Violation: Collected Essays - Sallie Tisdale

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assumed they’ve found an active compound. So it was a valuable lesson.”

      Tunga paced the concrete apron, sniffing the air. Suddenly, his trunk straightened like an arrow; the single fingertip at the trunk’s end flared, and he placed his nostrils flat against the wet surface. His jaw dropped open, and he held perfectly still for a moment, a sculpture of discovery and concentration. Then he deftly curled his trunk in upon itself, in a long and pretty oval, and pressed the tip against the two dark pits inside.

      “Oh, that’s a good one,” Bets said. “I was a little worried about that sample.” The extracts that pass the test are further purified in the lab and then sent to Dr. Terry Lee, a longtime colleague of Bets, who gauges their molecular weight using a mass spectrometer. Bets made a check on her clipboard, looking down only for an instant, and returned to watching Tunga. “I get so excited about this part of the work sometimes that I dream about it,” she said. “I wake up and think, Gee, maybe tomorrow I’ll get a flehmen on that particular peak.” (She tends to refer to the samples as peaks, because this is how the various molecules show up in chromatographic analysis.) “The research wouldn’t interest me half as much if I couldn’t see the elephant do the flehmen.”

      Bets has become something of a connoisseur of flehmen, with an aesthetic appreciation of the different styles. Tunga, she told me, will shake his trunk to “clear his palate” between samples. The idea of elephant flehmen was for a long time unacceptable to many conservative biologists; they considered true flehmen a behavior limited to hoofed mammals, and possibly cats. Most mammalian species are now thought to exhibit some form of flehmen, but one reason it took so long for elephant flehmen to be recognized is the trunk. No other animal has one, so there are no analogies. Another reason is the speed of the gesture; while Tunga has a leisurely approach, Packy is fast—his trunk whips in and out of his mouth in a few seconds. Bets was immediately able to see the gesture for what it was because she was looking for a pheromone. She believed, because of the results of Schmidt’s original sniff testing, that a pheromone had to be there. In turn, pheromone presence suggested flehmen, and so did a vomeronasal organ. In late 1981, after she became certain of the flehmen, and was able to obtain a series of photographs of the behavior, she submitted an article to Science. At first, she received what she refers to as a “scathing” review by the journal’s referees. I was heavily criticized for having used only two bulls,” she said. “I just drew on my knowledge of the literature and fought back.” In July of 1982, the article was published, as a cover story, but the idea was not widely accepted for several years.

      There is a constant interplay between olfaction—smelling the urine and, perhaps, the pheromone—and the perception based in the vomeronasal organ. (Eric Albone points out that we have no word for that perception.) But in the tiny concentrations used in the bioassays there is so little urine left that no noticeable odor remains. The perception is thought to be occurring entirely within the vomeronasal organ, long a mysterious place. In 1983, Bets had an opportunity to study one when Mike Schmidt made the difficult decision to euthanize Tuy Hoa, the Vietnamese gift of gratitude. Tuy Hoa had congenital skeletal problems and suffered from severe arthritic and foot pains. The zoo’s only previous adult death had been Thonglaw’s, and he had been buried, with enormous trouble, in an isolated spot on the grounds. (“The problem with a dead elephant is that you don’t have the time for an autopsy which you might have with, say, a monkey,” Schmidt told me. “You have ten thousand pounds of decaying flesh to deal with, and in a zoo any death is a very unpleasant situation, which everyone wants to get through as soon as possible.” Tuy Hoa was “disarticulated” with chain saws and incinerated after an expeditious autopsy. Bets took Tuy Hoa’s head and attempted to remove the vomeronasal organ, a cigar-shaped white tube about a foot long and tightly bound in the middle of the skull above the soft palate. She was only partly successful. A few years later, a circus elephant died suddenly in Portland, and again she managed to obtain the skull. She worked through the night in a cold-storage room, and in about eight hours had removed the vomeronasal organ almost intact. She began to prepare a paper with anatomical drawings. This past summer, a colleague in Africa sent her the organ of a fetal African elephant, and she was able to work up comparisons. But questions remained. She was uncertain about how the organ connected to the nerves and glands, and exactly how it sat within the bone. Then there was another death in the Washington Park herd, when Susie apparently suffered a reaction to a routine drug.

      “I’d just walked in the door from a trip,” Bets recalled. “I was exhausted, and the phone rang. It was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down, because there were probably five major questions I still had about the anatomy. With the circus elephant, my major objective had been to get as much of the organ out as quickly as I could, so that I could accurately determine the histology and cytology. Once I learned that Susie had been dead for four or five hours, I knew there was no point in looking for that. The thing to concentrate on was the anatomy. We can only speculate, on the basis of what we know from other animals, about what happens on the receptive side of the vomeronasal organ. You can’t put a compound labeled with a fluorescein dye there and let the animal flehmen and then cut the skull apart to see how far up the vomeronasal organ the dye went. You can’t do electrophysiological tests, so you can’t know the response of the bipolar neurons inside the organ.”

      She could, however, map the anatomy. “I spent five days on Susie’s skull, usually about eight hours a day,” she said. “I went very, very slowly. The most fascinating thing is the enormous size of the sinuses. The elephant brain is back behind the ears, in line with the eyes, and all the stuff above that is sinus—incredibly honeycombed pockets. I dissected part of the skull with fine dissecting tools—the kind a neurosurgeon uses. In many places, I had to go through four inches of bone with a metal cutter. Then I would take photographs, and label the whole thing along the way.”

      She is not, however, immune to loss. The dissections were a strain. “I had to cut Tuy Hoa’s trunk off. I’ll never forget that. She had been dead three hours, but it felt as if I were killing her. With Susie, the eyes were there. Someone came and took the eyeballs out—I never could have done that. I would find it impossible to dissect Sunshine. I’d just say, ‘Forget it.’ But I guess if the guys are cutting them up for disposal, then I should be there getting the information, and I can’t afford to be sentimental. If it was hard for me, it must have been really hard for Roger and Jay and Jim. I firmly believe in my own research. If I didn’t believe in it, I would have quit about five years ago, because the last three or four years have been slow going. I can’t believe I’ve been working so many years on this. That’s one thing about working with elephants—you learn patience.”

      THE FECUNDITY OF the herd at the Washington Park Zoo masks the pressure on elephants in the wild, and captive breeding may be, as Mike Schmidt calls it, “the last hurrah” of Proboscidea. Schmidt continues to occupy himself with the ovulation cycle, but for several years he has taken his research in a particular direction—that of artificial insemination. The survival of the species can’t be assured, he feels, by successful breeding in one herd, or even in several. The genetic pool is painfully small; he estimates that in the United States at this time there are 326 Asian cows and eighteen Asian bulls. And the Endangered Species Act has, since 1976, made the importation of Asian elephants virtually impossible.

      “Artificial insemination is the best way to ensure the genetic variability of domestic elephants,” he told me. “And it will also have implications for managing wild elephants. If you have a population of no more than five hundred elephants, they will sooner or later become extinct—though that sounds like a lot of elephants—because there’s not enough genetic diversity. But if you take just six other animals every twenty years and inject them into that population it can go on forever. Where are you going to get those six unrelated animals? You’re going to get them from your domesticated herds. But there are problems with A.I. in the case of elephants. If your timing is off, you’ve got a four-month wait. And elephant anatomy makes it difficult—you have to go four feet to get to the cervix. The route is circuitous—up, over, and down—and requires flexible fiber-optic tubing. Managing that and preserving the sperm adequately are going to take years and years of work.”

      Several months earlier, Schmidt had travelled to Thailand for a conference on elephant preservation and presented some

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