottom. The needle lodged in place, and he held a vial to catch the steady drops. Hanako’s trunk continued its undulations, from Haight to the unfamiliar air around me and on to Sanford. When the vial was full, Sanford pulled out the needle, stepped through the door, and took two bananas from a box.

“Tamba, get back, get back!” he shouted at the younger cow, who had rushed forward in her eagerness for fruit. He moved to Hanako. “Trunk!” She swung the floppy member aside, and Sanford shoved the bananas in whole.

Tamba was restless. “She knows she’s gonna get a stick and a treat,” Sanford explained. “She’s a happy camper. She’s a doll.” Tamba moved over to the door opening. She threw her trunk above her head like a lady flinging open a parasol; her mouth opened wide, presenting me with a giant pink cavity framed by two bright, intelligent eyes. Her tushes, short and dull, were at the front of a set of enormous molars, each nine inches long and weighing about four pounds. Her throat dropped away from me into blackness, the pale-pink tongue, as large as a loaf of bread, damp and vibrating with life. Sanford reached in and massaged her tongue, grabbing it with a firm hand and scratching its rough surface. Tamba seemed to sigh with pleasure at the touch. The men traded places, Haight moving to Tamba’s ear while Sanford held her trunk. As they worked, they swore cheerfully, insulting each other and the animals, disparaging clothes, looks, and heredity with equal zest. Tamba wiggled her head, trying to watch, and Sanford, tall enough to meet her at the eye level, yelled in her ear, “Get your head down, or I’ll get all over you like a cheap suit!”

Roger Henneous ducked in the door, carrying an electronic thermometer. Steadily, half bored, he took Tamba’s skin temperature while Haight drew blood. Behind Henneous, Hanako bobbed gracefully. She rubbed her head against his back, the bulbous gray easily dwarfing the man in his brown uniform. Henneous ignored her, but I couldn’t: I ventured too close to the door, and she was distracted by me, by my new smell, and came to press her trunk against me. It was a wet, bristly live thing, like the head of an anxious reptile, and she inhaled me in a rush of wind. By the time Haight stepped between us, scolding me for my reckless move, she had kissed tight to my shoe and was marching purposefully up my leg.

More cows were waiting in the viewing room, and the keepers rushed to finish before the zoo gates opened. This is the first place that people come, to see the elephants. Several feet inside the glass panel are widely spaced bars as thick as a man’s arm; because Chang Dee was small enough to slip through the bars, four chains were strung between them. Sunshine held perfectly still while the keepers bled her ear. “She loves being treated like a grownup,” Sanford said, and rewarded her with two bunches of blackened bananas. Chang Dee reached for the fruit with his undersized trunk, and Sunshine marched away, bananas held high.

Elephants have many voices: they trumpet, rumble, squeal, growl, roar, snort. While Haight was patting Rosy under the “forearm,” a high metallic whine began. “I gotta get some grease—she needs oiling,” he said, laughingly, and only then did I realize that the whine was elephant speech. Rosy, Pet, Me-Tu, and Sunshine began to cry together, a shrill, stridulous, and very loud clamor rolling through the high-ceilinged room. It was an almost painful yet beautiful noise, split by belly rumbles, birdlike eeks and squawks, and the ululating song of whales. The men paid no attention and drew blood from Rosy’s wrinkled ear, their voices raised above the din. Sanford scratched his back with the ankus and watched Chang Dee try, for the hundredth time, to climb over the chains strung between the bars. As suddenly as it had started, the squealing stopped. In the silence, Sanford began singing a Chuck Berry song to Sunshine, and the elephants joined in. There were wet exhalations, belches, growls and grunts, a repeating sonar blip, a keening whistle. The men passed out rewards, and Sanford gave Pet three bunches of bananas. Why three, I asked him, when the other cows got two?

“Because she’s Pet,” he answered with a grin. “They don’t get any better than that.”

IN ALL WORK with Asian elephants, there is one limit—the puzzling circumstance of musth. Cow elephants, and bulls out of musth, can be dangerous; the casual motions of the keepers in stroking an unchained cow mask a constant caution. But musth bulls are deadly. Knowing this, one sees in a new light historical references to the use of elephants. In the Rome of Pliny’s time, people would sit down to a banquet, and then a ceremonially dressed elephant, picking its way through the crowd, would come and take its place at the table. I’m sure it was an uncommon spectacle—the gargantuan guest swaying past the seated diners. But what a risk! I thought of the Romans when I found a photo of Morgan Berry and Thonglaw the other day. Berry stood in front of the bull, who was seated on the ground, his front feet dangling high and Berry’s son, Kenneth, clinging to his back. All three seemed in a kind of repose, still for the camera, waiting to do the next trick.

