Activists Denounce L.A. Zoo’s Treatment of Elephants : Animals: An attempt to ‘dump’ the rowdy Hannibal led to his death, the critics say. Authorities deny that their policies or facilities are faulty.

It was a sad requiem for a heavyweight.

As the tusks of Hannibal the elephant sat Wednesday on a storage shelf and experts awaited word of the cause of his death, animal activists and Los Angeles Zoo officials were clashing over blame and the need for an independent investigation into the incident.

A coalition of animal rights groups denounced the zoo for rushing to “dump” the rowdy, five-ton adolescent male in Mexico and called for a special “oversight committee” to examine zoo policies. In the meantime, the coalition demanded that immediate steps be taken to protect the zoo’s seven remaining elephants.

Zoo officials dismissed the criticism as unwarranted, announcing that a preliminary investigation by the federal Department of Agriculture supported their plan to relocate the animal to Mexico--and has cleared them of any wrongdoing.

Hannibal died early Friday after being sedated and loaded into a steel crate for the trip to Mexico. Los Angeles officials had planned to move the 16-year-old animal to a large habitat at a zoo near Mexico City.

Zoo Director Mark Goldstein said the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service concluded this week that there were “no apparent violations of the Animal Welfare Act on the part of the zoo” in tranquilizing Hannibal and loading him into the crate for the trip south.

But animal activists shrugged off that assessment, complaining that federal officials know no more than zoos do when it comes to dealing with rare and endangered species.

Representatives of Friends of Animals, Performing Animal Welfare Society, Fund for Animals, In Defense of Animals, Last Chance for Animals and United Animal Nations, USA called for an independent outside investigation and said they were taking steps of their own to start such a probe.

They urged zoo officials to immediately improve what they characterized as “barren” elephant enclosures. And they urged the public to attend a demonstration in memory of Hannibal at 10 a.m. Saturday at the zoo entrance.

Pat Derby, president of the Sacramento-based Performing Animal Welfare Society, told reporters in Santa Monica that the coalition is creating a “task force of citizens, veterinarians and elephant experts” to investigate the zoo’s treatment of elephants.

She indicated that the panel will look into two previous elephant deaths and will review the zoo’s master plan for elephants.

At present, the elephants have woefully little to do but pace in their small enclosures, Derby complained.

Lisa Landres, a Venice captive wildlife specialist with Friends of Animals, said her experience as an elephant keeper at the San Diego Zoo proved that elephants can be given such things as tire swings and empty beer kegs to play with.

The rowdy-appearing Hannibal, Landres asserted, “was not a ‘problem’ elephant. He was a bull elephant. That’s what bull elephants are about.”

The activists also said several U.S. organizations had offered to take Hannibal as a way of keeping him in this country.

Zoo officials--who sent a public relations specialist to the activists’ press conference and distributed copies of the federal Agriculture Department’s letter--tried to put a different spin on the controversy later Wednesday.

As a pair of PR experts hovered in the background, Goldstein defended the plan to move Hannibal to the Zacango Zoo in Toluca, Mexico, and away from “a situation and circumstances inappropriate to him.” He praised his staff’s response after Hannibal lay down in the $10,000 steel shipping crate, never to get up.

“At this point, having analyzed the issue, would we have done anything differently last week? No,” Goldstein said.

But the zoo should never have obtained an African bull elephant in the first place, Goldstein acknowledged.

The zoo’s elephant area is small and the animals grow too big and powerful, he explained. Twice in recent weeks Hannibal had torn down his barn’s thick steel door, Goldstein said, endangering himself as well as other animals and zoo visitors.

Because of Hannibal’s power, it would have been foolish for officials to place old tires or beer kegs in his enclosure, where such items could have been thrown at visitors, Goldstein said.

As for sending Hannibal to an American site, Goldstein said officials investigated a Texas animal compound and determined that its operators lacked experience in dealing with elephants.

From Abilene, Tex., however, elephant handler Patty Stobridge-Gough said late Wednesday that she and a partner were willing to take Hannibal. She said a 712-acre elephant compound is being planned for a box canyon.

“We told them to give us 90 days and we’d be ready,” said Gough--who claimed that she and her partner have a total of 25 years of experience as elephant handlers. “We told them to come here and look us over. But they never did.”

Don Roser, a Torrance animal activist and member of the Elephant Alliance group, said his organization tried to arrange a potential home in Acton, at actress Tippi Hedren’s wild animal compound.

Hedren confirmed that space was offered, although she noted that the city would have had to help defray Hannibal’s living expenses at her compound, where two other African elephants reside.