Elephant in No Mood to Go Traveling : Wildlife: An effort to ship the African bull to a Mexican zoo is abandoned when workers are unable to get it on its feet. Animal rights activists criticize the operation.

Working under cover of darkness, Los Angeles Zoo officials Wednesday tried--and failed--to spirit a rowdy five-ton bull African elephant away for a controversial journey to a zoo in Toluca, Mexico.

Officials beginning at 4 a.m. sedated the troublesome pachyderm and used heavy machinery to load it into a $10,000 wood-and-steel cage before dawn for what was to be a five-day journey to its new home at the Zacango Zoo.

But Hannibal, who has dismantled a barn door with its trunk twice in the past month, failed to respond to an antidote administered to help it stand in the cage. The elephant thrashed about for hours on its knees in the 9-foot-wide, 20-foot-long structure.

Twelve hours after the effort began, Los Angeles Zoo Director Mark Goldstein called off the operation and postponed the move--which has been strongly criticized by animal rights activists--until Saturday at the earliest.

“We are concerned about the safety of Hannibal, everyone involved in this operation and visitors at the zoo,” Goldstein said.

Lisa Landres, a former elephant keeper and captive wildlife specialist with Friends of Animals, an international animal protection agency, chastised zoo officials for the manner in which the operation was conducted.

“I don’t appreciate that they are trying to do things in a secretive manner. If they are going to do this, they have to be aboveboard all the way,” Landres said. “For them to try to pull the wool over our eyes is intolerable.”

Zoo officials said they undertook the procedure before dawn to guarantee peace and quiet to keep Hannibal calm. Goldstein said the animal was to spend Thursday night in the cage, with workers trying this morning to hoist the elephant to its feet with a crane and sling.

The day marked another sad chapter in the life of the 16-year-old animal that was rescued as an orphan from a national park in South Africa and brought to the Los Angeles Zoo in 1980 as the only male elephant in residence. Two female African elephants and five Asian elephants, one of them male, will remain after Hannibal’s departure.

Unlike the more well-behaved Asian elephants at the zoo, Hannibal grew up to be “extremely forceful and . . . capable of causing injury to himself or the people around him,” Goldstein said.

A year ago, zoo officials and veterinarians concluded that Hannibal was too big and dangerous to handle safely in its pen and decided to send it to the Zacango Zoo near Mexico City, which wants to begin a breeding program for African elephants.

There, it will be introduced to a 9-year-old female African elephant in a facility more spacious than Hannibal’s digs in Los Angeles.

However, Goldstein acknowledged that the 11-year-old Zacango Zoo--a 91-acre facility housing 1,500 animals representing 200 species--has no experience in breeding African elephants.

“They’ve already dealt with an Asian bull elephant. Granted, it may may not be of the same temperament (as an African bull),” Goldstein said. “But a majority of zoos in our country would not even have that experience.”

Hannibal became a topic of public concern in September, 1990, after he was tranquilized to get his toenails trimmed in preparation for shipment to Mexico, but failed to respond to an antidote. Zoo officials had to use a heavy utility tow truck from the Fire Department to help hoist the animal to its feet.

Since then, the move has been protested by animal welfare activists who claim that zoo officials are dumping the animal because of its temper tantrums and sending it to a below-par place where it might be abused.

D. J. Schubert, director of investigations for the Fund for Animals, a national animal protection organization, said that although his group opposes keeping elephants in any form of captivity, once they are in a zoo here it is best to leave them where they are.

“Transporting an elephant to another facility is very stressful,” Schubert said. “And I hear the zoos down there (in Mexico) are even worse than in this country. They don’t have the same standards that we do.

“I don’t think a transfer should be considered,” he said. “I think the Los Angeles Zoo has the responsibility to provide this elephant with the best care they can for the rest of its life.”

Florence Lambert, a spokeswoman for Elephant Alliance, a group trying to raise funds to buy a sanctuary for unwanted pachyderms, agreed. “It’s foolish to send Hannibal down there on a breeding loan when the Zacango Zoo has no experience in breeding African elephants.”

Two weeks ago, Goldstein visited the Zacango Zoo.

“The elephant exhibit at Zacango is three times the size of what we can offer Hannibal at Los Angeles; the barn twice the size,” Goldstein said. “In addition, he goes there on a breeding loan--any decision made by Zacango having to do with Hannibal will have to be made in conjunction with the Los Angeles Zoo.”

At first, zoo officials had decided to sell Hannibal to the Mexican zoo for a token $1. But after Goldstein became zoo director in January, he decided a breeding loan would be preferable.

Still, captive wildlife specialist Landres said the outlook for Hannibal seemed bleak.

“It’s true the Los Angeles Zoo does not have appropriate facilities to house him, but shipping him off to Mexico is not the proper solution,” she said. “If we can’t cough up enough money to care for him humanely in our own zoo, what makes us think a small town in Mexico will be able to do it?”

Times staff writer Eric Malnic contributed to this story.