Park Ends Life of Omar, Sickly Baby Elephant

Omar, the 9-month-old elephant rejected by his mother at birth, was put to sleep early Sunday at the San Diego Wild Animal Park after failing to overcome the mysterious infection that he had battled for two months.

The first Asian elephant born at the park, Omar had suffered from a variety of ailments over the past eight weeks, including inflammation of his knee joints, a high white blood cell count, periodic diarrhea and constipation, and acute pain in his legs and shoulders. Because of chronic digestive problems, the 481-pound elephant also experienced a serious loss of appetite, resulting in the loss of about 80 pounds since early February, park officials said.

Two weeks ago, with the pain in his joints worsening, Omar was transferred to the San Diego Zoo’s veterinary hospital, where tests showed that he suffered from hairline fractures in both his front legs, just below the elbows.

Though veterinarians believed that those fractures resulted from his digestive problems, numerous blood, urine and fecal tests failed to reveal the cause of Omar’s initial illness, according to Tom Hanscom, a spokesman for the Wild Animal Park.

Returned to the animal park for continued care, Omar displayed no notable improvement, prompting veterinarians to conduct another series of X-rays on Friday that revealed a new fracture of the animal’s right front leg.

After being taken back to the park’s Asian elephant barn, where veterinarians and park staff kept a 24-hour watch over him, Omar became progressively weaker over the weekend, Hanscom said. Though he stood for brief periods Friday night, he had been unable to stand since early Saturday, the park spokesman added.

Throughout Saturday and early Sunday, keepers kept Omar warm and comfortable by rolling him from side to side every three hours in an attempt to prevent his lungs from filling with fluid.

After veterinarians examined Omar again at 6:30 a.m. Sunday, they decided, in consultation with elephant keepers and park curators, that “he was not going to recover and that the most humane thing to do was to put him to sleep,” Hanscom said.

With two veterinarians, one veterinary technician and nine elephant keepers present, a euthanasia solution was given to Omar through an intravenous tube shortly after 9 a.m. About half an hour later, Omar died.

Results of a necropsy examination are not expected until later this week, Hanscom said.

Sunday’s sad conclusion to Omar’s battle for life was the third death connected to the Wild Animal Park within the past two weeks.

On March 14, a 27-year-old animal keeper from Ramona, Pamela Orsi, was killed when she was trampled by an elephant that knocked her down while she was tending to another elephant. And last Thursday, Dr. Charles Schroeder, the 89-year-old father of the Wild Animal Park and a renowned figure in the zoo community throughout the world, died at his Escondido home of complications from liver cancer.

Omar’s death is likely to heighten animal rights activists’ call to end the breeding of elephants in captivity.

In a statement issued last month as Omar’s condition worsened, Sally Mackler, director of San Diego Animal Advocates, lamented the unnatural conditions under which captive elephants live.

“In the wild, elephants learn mothering skills from life in the herd,” the statement said. “Captivity does not permit that necessary learning to take place and rejection of the newborn can be the result.”

Prior to Omar’s birth last June, the Wild Animal Park’s breeding program had produced only three stillbirths of Asian elephants, an endangered species of which about 35,000 exist in the wild.

Shortly after Omar was born, his mother, Connie, apparently became frightened by the baby and attacked him, stepping on him, trumpeting and knocking him about on the ground.

Keepers rescued the baby and later tried unsuccessfully to reintroduce him to his mother. When those efforts failed, they began hand-feeding Omar, using advice solicited from other zoos that had raised the only two Asian elephants that survived without their mothers.

In an attempt to compensate for the lack of a mother’s milk, vital to the development of the mammalian immune system, Omar was given injections of his mother’s blood and was fed milk from cows that had recently given birth.

Having given Omar only a 50% chance of survival at birth, veterinarians gradually became more optimistic as he gained weight and became more active, picking up plastic toys with his trunk and wading in a pool in his pen.

Those hopes were dashed, however, when Omar began walking with a limp toward the end of January as his knee joints became inflamed and swollen. At the same time, his white blood count rose to three times its normal level, Hanscom said.

Sustained by intravenous nutrients and treated with antibiotics and pain relievers, Omar subsequently showed occasional signs of improvement, only to later take progressively worse turns.

When the decision to put Omar to sleep was made Sunday, one elephant keeper reportedly comforted another by conjuring up memories of one of the park’s earlier recent tragedies.

“That’s OK,” Hanscom quoted the keeper as saying. “Pam will take care of him.”