Violation: Collected Essays - Sallie Tisdale

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sight a neat Japanese garden, tiers of award-winning roses, and a cluster of distant skyscrapers. I like the crowds in the morning, too: most of the people pressed against the glass wall of the viewing room are young mothers with children in strollers; on a hillock above the moat, toddlers waddle beside a wood-and-wire fence, oblivious of the giants below.

      These are Asian elephants, slightly smaller than their African cousins and, I think, more diffident. The Asian and the African elephant not only are separate species but belong to separate genera, and are the only surviving members of the order Proboscidea, which once covered much of the planet and may have included more than three hundred species. The genesis of the modern elephant is, in fact, a point of debate; its evolutionary tree is filled with dozens of branches that failed to bloom. On the basis of the sometimes obscure elements of taxonomy, the elephant’s closest living relatives are the hyrax, a furry rodentlike animal; the rotund ocean-dwelling manatee and dugong; and the aardvark.

      The Asian elephant has smaller ears than the African, one rather than two “fingers” on the tip of its trunk, a long narrow face under a giant domed skull of airy bone. The Asian has smaller tusks, if any; the popular image of the elephant—huge ears flung wide, long rails of ivory below the face—is of the African. But it is Asians we see as the centerpiece of circuses and in zoos. They are considered far easier to train—more amenable and less skittish. The Asian has been the elephant of domestic life all the years of recorded history and is sacred in many religions. It is still used as a work animal in India, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand. According to trainers, the Asian is more willing to enter the intimate, emotionally complex relationship that domesticity requires. Pliny the Elder ascribed to the elephant the senses of modesty, shame, and delight, and in this herd—the most prolific herd of elephants in the Western Hemisphere, with twenty-four births in twenty-six years—I imagine a sense of style, too. Even in the spacious, sandy backyard, they move with a jungle delicacy.

      It has taken me a while to learn to distinguish one elephant from another—by noting the pattern of pink freckling on their ears, the number of creases on the lower leg (a kind of fingerprint), and the angle and set of the ears, which are shaped like ginkgo leaves. Elephants rarely stand completely still; they pass among others, lean, touch, and blend into a single, soft contour. The trunk, which is both nose and upper lip (it is also the elephant’s hand, with control fine enough to pick up a dime), never rests; it waves slowly, restlessly about. A few in the herd of eleven are easy for me to spot: Tunga, a bull, because he is the only one with tusks (they are banded in brass); Rosy, the oldest cow, who has a pleasing shape and the balance of an elder; Belle, a few years younger, who has the wrinkles. The elephants scratch themselves—foot to knee, head against pillar—and caress each other with their heads and trunks, and all this motion is oddly quiet. The elephant foot is encased in a fatty pad, and it is this wide cushion that makes elephants so silent and stealthy in the wild. They can pass undetected a short distance away from people, even at an easy lope. When standing, elephants swing their front legs one in front of the other in perfect time; sometimes two elephants will rock in rhythm, heads swaying in counterpoint to the beat.

      I think it is a human trait to exaggerate difference—to imagine an odd thing as odder than it really is. I expected, when I first met elephants, to have exaggerated their size in my imagination. But elephants are so big, so much bigger than any other creature we meet on land, that I found the opposite to be true: I had actually reduced them in my mind, diminished their size and their difference. Up close, within reach, an elephant is a transcendent thing, entirely alien. Elephants resemble us in funny ways—they catch colds, get sunburns, babysit each other’s children. Rosy and I even have the same body temperature. But I am really nothing like Rosy, and she is nothing like me; still, as I watch her and her kin pass by, my strongest feeling is one of society and relation.

