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and a gruff manner, and he has worked at the Washington Park Zoo for more than twenty years. “She used to be earth mother to all the calves, but now she’s had a bellyful. There’s no elephant you’d rather spend time with—you could trust your child with her. Now, Belle—she is so damned hardheaded. She won’t bend and acknowledge that she’s getting older and everybody else is getting better. So she proceeds to get her butt whipped up on with depressing regularity by the young cows moving up. She is not going gently into that good night. And Me-Tu, Rosy’s daughter—that’s Daughter Hog.”

      “Me-Tu lives to eat,” Haight explained. “You could put four animals together and they would not eat as much as fast as she does.” Jim Sanford, the zoo’s third full-time elephant keeper, talked about his favorite, a young cow named Pet. “One of her trademarks is checking us out: ‘How far can I go? How much does this guy know? Have the rules been changed?’” he told me. “It’s one of the things you really like about her. I’d call it a sense of humor—she obviously gets pleasure out of seeing how much she can get away with. It slays her. I think the relationship between a human being and an elephant is based on mutual trust. They know what the rules are here. If one of us, particularly a new guy, chastises them for things that are okay with everybody else—well, they won’t put up with it.”

      “Do they like you?” I asked.

      Haight paused, considering. “Does it matter? I like them, but they piss me off a lot of the time. I know they’re hearing me, and then suddenly it’s ‘I’ve never done this before! You can’t be talking to me!’” He threw up his hands, mimicking elephant disbelief. “But you have to be the dominant animal. That’s why the bulls come after us. If we weren’t the dominant animal, they wouldn’t care.”

      The herd’s daily routine is complicated, with many comings and goings and tradings of place. Every task is punctuated with sound: the deep whoosh of an elephant’s exhalation, the spray of a hose on concrete, the clang of massive hydraulic doors, the faint rustle of a scratching bull. There is sound, and there is smell—a perfume of hay and manure, and, underneath, the musky, dry, sweet smell of the elephants themselves. The air in the barn is always warm, even in this high-ceilinged central room.

      Elephant cows are irrepressibly social beasts. Washington Park has two separate family herds of mothers, daughters, and female cousins. (At the time of my visits last spring and summer, Chang Dee, the male calf, was still with his mother, Me-Tu. He has since gone to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and almost to the day his five-year-old half uncle, Rama, returned to the herd from a four-year sojourn at the Point Defiance Zoo, in Tacoma.) The groups rotate and are sometimes split into smaller groups throughout nine available areas, eating periodically in different places. (A single mature cow will consume ninety pounds of hay, three pounds of oats, forty-six pounds each of carrots and lettuce, a handful of vitamins, a quarter cup of salt, and fifty gallons of water every day.) The three mature bulls are always separate and solitary, but during mating a cow and bull are given a private room for several days or, sometimes, are allowed the use of one of the outside yards.

      With each move to a new area, the animals must examine the evidence of the animals that have just left; it is in the first few moments in a yard or a room that the elephants seem to merge, recognizing and reassuring each other. To prevent boredom and to ensure cooperation, the cows and calves are trained to stand, to back up, to lie down, to hold still, and to tolerate leg chains, which are necessary during feeding to prevent the dominant animals from stealing food. Both Tunga and Hugo were once show animals—Hugo belonged to the Ringling Brothers circus—and can do such tricks as walking on a ball. Chang Dee, Hugo’s firstborn, was the payment the zoo made to the circus in exchange for Hugo, and was thus trained to accept leg chains from babyhood. Sunshine (her real name is Sung Surin) was taught to lie down on command—a marvel of conditioned response. In the course of a week or two, a keeper would enter the barn while Sunshine was napping and rouse her just enough to feed her a banana. When she woke from her nap, Jim Sanford says, “it was with banana on her breath and the word down in her ears.”

