The African Elephant Is Slowly Slipping Away

At 5:22 a.m. on Aug. 30, Colleen Kinzley, the elephant keeper at the Oakland Zoo, noticed the water. When a pregnant 8,000-pound African elephant’s water breaks, there tends to be a lot of it. This was the moment the zoo had long been planning for: Lisa, a 24-year-old cow, was going to be a mother again. Elephants are slow breeders, with a gestation period of almost two years, and usually don’t have another calf for two more years.

Their slow reproduction rate is one factor in the elephant’s status as an endangered species, in zoos as well as in the wild. In their natural habitat there are fewer than 500,000 African elephants--down from 1.3 million 30 years ago--and fewer than 50,000 of their smaller Asian cousins. U.S. zoos hold fewer than 400 elephants, a population that is shrinking so fast that some experts fear that even seeing the noble pachyderm in zoos will someday be a rarity. Unless, that is, zoos can figure out how to breed the highly intelligent but reproductively mysterious animals.

The Oakland Zoo is one of a handful of institutions in the country that has had any luck breeding African elephants, the largest land animal in the world. Unfortunately, most of that luck has been bad.

In 1995, for example, Lisa became the first African elephant to give birth in a zoo in a dozen years. The staff had no idea she was even pregnant. It’s hard to notice a couple of hundred extra pounds on an animal that weighs as much as two Ford Explorers. Still, the zoo was happy to discover that its male elephant, Smokey, was one of the few African bulls in the country to demonstrate any stud potential.

Seventeen days later, the zookeepers were even more impressed with Smokey. Donna, another cow, also gave birth. Donna seemed to readily take to motherhood, nudging the calf to stand, but it never did. Doctors discovered that the calf had a displaced hip. The animal was put to sleep.

Meanwhile, Lisa was not proving to be such a good mother to her calf, which was named Kijana. Elephants are social animals, learning much of their behavior from the herd, and Lisa had spent most of her life in a zoo with no older females. She was rough with the calf and pushed it away instead of letting it nurse; the keepers decided to raise Kijana by hand. Eleven months later, Kijana came down with a herpes virus and died.

In 1998, both females were pregnant again. Both miscarried. The following year, Smokey impregnated Lisa for a third time. The zoo built a special birthing pen: a 12-foot-long, 8-foot-high cage of widely spaced steel beams that would let the keepers have close contact with the elephant but prevent the animal from being able to attack or injure the handlers--no small concern since elephant training is considered one of the most dangerous jobs in the country.

The birth of an African elephant is a rare thing. Before August, only 30 African elephants had been born in the U.S., the first in 1978. Never before, however, had a zoo tried to deliver a baby elephant through a barrier. Keeping elephants and their handlers apart--a practice called protected contact--is a trend that has been sweeping U.S. zoos in the last decade, designed to provide greater safety for both the animal and its handlers.

Lisa was pregnant for 22 months, and during the last year Kinzley trained the elephant to walk into the cage by rewarding her with treats, such as golf-ball-size pieces of watermelon. “We have to make it worth their while,” she says.

Finally, after five hours of labor, Lisa gave birth to a 320-pound male elephant. The zoo named it Dohani, Swahili for smoke, in honor of the father, Smokey, who died in March at age 29. The zoo staff made up a poster announcing “It’s a boy” with a picture of the calf taking its first unsteady steps. The photo shows the 3-foot-6 animal, all ears and trunk, cuter than any Babar doll. Eleven days later, the calf was dead.

*

In 1991, visitors were watching the Oakland Zoo’s herd of African elephants lumber about their 2-acre grassland enclosure when the largest of the pachyderms walked up to Lorne Jackson, who was in the corral cleaning up. The big elephant was Smokey, then a 19-year-old bull, 12,000 pounds and still growing. Jackson had been the elephant’s trainer for 15 years.

“Step back,” Jackson commanded, as he had many times before. Instead, Smokey whacked Jackson over the head with his trunk, killing his keeper.

“It was no accident,” says Joel Parrott, the zoo’s executive director. “It’s not the elephant’s fault. Any elephant in Africa will try to kill you. They are the dominant animal in their ecology. They have no predators; they are the dominant animal because of their size. ... In a captive environment, you have the same dominant attitude. You don’t euthanize them for that. But we decided to put in a system so our keepers would never be killed again.”