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 gland 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.

“He said, ‘You know, I’ve got this really interesting problem I’m working on. I’ve done a lot of work on elephant behavior and elephant reproduction. But I’ve always been interested in chemical communication.’ This was a new term to me. So he started to tell me his ideas about temporal-gland secretion.” She and Buss collaborated on the first analysis of the secretion. In 1979, the Rasmussens moved to Portland, where Bets’s husband had an offer to work and teach at the Oregon Graduate Center. Bets received a faculty appointment without salary, giving her access to laboratories but no teaching duties. She was still principally occupied with fish, but as a last favor to Buss she visited the Washington Park Zoo and the elephants.

“The elephant keepers started to talk to me,” she recalled, “and I said, ‘You know, I’m really interested in this musth thing.’ I got to like the elephant people, got to know them, and one day I met Dr. Schmidt.” One of the first things Schmidt told her concerned the sniff tests and his suspicion that a pheromone was present in the urine. “I thought it was the most fascinating thing I’d ever heard in my whole life. Here was a problem that made everything I was doing with fish look like routine clinical chemistry.”

She went to the chairman of the Chemistry Department at the Center, an organic chemist named G. Doyle Daves, and repeated what Schmidt had told her. Together, they began studying the urine of elephant cows in estrus, Daves doing the laboratory work of extracting compounds from the urine and Rasmussen the biological checks, recording the urine-testing reaction of the bulls to the laboratory samples. Their timing was based on Schmidt’s blood data, and the keepers took responsibility for collecting the urine.

Urine collection changed the routine at the zoo in a permanent way. Whenever the designated cow of the day began to urinate, one of the keepers had to grab a bucket and race to catch the splattering stream. (There was no telling when this might occur. “Elephants can cross their legs till their eyeballs float,” Roger Henneous says.) The keepers were lucky to collect twenty liters from a cow in her fertile period; Bets, admitting to a chronic fear of running out of elephant urine, still keeps gallons of it in her freezers at the Center.

A few months into the work of chemical extraction, Daves left the Center for Lehigh University, and Bets was alone, without funding. “I was absolutely devastated,” she told me. “I was not trained as an organic chemist. I was a biochemist, which is very different. I had no choice—if I didn’t do the lab work myself I’d have to drop the project.” She began borrowing equipment and teaching herself to use it; she has since learned to repair it as well.

One of the central questions in pheromone research is that of transportation: how does the chemical signal move from, say, the female to the male, and how does the male perceive it? Most of the identified insect pheromones are dissipated on the wind in gaseous form. But mammals appear to have a more elaborate, intimate method. It is common, even daily, practice among mammal species for a male to check a female’s secretion by sniffing and licking her urine, her genital mucus, and her saliva. Often a female will assist in the process by standing still, moving her tail, or even politely urinating a small amount nearby. The male accomplishes his testing in a very specific way, by a behavior known as flehmen. Classic flehmen is a grimace—an expression of bared teeth, curled upper lip, and open mouth. Both sexes of moose, giraffes, cattle, sheep, and goats, seeking information not only about fertility but also about status and identity, demonstrate classic flehmen. The curious expression, with its appearance of casual disdain, is thought to bring, by tongue and nostril movements, a bit of pheromone into the vomeronasal organ, a chemosensor present in almost every mammalian species and also in reptiles. (It is vestigial in human beings, with anatomical remnants visible in skull sections.) The vomeronasal organ is distinct from the olfactory system and is separately connected to the brain; in snakes, in fact, it is more highly developed than the sense of smell. (Eric Albone, a chemist at Bristol University, in England, thinks that tongue-flicking in snakes may be a kind of flehmen.) When a male flehmens a fertile female, he “tastes” her fertility with his vomeronasal organ. The taste stimulates him into mating; once the female has become pregnant, or has ceased to be fertile, she tastes different, and he will leave her alone.