      The keepers are full of such stories; they say, with a certain pride, that single-trial learning is normal in elephants. They tell long anecdotes—tales of one elephant determined to pull a door apart, another playing with an electrical heating panel, a third refusing to lift a leg for a chain—and they laugh at the elephants’ cleverness and their own efforts to be a bit more clever. It is an affectionate one-upmanship; tomorrow, perhaps, the elephants will win another round.

      “One day, Rog and I came back from a break, and there’s Tamba, who had been with the herd in the backyard, all by herself over in the bamboo,” Jay Haight recalled. At the time, Tamba, a seventeen-year-old cow born in Thailand, wasn’t fully grown, and she had somehow managed to squeeze through a gap at one end of the wall between the two yards and was harvesting the bamboo, an elephant delight. “So she’s really conspicuous, but as soon as she heard us coming she turned around and faced the other way, rock-still, holding her trunk in her mouth.” Haight pretended to whistle, gazed at the ceiling. “‘I’m not really here, don’t mind me. It’s just Mr. Squirrel.’” Another time, Tunga swung one of the elephants’ playthings, a chained log, over the moat, climbed out along it as if he were on a balance beam, and fell in. It was not his first such mishap: an erstwhile performer, Tunga can balance on one leg, and he was once seen to “waltz,” or spin on his hind legs, around the backyard until he tripped and tumbled into the moat.

      Roger Henneous believes that the elephants are well aware of their keepers’ expectations. “You ought to be here on a day when the routine is hopelessly screwed up and get a look at the expressions on their faces,” he said. “If they had a watch, they’d be checking it. And asking you, ‘Look, buddy, what’s the problem? Have you forgotten everything we ever taught you?’”

      “Come on and see the big guy,” Jim Sanford said, and he led me down the hall, a narrow concrete alley lined with dusty pipes, to a room with a window about three feet wide and screened with heavy wire mesh. He was referring to Packy, the undisputed master of the herd. Packy, who stands more than ten feet high and weighs 13,320 pounds, is the largest known Asian elephant in the world. He is only twenty-six—young for an elephant—and he will continue to grow throughout his life.

      When I peered through the window, the room at first seemed empty. Then, as in a dream, I saw a trunk float by, far above my head, and then I saw a leg—a tall pillar of dirty velvet—and another, another, another. He was moving past the window with a ponderous grace, outsized. I felt that he needed not a bigger room but a bigger planet. He turned when he picked up my strange new scent, his trunk weaving a hypnotic dance against the mesh, up and down. His tushes—the upper incisors, which in Tunga had grown to tusks—were rough points against the thick wire. Several years ago, a keeper was walking past Packy, who was in a barred room. The bull casually reached through the bars with his trunk, grabbed the keeper’s arm, pulled him close, and crushed the limb against the bars with his skull, splintering the bone. Even with the heavy mesh protection, that sinuous trunk is disconcerting; Packy was looking me right in the eye, in a leisurely kind of way. Out of musth, he is usually a placid boy. But he is every inch the king of all the beasts.

      There are between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand Asian elephants left in the world. Their gradual elimination in the wild is the result of a number of changes, most of them recent and a few subtle. The invention of the chain saw, for instance, made forest-clearing much easier and quicker work. But basically there is just not enough room in Southeast Asia for both elephants and people. The elephant’s jungle habitat is being replaced by cropland, and many of the crops are delectable to the now homeless elephant. The elephant raids the millet and sugarcane, and is killed for his efforts, and kills in turn: in India, nearly a hundred and fifty people are killed by elephants every year. Wild elephants are found from India to Indonesia; most inhabit shrinking parks and preserves, in shrinking populations, separated from each other by human settlements as uncrossable as an ocean. Bulls, being more aggressive, are killed far more often than cows. Not only does this deplete the gene pool, but the cows’ opportunities to breed grow fewer, and as the birthrate falls their mean age increases. Because elephants will feed on the youngest, most tender trees available, finding them the most appetizing,

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