Disappearing Act : Animals: The L.A. Zoo has no trouble making elephants vanish--sending most of them off to a ranch while their compound is rebuilt. But problems in handling the beasts won’t go away.

The plaintive cry echoing through the Los Angeles Zoo wasn’t the usual yowl of the hyena or call of the macaw.

The wailing was coming from the woman with the two kids in tow.

“Where are the elephants?” she hollered across an empty moat in front of the dusty elephant compound.

Inside, where he was inspecting a $1.2-million remodeling project at the pachyderms’ barn, zoo chief Mark Goldstein winced. Where eight African and Asian elephants had once lived, there were only two left on Wednesday.

Los Angeles zookeepers--under fire for the death of one elephant and later the exiling of another to a remote Riverside County ranch--had just shipped off four more.

The departure of a 32-year-old African elephant and three younger Asian animals is temporary, officials say. The zoo’s last two elephants will remain while the construction continues.

But on Wednesday, 27-year-old Tara and 35-year-old Geeta remained behind the barn, out of view of visitors on the south side of the 25,000-square-foot compound.

Goldstein walked to the edge of the moat and shouted to the woman: “The elephants are around on the other side. But because of the construction, you can’t get there from here. . . . You’ve got to go around the long way.”

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Zoo officials say they have come a long way themselves since early 1992. That’s when a bungled attempt to send a 16-year-old African male elephant named Hannibal to a Mexican zoo caused him to collapse and die in his transportation crate.

An upgrading of the 27-year-old elephant barn was ordered after that. Improvements include stalls that eliminate the need for nighttime chaining, new hydraulic doors and the addition of a special “squeeze” chute. It is a mechanical device strong enough to grip and control the rowdiest of elephants for examination by veterinarians or for shackling.

A shackling problem was blamed for Wednesday’s transfer of the four elephants to the privately owned “Have Trunk, Will Travel” elephant compound near Perris. Tara, an African female, had balked at being chained each night in the partially completed barn.

To keep her from staying outside in the cold, officials decided to move Tara into a smaller “bull barn” that once housed Hannibal and another male elephant, Billy. Ten-year-old Billy was shipped to the Perris ranch in September to get him out of the way of construction.

Problem was, the bull barn was being temporarily used by Ruby, a 32-year-old African elephant, and three young Asian elephants--Becky, 8, and 10-year-olds Dixie Lee and Jennie Lynn. So they were sent on Wednesday’s hour-and-40-minute truck ride to join Billy.

All the moving has caused some critics to grumble that elephants are becoming the L.A. Zoo’s vanishing species.

But the only protester on hand to watch the four elephants depart in enclosed trailers was Aaron Leidner, a Hollywood activist who is national director of Last Chance for Animals. He complained that the zoo is rebuilding the elephant barn for the convenience of handlers, not animals.

“He’s using the money not to improve the living conditions for the animals, but to make it easier for zookeepers to handle animals that should not be in captivity in the first place,” Leidner said of Goldstein.

But zoo construction supervisor Bud Worthen said the project is adding a heated floor to the barn and will increase the outdoor elephant yard by 6,000 square feet. It will also clear the way for the eventual addition of another 12,000 square feet of elephant compound space.

The four female elephants shipped out Wednesday will return in two or three months, Goldstein said. But while Billy had been expected to stay away for a year, his future now is up in the air.

If Billy comes back, Goldstein said, it will be after zoological experts in Los Angeles and elsewhere decide what’s best.

For now, he’d better not start packing his trunk.