It had been known for a long time that elephants had a vomeronasal organ, but little attention and less research had been devoted to it. When an elephant opens its mouth, pressing the trunk above the head and revealing its tunnel-like throat, two duct openings are visible in the roof of the mouth. Bets Rasmussen was able to get a good photograph of these pits when she noticed Packy out in the yard trying to pull down the rain gutter of the barn. She waited until he stretched his trunk to its limit, and then she snapped the picture; it was the first ever published of the duct openings.

The elephant’s trunk, which is about eight feet long in a mature bull, has an astonishing number of uses. With its trunk, an elephant eats (hay, cigarette butts, a single ice cube, a half-dozen large carrots at once); sucks up water, as much as four liters at a time, and squirts it down its throat; digs, pulls up plants, or pulls down tree branches; fights; smells (an elephant can detect odors several miles away); bathes and dusts itself; caresses its kin. Elephants put their trunks in each other’s mouths, and sometimes an elephant drapes its trunk over a tusk, as artlessly as a man drapes a suit coat over his arm. The elephant rubs its own eyes, scratches behind its ears, and snorkels while swimming. (They are strong swimmers.) Elephants also flehmen; this is what is happening when a bull checks a cow in a sniff test. But a clear understanding of the nature of the behavior was a long time in coming.

“Everyone knew that the males stuck their trunk tips in the female urine, but they didn’t connect that behavior with the vomeronasal organ,” Bets told me early one morning as we stood behind the fence overlooking the back elephant yard. This is her spot—a corner of dirt and scrub not far from a head-high pile of elephant manure, which was steaming in the spring fog. Here she has bioassayed over ten thousand samples of urine extractions, in every kind of weather, standing for hours at a time as a lone bull paces the sand. We were watching Tunga, who is normally a slow, rather dull animal. But today he was in the early stages of musth and restless; as soon as he spied us, he trotted over to the moat and stood opposite us, swaying from side to side, foot to foot. “That’s one mad bull,” Bets said, laughing. Tunga seemed to roll his head in indignation, and suddenly we were sprayed with wet sand, stinging and sharp.

Before Tunga was released into the yard, Bets had splashed six different samples along the newly washed concrete apron. One was a control—fresh urine from a cow who was not in estrus. The rest were new extractions. In the lab one day, she had shown me fifteen small flasks of liquid from the extraction process, each a different tint and with a different odor. She pulled the cork for No. 1, and I smelled a startlingly strong urine with a lingering, bitter reek. No. 15, the last in the line, was a very light coral color, with an aroma of cinnamon. Nos. 4, 5, and 6 were straw-colored and had the most surprising smell of all: elephants and hay. She laughed at my expression. “When I first smelled those, I was sure I’d found the pheromone,” she said.

If a bull fails to respond to a particular sample, Bets doesn’t know whether that means that the pheromone is not present or just that it is present in too small a quantity. On the other hand, if a bull responds with unusual vigor she has to steel herself against untoward optimism. “As you separate these compounds, you create novel substances,” she told me. “The animal will often respond to them the first and second, and even the third, time you bioassay, simply because they are novel.” Six years ago, she found a volatile long-chain hydrocarbon. It felt, she says, like a pheromone. It was a common chemical, available in quantity, and she bought a batch of it. “We got tremendous response. We had five or six flehmens in a row from the bull. We thought we had found the pheromone! We were all elated. The next day, there was a response, but it was less marked. The third day, there was virtually nothing. The fourth, no response. That’s a pitfall in the work of others—they’ve only done their experiments a couple of times and then assumed they’ve found an active compound. So it was a valuable lesson.”

Tunga paced the concrete apron, sniffing the air. Suddenly, his trunk straightened like an arrow; the single fingertip at the trunk’s end flared, and he placed his nostrils flat against the wet surface. His jaw dropped open, and he held perfectly still for a moment, a sculpture of discovery and concentration. Then he deftly curled his trunk in upon itself, in a long and pretty oval, and pressed the tip against the two dark pits inside.

“Oh, that’s a good one,” Bets said. “I was a little worried about that sample.” The extracts that pass the test are further purified in the lab and then sent to Dr. Terry Lee, a longtime colleague of Bets, who gauges their molecular weight using a mass spectrometer. Bets made a check on her clipboard, looking down only for an instant, and returned to watching Tunga. “I get so excited about this part of the work sometimes that I dream about it,” she said. “I wake up and think, Gee, maybe tomorrow I’ll get a flehmen on that particular peak.” (She tends to refer to the samples as peaks, because this is how the various molecules show up in chromatographic analysis.) “The research wouldn’t interest me half as much if I couldn’t see the elephant do the flehmen.”