That meant rethinking the traditional method of handling elephants, adapted from the handlers of Asia, called mahouts, who have been training elephants for thousands of years. The mahout’s main tool is the ankus, or elephant hook, usually a wooden baton with a steel crook and spike on the end. Mahouts use the ankus to cue an elephant, and if the animal doesn’t respond, they may hit it on the trunk with the stick.

Sometimes they use the steel part of the hook to jab the elephant--although the American Zoo and Aquarium Assn. guidelines forbid U.S. handlers from striking elephants with the hook, which can puncture the skin and leave wounds. Because the handler stands next to the elephant, this system is called free contact.

But before Jackson was killed, U.S. zoos had begun experimenting with a different approach, called protected contact, in which the elephant and the trainer are never in the same space. For decades, marine mammal trainers have taught tricks to dolphins and seals by bribing them with treats. In the 1980s, zoos such as San Diego’s Wild Animal Park began applying the concept to elephants.

After Jackson’s death, Oakland moved into the vanguard of the protected-contact movement. The zoo spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to install electric gates and special barriers that let keepers have close contact with the animals but prevented the keepers from being injured. In the last decade, protected contact has gone from an experimental method of elephant training to a mainstream technique. About half the zoos in the country now practice some form of protected contact. Some, such as the Oregon Zoo in Portland, mix the two, using protected contact on its male elephants, and free contact with its more docile females.

Yet not all zookeepers are convinced. “In free contact there’s so much more we can do,” says Mike Keele, assistant director at the Oregon Zoo. “Artificial insemination, for example, is so much easier in free contact.”

And, indeed, artificial insemination is the most promising development in the effort to breed captive elephants. In 1999 the Dickerson Park Zoo in Springfield, Mo., produced the first Asian elephant born from artificial insemination; last year the Indianapolis Zoo did the same with two African elephants.

Debbie Olson, director of elephant conservation and science programs at the Indianapolis Zoo, believes that free contact is necessary for invasive animal research and husbandry. “Having an animal that is very comfortable with people and hands-on contact allows us to do research,” she says. “The artificial insemination procedure could not have been developed without a cow that was well-trained and used to people handling her directly.”

But Oakland’s Parrott challenges that assumption. He points out that the zoo demonstrated that protected contact can be used in medical emergencies. When Lisa was seriously ill with the salmonella virus, she was given treatment for 18 days without violating protected contact. And Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Fla., has successfully inseminated an elephant through protected contact. “We’ve not faced a condition we couldn’t manage through protected contact, and we’ve been doing it for 10 years,” Parrott says. “We’re not worried.”

The Oakland Zoo is dedicated to protected contact, but it is also dedicated to captive breeding, and since Smokey died earlier this year, it now has three cows but no bulls.

Which means, Parrott says, that the zoo will artificially inseminate its females over the next year--via free contact.

When Lisa gave birth to Dohani, Kinzley separated the mother from her calf, placing the 320-pound baby elephant in an adjoining pen. Lisa snaked her trunk through the canvas-covered chains to touch her newborn.

Through the day, Kinzley put the calf in the pen with its mother. Dohani tried to suckle on Lisa’s belly. Experienced elephant mothers know they have to lift a leg so a calf can reach a breast. Lisa didn’t. But after a day of fumbling contact, Dohani nursed. “With people, Lisa can be impatient and aggressive,” Kinzley says. “But she gets along well with other elephants. All the other elephants like her the best. She’s usually the one who comforts others.”

Kinzley saw a sign that Lisa was learning to be a good mother: She began stepping carefully around the calf. When the 11-day-old calf was found dead, Kinzley moved Lisa out of the pen. The elephant was frantic. She ran back and forth outside the barn, holding her head up, ears out, making a low, rumbling sound, calling to her baby.

After performing a necropsy, Kinzley let Lisa back in. The calf had died of trauma, with a small puncture wound on his chest, as if it had been tusked by its mother. It was, Parrott says, an accident. Lisa called to her calf. No response. She nudged the body. It didn’t move. The two other females in the herd came up. Donna, who had lost two babies as well, touched the body with her trunk and then put her trunk on top of Lisa’s head.

Lisa stood over the body for 20 hours, never moving more than a few feet away. When she finally left to eat, the zookeepers buried the body in the elephant yard. For the next four days, Lisa looked around the barn, calling out for her calf.