      At Washington Park, the elephants are guests, family, and royalty; they are by far the most popular animals on exhibit. One morning in early June, I watched as Sunshine, a five-year-old adolescent cow, bullied Chang Dee, the herd’s only calf, into fetching a ball from the wading pool in the front yard; she shoved the bristly haired, short-trunked baby toward the edge of the water until he tumbled in. The mothers and cousins nearby ignored the children, and threw leaves of lettuce on their own and each other’s backs, using each other as tables. In the backyard, Hugo, a bull, paced, and dusted himself with sand, and the people leaning on the fences sighed with pleasure. He was the Elephant, in myth an earthbound rain cloud, the beloved beast known variously as God’s messenger, earth’s egg, the carrier of the world. But Hugo is also a research animal, as they all are, and is subject to the keepers’ law. Washington Park’s elephants are participants in research aimed at protecting their species from extinction; through Hugo, Sunshine, and the others, certain essential mysteries are beginning to unravel.

      The real key to recognizing elephants is personality. The keepers at Washington Park indulge in a cheerful and unapologetic anthropomorphism when discussing their charges, but this is a matter more of the conventions of language than of biological inaccuracy. All are quick to bristle at explanations of elephant behavior—such as the common assumption that Hugo dusts himself with sand in order to cool off. “We don’t know why Hugo or any of them do what they do. How could we?” says Jay Haight, who has been a keeper at Washington Park for nine years. Each man brings his own degree of familiarity to each elephant, and it varies from a rude slap on the rump or a gentle stroke and whisper to a respectfully wide berth.

      Between chores, the keepers tend to gather for a cigarette or a cup of coffee in the barn’s central room, a huge, concrete-floored chamber with a cathedral ceiling split by skylights. This particular room, in spite of its size, isn’t used by the elephants; its dominant feature is an enormous pile of timothy hay. Along one wall are a counter and a dusty, paper-strewn desk below a row of dusty cupboards; elephant cartoons are tacked on the cupboard doors. This room and the viewing room next to it are part of the original barn, which was completed in 1959. Behind a hydraulic door labeled with a red danger sign is a later addition: a hallway and several large rooms. One of these contains the crush, a contraption of hydraulic barred walls, which is used to confine the animals—painlessly, despite the name—for care. Asian bull elephants are subject to a recurrent phenomenon of unknown purpose called musth, which lasts anywhere from a few weeks to several months (longer in healthy, well-nourished elephants like these) and is marked by violent, unpredictable behavior. This and an inveterate need to dominate are what characterize the bull. The keepers will go into a room with cows, mingle with them, many times a day; they generally approach a bull only after he is settled in the crush. Few zoos have the equipment, the experience, or the will to care for even one full-sized bull; there are three at Washington Park, thanks largely to the crush. It is not a new idea: log or bamboo cages have been used in Burmese work camps for hundreds of years. Every elephant here goes in and out of the crush nearly every day—it also functions as a door to the backyard—and each is rewarded for the trip with a bunch of carrots or bananas or an armful of hay. The thick walls of wide-spaced bars slide both horizontally and at angles, shifting noisily, with simple controls, to match the animal’s form. Here the periodic foot care is done, to prevent bacterial infections and overgrowth of toenails, and here medicine, vitamins, and other medical treatment are given. It is also in the crush that the trickiest part of reproduction research—sperm collection—takes place.

      I have joined the keepers in the big hay room for conversation many times, and now and then one of them will go off to do an errand: move an animal or two or three from room to room or into one or another of the yards; pass out carrots. I’ve been startled to hear a sudden shout of “Bull coming through!” and see, through a crack in the hallway door, a trotting elephant, head high, trunk waving toward the scent of the hay as he heads up the hall.

      One day last June, I visited the keepers to discuss elephant character. They had left open a door to a little side yard fringed with bamboo and fenced off from the backyard by a concrete wall. A group of cows in the backyard came to stare at us, leaning their great gray heads over the wall, their trunks weaving from side to side. The elephants will watch, sometimes for hours, the movements of the human beings nearby. Now and then, a bull will scoop up a pile of sand (and, occasionally, excrement) in the sinewy curl at the tip of his trunk and sling it at a keeper or a maintenance man. The damp sand flies out like a hail of buckshot and is aimed with an archer’s

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