Bets has become something of a connoisseur of flehmen, with an aesthetic appreciation of the different styles. Tunga, she told me, will shake his trunk to “clear his palate” between samples. The idea of elephant flehmen was for a long time unacceptable to many conservative biologists; they considered true flehmen a behavior limited to hoofed mammals, and possibly cats. Most mammalian species are now thought to exhibit some form of flehmen, but one reason it took so long for elephant flehmen to be recognized is the trunk. No other animal has one, so there are no analogies. Another reason is the speed of the gesture; while Tunga has a leisurely approach, Packy is fast—his trunk whips in and out of his mouth in a few seconds. Bets was immediately able to see the gesture for what it was because she was looking for a pheromone. She believed, because of the results of Schmidt’s original sniff testing, that a pheromone had to be there. In turn, pheromone presence suggested flehmen, and so did a vomeronasal organ. In late 1981, after she became certain of the flehmen, and was able to obtain a series of photographs of the behavior, she submitted an article to Science. At first, she received what she refers to as a “scathing” review by the journal’s referees. I was heavily criticized for having used only two bulls,” she said. “I just drew on my knowledge of the literature and fought back.” In July of 1982, the article was published, as a cover story, but the idea was not widely accepted for several years.

There is a constant interplay between olfaction—smelling the urine and, perhaps, the pheromone—and the perception based in the vomeronasal organ. (Eric Albone points out that we have no word for that perception.) But in the tiny concentrations used in the bioassays there is so little urine left that no noticeable odor remains. The perception is thought to be occurring entirely within the vomeronasal organ, long a mysterious place. In 1983, Bets had an opportunity to study one when Mike Schmidt made the difficult decision to euthanize Tuy Hoa, the Vietnamese gift of gratitude. Tuy Hoa had congenital skeletal problems and suffered from severe arthritic and foot pains. The zoo’s only previous adult death had been Thonglaw’s, and he had been buried, with enormous trouble, in an isolated spot on the grounds. (“The problem with a dead elephant is that you don’t have the time for an autopsy which you might have with, say, a monkey,” Schmidt told me. “You have ten thousand pounds of decaying flesh to deal with, and in a zoo any death is a very unpleasant situation, which everyone wants to get through as soon as possible.” Tuy Hoa was “disarticulated” with chain saws and incinerated after an expeditious autopsy. Bets took Tuy Hoa’s head and attempted to remove the vomeronasal organ, a cigar-shaped white tube about a foot long and tightly bound in the middle of the skull above the soft palate. She was only partly successful. A few years later, a circus elephant died suddenly in Portland, and again she managed to obtain the skull. She worked through the night in a cold-storage room, and in about eight hours had removed the vomeronasal organ almost intact. She began to prepare a paper with anatomical drawings. This past summer, a colleague in Africa sent her the organ of a fetal African elephant, and she was able to work up comparisons. But questions remained. She was uncertain about how the organ connected to the nerves and glands, and exactly how it sat within the bone. Then there was another death in the Washington Park herd, when Susie apparently suffered a reaction to a routine drug.

“I’d just walked in the door from a trip,” Bets recalled. “I was exhausted, and the phone rang. It was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down, because there were probably five major questions I still had about the anatomy. With the circus elephant, my major objective had been to get as much of the organ out as quickly as I could, so that I could accurately determine the histology and cytology. Once I learned that Susie had been dead for four or five hours, I knew there was no point in looking for that. The thing to concentrate on was the anatomy. We can only speculate, on the basis of what we know from other animals, about what happens on the receptive side of the vomeronasal organ. You can’t put a compound labeled with a fluorescein dye there and let the animal flehmen and then cut the skull apart to see how far up the vomeronasal organ the dye went. You can’t do electrophysiological tests, so you can’t know the response of the bipolar neurons inside the organ.”

