[Kabar-indonesia] NYT-2: An Elephant Crackup?

[Joyo at aol.com]

The New York Times Magazine
Sunday, October 8, 2006

An Elephant Crackup? 

Part 2 of 2

Shortly after my return from Uganda, I went to visit the Elephant Sanctuary 
in Tennessee, a 2,700-acre rehabilitation center and retirement facility 
situated in the state’s verdant, low-rolling southern hill country. The sanctuary is 
a kind of asylum for some of the more emotionally and psychologically 
disturbed former zoo and circus elephants in the United States — cases so bad that 
the people who profited from them were eager to let them go. Given that 
elephants in the wild are now exhibiting aberrant behaviors that were long observed in 
captive elephants, it perhaps follows that a positive working model for how 
to ameliorate the effects of elephant breakdown can be found in captivity. 

Of the 19 current residents of the sanctuary, perhaps the biggest hard-luck 
story was that of a 40-year-old, five-ton Asian elephant named Misty. 
Originally captured as a calf in India in 1966, Misty spent her first decade in 
captivity with a number of American circuses and finally ended up in the early 80’s 
at a wild-animal attraction known as Lion Country Safari in Irvine, Calif. It 
was there, on the afternoon of July 25, 1983, that Misty, one of four 
performing elephants at Lion Country Safari that summer, somehow managed to break free 
of her chains and began madly dashing about the park, looking to make an 
escape. When one of the park’s zoologists tried to corner and contain her, Misty 
killed him with one swipe of her trunk. 

There are, in the long, checkered history of human-elephant relations, 
countless stories of lethal elephantine assaults, and almost invariably of some 
gruesomely outsize, animalistic form of retribution exacted by us. It was in the 
very state of Tennessee, back in September 1916, that another five-ton Asian 
circus elephant, Mary, was impounded by a local sheriff for the killing of a 
young hotel janitor who’d been hired to mind Mary during a stopover in the 
northeast Tennessee town of Kingsport. The janitor had apparently taken Mary for a 
swim at a local pond, where, according to witnesses, he poked her behind the 
left ear with a metal hook just as she was reaching for a piece of floating 
watermelon rind. Enraged, Mary turned, swiftly snatched him up with her trunk, 
dashed him against a refreshment stand and then smashed his head with her foot. 

With cries from the townspeople to “Kill the elephant!” and threats from 
nearby town leaders to bar the circus if “Murderous Mary,” as newspapers quickly 
dubbed her, remained a part of the show, the circus’s owner, Charlie Sparks, 
knew he had to do something to appease the public’s blood lust and save his 
business. Among the penalties he is said to have contemplated was electrocution, 
a ghastly precedent for which had been set 13 years earlier, on the grounds 
of the nearly completed Luna Park in Coney Island. A longtime circus elephant 
named Topsy, who’d killed three trainers in as many years — the last one after 
he tried to feed her a lighted cigarette — would become the largest and most 
prominent victim of Thomas Edison, the father of direct-current electricity, 
who had publicly electrocuted a number of animals at that time using his rival 
George Westinghouse’s alternating current, in hopes of discrediting it as 
being too dangerous. 

Sparks ultimately decided to have Mary hanged and shipped her by train to the 
nearby town of Erwin, Tenn., where more than 2,500 people gathered at the 
local rail yard for her execution. Dozens of children are said to have run off 
screaming in terror when the chain that was suspended from a huge industrial 
crane snapped, leaving Mary writhing on the ground with a broken hip. A local 
rail worker promptly clambered up Mary’s bulk and secured a heavier chain for a 
second, successful hoisting. 

Misty’s fate in the early 80’s, by contrast, seems a triumph of modern 
humanism. Banished, after the Lion Safari killing, to the Hawthorn Corporation, a 
company in Illinois that trains and leases elephants and tigers to circuses, 
she would continue to lash out at a number of her trainers over the years. But 
when Hawthorn was convicted of numerous violations of the Animal Welfare Act in 
2003, the company agreed to relinquish custody of Misty to the Elephant 
Sanctuary. She was loaded onto a trailer transport on the morning of Nov. 17, 2004, 
and even then managed to get away with one final shot at the last in her long 
line of captors. 

“The details are kind of sketchy,” Carol Buckley, a founder of the Elephant 
Sanctuary, said to me one afternoon in July, the two of us pulling up on her 
all-terrain four-wheeler to a large grassy enclosure where an extremely docile 
and contented-looking Misty, trunk high, ears flapping, waited to greet us. 
“Hawthorn’s owner was trying to get her to stretch out so he could remove her 
leg chains before loading her on the trailer. At one point he prodded her with a 
bull hook, and she just knocked him down with a swipe of her trunk. But we’ve 
seen none of that since she’s been here. She’s as sweet as can be. You’d 
never know that this elephant killed anybody.” 

In the course of her nearly two years at the Elephant Sanctuary — much of it 
spent in quarantine while undergoing daily treatment for tuberculosis — Misty 
has also been in therapy, as in psychotherapy. Wild-caught elephants often 
witness as young calves the slaughter of their parents, just about the only way, 
shy of a far more costly tranquilization procedure, to wrest a calf from 
elephant parents, especially the mothers. The young captives are then dispatched to 
a foreign environment to work either as performers or laborers, all the while 
being kept in relative confinement and isolation, a kind of living death for 
an animal as socially developed and dependent as we now know elephants to be. 

