Madrid Elephant Takes Stock--and Runs

An amusement park company thought that a clever way to promote the first day of its stock sale Wednesday would be to take an elephant to the stock exchange. The pachyderm thought otherwise.

The noise, cars and crowds of downtown Madrid spooked Clarisa, a 12-year-old elephant, so badly that she broke away from her caretakers and knocked into traffic lights, a lamppost and a trash bin.

The handlers briefly managed to tie the 2-ton animal to a tree, but she got away again. In the end, they shot Clarisa with a tranquilizer gun, then used a crane to hoist her snoozing hulk onto a truck for the ride back home to the Madrid zoo.

“It was a disaster,” said Marta Carazo, a journalist for the Spanish news agency Efe who watched Clarisa’s ordeal. “Cars were driving right by her while she was loose. The poor thing was so nervous.”

The elephant never made it to the stock exchange photo session where she was to have appeared with officials of Parques Reunidos to publicize the first day of share sales. The company owns the Madrid zoo as well as amusement and theme parks.

“We didn’t expect her to react this way,” acknowledged a company official, who declined to be identified by name.