Senior Trainer at Zoo Says Elephant Was Beaten Until It ‘Rolled Over and Moaned’

An elephant at the San Diego Wild Animal Park was struck on the head more than 100 times over two days by keepers who used heavy wooden sticks, the senior elephant trainer at the San Diego Zoo said Wednesday.

The elephant, called Dunda, was struck so many times that she “rolled over on her side and moaned,” said Steve Friedlund, who said he and his staff learned details of the incident from two Wild Animal Park handlers who witnessed and participated in the incident. Friedlund said he believes the keepers hit the elephant with ax handles normally kept around the elephant barn at the park.

“Both keepers who talked to us said they were just sick about it the first night, then went back and did the same thing the next day,” Friedlund said.

Probes by Humane Societies

He said the reports of the two keepers and photographs of the elephant taken by a San Diego Zoo trainer a few weeks after the incident were what prompted Friedlund and his staff to call for an internal investigation.

A spokeswoman for the San Diego Humane Society said the organization is looking into the incident at the request of officials of the San Diego Zoological Society, which operates both the zoo and the Wild Animal Park. The Humane Society of the United States is also investigating. The two organizations are not related.

Friedlund said he described the reports to Jim Baker, an investigator for the San Diego Humane Society who questioned him at the zoo Wednesday. Attempts to reach Baker were unsuccessful.

The incident occurred about Feb. 18, several days after the 18-year-old African elephant was transferred from the zoo, where it had lived most of its life, to the park, where it is to become part of a breeding program.

Douglas Myers, director of the San Diego Zoological Society, said Wednesday that, although he has not finished his own investigation, he believes the transfer and discipline of Dunda were handled properly and professionally by trainers at the Wild Animal Park.

Myers said statements by trainers at the zoo that they were not consulted about the move are untrue, and that statements by Werner Heuschele, the society’s director of research, “were not in context.”

The Times reported Wednesday that Heuschele, after investigating the matter, determined that handlers at the park lost their tempers and used excessive force in disciplining the elephant after it became agitated and threatened their lives. Attempts to reach Heuschele on Wednesday were unsuccessful.

The transfer and its aftermath have provoked a bitter dispute between handlers at the zoo, who say excessive force was used, and handlers at the park, who deny the claim, but say the animal was out of control.

Alan Roocroft, supervisor in charge of elephants at the Wild Animal Park, said Wednesday that the elephant was struck with “hickory sticks” in addition to the baton-like elephant hooks normally used to discipline the animals. He said the hickory sticks are harder than elephant hooks, but he denied that ax handles were used.

The elephant, which was extremely unruly, was struck with the instruments on only one day, not two, Roocroft said.

“The animal was brought up to the park because she was uncontrollable out there (at the zoo),” he said. “However brutal this may seem to people, this is just a drop in the pond to what happens to them in the wild. . . . You put your emotions on reserve.”

The breeding program in which Dunda has been placed is aimed at the preservation of elephants before they reach the status of an endangered species. They are now classified as “threatened,” a less serious category, Roocroft said. In order for the program to work, the elephants must be controlled, he said. The elephant “would have been running around like crazy” if firm discipline had not been administered, he said.

Nervous but Not a Problem

Keepers at the zoo say Dunda, although nervous by nature, never created problems at the zoo, and became upset only because she was “transferred cold” to the park without sufficient preparation and was frightened by the unfamiliar surroundings.

Friedlund said that one of the Wild Animal Park keepers phoned him at home in February shortly after the incident and relayed his “eyewitness account” of the events. He declined to name either the keeper who called him or another who relayed details to a member of his staff.

The keeper told him, he said, that, over two days, six people, including Roocroft, disciplined the elephant under Roocroft’s instructions. The elephant was “terrified” and was given “no chance to ease into her new environment,” Friedlund said.

“He told me she was stretched out on her knees and elbows. She was tied so close to the floor that she couldn’t move and she couldn’t flee. Every time the animal turned in fear to strike at people, they would knock it senseless,” Friedlund said. “She never understood what was going on. If she had been loose, she would have gone away.

“She was hit so many times she rolled over on her side and moaned. He was sickened by it. It was beaten up so severely it just gave up and wanted to die.”

Skin Extremely Thick

Friedlund said the wounds inflicted on the elephant’s head were too severe to have been inflicted solely by elephant hooks, which are light poles, each with a metal hook on one end.

“I know that there were heavy wooden ax handles involved, not the batons they were saying they used,” he said. “I’ve seen the ax handles in the barn.”

Friedlund, 42, has been working with elephants for 18 years and spent several years at the Wild Animal Park before joining the staff of the zoo.

He said it would take a great number of blows to cause the damage suffered by Dunda.

“That skin on the skull of an elephant is extremely thick and durable,” he said. “To crush the skin down like that so that it falls off requires repeated blows to the same spot. . . . There had to be a tremendous number of blows at full force on the same spot over and over again.”