She could, however, map the anatomy. “I spent five days on Susie’s skull, usually about eight hours a day,” she said. “I went very, very slowly. The most fascinating thing is the enormous size of the sinuses. The elephant brain is back behind the ears, in line with the eyes, and all the stuff above that is sinus—incredibly honeycombed pockets. I dissected part of the skull with fine dissecting tools—the kind a neurosurgeon uses. In many places, I had to go through four inches of bone with a metal cutter. Then I would take photographs, and label the whole thing along the way.”

She is not, however, immune to loss. The dissections were a strain. “I had to cut Tuy Hoa’s trunk off. I’ll never forget that. She had been dead three hours, but it felt as if I were killing her. With Susie, the eyes were there. Someone came and took the eyeballs out—I never could have done that. I would find it impossible to dissect Sunshine. I’d just say, ‘Forget it.’ But I guess if the guys are cutting them up for disposal, then I should be there getting the information, and I can’t afford to be sentimental. If it was hard for me, it must have been really hard for Roger and Jay and Jim. I firmly believe in my own research. If I didn’t believe in it, I would have quit about five years ago, because the last three or four years have been slow going. I can’t believe I’ve been working so many years on this. That’s one thing about working with elephants—you learn patience.”

THE FECUNDITY OF the herd at the Washington Park Zoo masks the pressure on elephants in the wild, and captive breeding may be, as Mike Schmidt calls it, “the last hurrah” of Proboscidea. Schmidt continues to occupy himself with the ovulation cycle, but for several years he has taken his research in a particular direction—that of artificial insemination. The survival of the species can’t be assured, he feels, by successful breeding in one herd, or even in several. The genetic pool is painfully small; he estimates that in the United States at this time there are 326 Asian cows and eighteen Asian bulls. And the Endangered Species Act has, since 1976, made the importation of Asian elephants virtually impossible.

“Artificial insemination is the best way to ensure the genetic variability of domestic elephants,” he told me. “And it will also have implications for managing wild elephants. If you have a population of no more than five hundred elephants, they will sooner or later become extinct—though that sounds like a lot of elephants—because there’s not enough genetic diversity. But if you take just six other animals every twenty years and inject them into that population it can go on forever. Where are you going to get those six unrelated animals? You’re going to get them from your domesticated herds. But there are problems with A.I. in the case of elephants. If your timing is off, you’ve got a four-month wait. And elephant anatomy makes it difficult—you have to go four feet to get to the cervix. The route is circuitous—up, over, and down—and requires flexible fiber-optic tubing. Managing that and preserving the sperm adequately are going to take years and years of work.”

Several months earlier, Schmidt had travelled to Thailand for a conference on elephant preservation and presented some of his research on artificial insemination. Another of his goals, he said, had been to persuade Asian elephant handlers to encourage their working bulls to breed. “I’m eager to collaborate with the Asians, because they have the numbers of animals,” he told me. “Almost everything we’ve done, from the beginning, has been geared to practical application in the field. You could develop a terrific research method for inseminating elephants using stereomicroscopes and manipulation of embryos, or something, but so what? There might be only three places in the world that could do it. So how can we take the knowledge and turn it into a practical method to use on thousands of elephants? We can’t save the Asian elephant single-handedly, even by building a monster zoo in America.”

There is one profound problem to solve if artificial insemination does succeed, and that—once again—is musth. “Suppose A. I. is gloriously successful and you’ve got all these pregnant cows,” Schmidt said. “Half the calves are going to be males. In ten years, most of them are going to be shot. It’s not responsible to get into that situation—you have to have some way of dealing with surplus males. Some will be kept for breeding, but what are you going to do with the rest? Well, you can castrate them. They can be work elephants, they can be exhibit elephants. What about a little zoo in the Midwest with one elephant—an Asian cow that’s never going to be bred? She should be in a social group, yet they’ve got room for only one elephant, and, in any case, they can’t afford a group of cows. Well, they could have a neutered male instead—he’s going to be a docile animal, easygoing, happy-go-lucky, imprinted on people. He doesn’t need to be with other elephants, or to breed, to be happy.”

The castration of elephants has until recently been a fatal proposition; the testes are lodged in a web of circulatory vessels near the kidneys, and mortality from the surgery used to approach 90 percent. In 1983, seeing the long-term need, Schmidt and several other veterinarians joined forces to solve the puzzle. The team has done six castrations so far, all on circus bulls facing execution as they matured and grew more dangerous. “We have yet to lose a bull,” Schmidt told me. “We developed the surgical approach to the abdomen, and more understanding of the anatomy. And we know more about anesthesia now.”

Schmidt is aware that some people consider all animal research exploitive. He is quick to point out that none of the elephant research at Washington Park contributes to human health; it is all for the benefit of the elephants themselves. “I think these animals’ contributions will echo down the years,” he said. “We always felt that way—that they were contributing to the preservation of their species. I tell them so—‘Pet, you’re making a contribution to your species.’ She has more than paid her dues.”

RECENTLY, I VISITED the elephant barn again, stopping first at the elephant museum next door, which opened in 1986 and is privately funded. It is a half-moon-shaped building filled with ceremonial helmets, paintings, and tusk rings—the trappings of the human relationship with all things elephantine. Its centerpiece is the complete skeleton of a mastodon, on permanent loan from the Smithsonian Institution; it seemed unimposing here, so near the living thing. Then I walked over to watch the cows awhile, as they tossed hay about and rocked in place, their spongy feet compressing and springing back with every beat. Rama, back from the zoo in Tacoma only a few weeks and still nervous, was darting back and forth in a quarantine room, his trunk wild and fast. (Bets told me that when she splashed a sample of urine from Rosy, Rama’s mother, on the freshly washed floor of the room he flehmened thirty-five times in a row.) Packy was in the crush, relaxed, downing carrots, seeming not to know—or care—that he couldn’t walk out at will. Jay Haight took me right to the bull’s gigantic, warm side. His trunk, as thick at its base as my torso and three times as long, snaked back to where I stood, questing for me. A wet print of his left forefoot had made a near-perfect circle on the concrete; Jay and I stood together inside it, with room to spare.

Roger Henneous was there, as he almost always is, his stained ranger’s hat cocked back on his head, his feet spread wide on the damp, hay-covered floor. Behind him milled a wall of dusty gray. He talked about the research, and the keepers’ efforts to help, no matter how great the inconvenience or the danger. A considerable amount of extra work is required of all the keepers, and much of it is dirty and difficult. “I have many times, over the years, found myself cussing and stomping my feet, wondering, Goddammit, why couldn’t I have taken up rabbits?” he said, with a glint in his eye. “In the overall scheme of things, our efforts here may not make a nickel’s worth of difference. Not in the big real world out there. But no other breeding program like this one exists. If we can’t—or won’t—do the work, who will? We have the facilities, and we have the animals. If Betsey isolates and identifies the pheromone, then, theoretically, it can be synthesized. If it can be synthesized, it could be used to lure wild elephants from inhabited areas—essentially trick them out of harm’s way. It could save a lot of bulls in Asia from getting the lead pellet.”

Down the hall, Belle has planted her face against the crack of a door. Behind her in the room is a trio of younger cows. The elephant guards the tree of life; the elephant worships the moon and stars. Elephants were once supposed to have had wings. Belle greets me with a grim stare, blocking me like a house matron uncertain whether I’m fit to be let in. I stand quietly for the inspection. Her trunk slides up, loose and confident, and rapidly slips under my collar, through my hair, down my sleeve, my pant leg. She’s close, her trunk is enormous, the two huffing nostrils at the end strangely naked and pink, vacuuming in my smell, my volatiles, myself. All the while, she fixes her moist brown eye on mine. I remember—because I can’t forget—photographs I’ve seen of butchered elephants. What was left of one bull knelt in apparent calm. The body, its head missing, was eerily still, as though waiting. John Donne called the elephant “Nature’s great masterpiece … the only harmless great thing.” As I submit to Belle’s precise, intelligent examination, I remember that and the dead elephant’s calm, and look straight back into her cautious and curious eye.

New Yorker, January 23, 1989

When I began writing an essay about a scientist’s long search for a mysterious pheromone, I was given the keys to the kingdom: access to the elephant herd at what is now called the Oregon Zoo. The story felt like a gift—it was a great problem and it gave me a chance to go inside, to be close to animals I prize greatly.

I’m not particularly interested in the campaign to stop zoos from keeping elephants in captivity. I want them to be treated well, preferably in open spaces with the chance to socialize and wander in the most natural way. But we’ve been too busy killing wild elephants and destroying their habitat to stop keeping captive herds. That this animal could disappear from the Earth is a tragedy beyond words for me. Imagine a world without elephants: I can hardly think about it.