And yet just as we now understand that elephants hurt like us, we’re learning 
that they can heal like us as well. Indeed, Misty has become a testament to 
the Elephant Sanctuary’s signature “passive control” system, a therapy 
tailored in many ways along the lines of those used to treat human sufferers of 
post-traumatic stress disorder. Passive control, as a sanctuary newsletter 
describes it, depends upon “knowledge of how elephants process information and respond 
to stress” as well as specific knowledge of each elephant’s past response to 
stress. Under this so-called nondominance system, there is no discipline, 
retaliation or withholding of food, water and treats, which are all common 
tactics of elephant trainers. Great pains are taken, meanwhile, to afford the 
elephants both a sense of safety and freedom of choice — two mainstays of human 
trauma therapy — as well as continual social interaction. 

Upon her arrival at the Elephant Sanctuary, Misty seemed to sense straight 
off the different vibe of her new home. When Scott Blais of the sanctuary went 
to free Misty’s still-chained leg a mere day after she’d arrived, she stood 
peaceably by, practically offering her leg up to him. Over her many months of 
quarantine, meanwhile, with only humans acting as a kind of surrogate elephant 
family, she has consistently gone through the daily rigors of her tuberculosis 
treatments — involving two caregivers, a team of veterinarians and the use of 
a restraining chute in which harnesses are secured about her chest and tail — 
without any coaxing or pressure. “We’ll shower her with praise in the barn 
afterwards,” Buckley told me as Misty stood by, chomping on a mouthful of hay, 
“and she actually purrs with pleasure. The whole barn vibrates.” 

Of course, Misty’s road to recovery — when viewed in light of her history 
and that of all the other captive elephants, past and present — is as harrowing 
as it is heartening. She and the others have suffered, we now understand, not 
simply because of us, but because they are, by and large, us. If as recently 
as the end of the Vietnam War people were still balking at the idea that a 
soldier, for example, could be physically disabled by a psychological harm — the 
idea, in other words, that the mind is not an entity apart from the body and 
therefore just as woundable as any limb — we now find ourselves having to make 
an equally profound and, for many, even more difficult leap: that a fellow 
creature as ostensibly unlike us in every way as an elephant is as precisely and 
intricately woundable as we are. And while such knowledge naturally places an 
added burden upon us, the keepers, that burden is now being greatly compounded 
by the fact that sudden violent outbursts like Misty’s can no longer be 
dismissed as the inevitable isolated revolts of a restless few against the 
constraints and abuses of captivity. 

They have no future without us. The question we are now forced to grapple 
with is whether we would mind a future without them, among the more mindful 
creatures on this earth and, in many ways, the most devoted. Indeed, the manner of 
the elephants’ continued keeping, their restoration and conservation, both in 
civil confines and what’s left of wild ones, is now drawing the attention of 
everyone from naturalists to neuroscientists. Too much about elephants, in the 
end — their desires and devotions, their vulnerability and tremendous 
resilience — reminds us of ourselves to dismiss out of hand this revolt they’re 
currently staging against their own dismissal. And while our concern may ultimately 
be rooted in that most human of impulses — the preservation of our own 
self-image — the great paradox about this particular moment in our history with 
elephants is that saving them will require finally getting past ourselves; it will 
demand the ultimate act of deep, interspecies empathy. 

On a more immediate, practical level, as Gay Bradshaw sees it, this involves 
taking what has been learned about elephant society, psychology and emotion 
and inculcating that knowledge into the conservation schemes of researchers and 
park rangers. This includes doing things like expanding elephant habitat to 
what it used to be historically and avoiding the use of culling and 
translocations as conservation tools. “If we want elephants around,” Bradshaw told me, 
“then what we need to do is simple: learn how to live with elephants. In other 
words, in addition to conservation, we need to educate people how to live with 
wild animals like humans used to do, and to create conditions whereby people 
can live on their land and live with elephants without it being this 
life-and-death situation.” 

The other part of our newly emerging compact with elephants, however, is far 
more difficult to codify. It requires nothing less than a fundamental shift in 
the way we look at animals and, by extension, ourselves. It requires what 
Bradshaw somewhat whimsically refers to as a new “trans-species psyche,” a 
commitment to move beyond an anthropocentric frame of reference and, in effect, be 
elephants. Two years ago, Bradshaw wrote a paper for the journal Society and 
Animals, focusing on the work of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya, a 
sanctuary for orphaned and traumatized wild elephants — more or less the 
wilderness-based complement to Carol Buckley’s trauma therapy at the Elephant 
Sanctuary in Tennessee. The trust’s human caregivers essentially serve as 
surrogate mothers to young orphan elephants, gradually restoring their psychological 
and emotional well being to the point at which they can be reintroduced into 
existing wild herds. The human “allomothers” stay by their adopted young 
orphans’ sides, even sleeping with them at night in stables. The caregivers make 
sure, however, to rotate from one elephant to the next so that the orphans grow 
fond of all the keepers. Otherwise an elephant would form such a strong bond 
with one keeper that whenever he or she was absent, that elephant would grieve 
as if over the loss of another family member, often becoming physically ill 
itself. 

To date, the Sheldrick Trust has successfully rehabilitated more than 60 
elephants and reintroduced them into wild herds. A number of them have 
periodically returned to the sanctuary with their own wild-born calves in order to 
reunite with their human allomothers and to introduce their offspring to what — out 
on this uncharted frontier of the new “trans-species psyche” — is now being 
recognized, at least by the elephants, it seems, as a whole new subspecies: the 
human allograndmother. “Traditionally, nature has served as a source of 
healing for humans,” Bradshaw told me. “Now humans can participate actively in the 
healing of both themselves and nonhuman animals. The trust and the sanctuary 
are the beginnings of a mutually benefiting interspecies culture.” 

On my way back to New York via London, I contacted Felicity de Zulueta, a 
psychiatrist at Maudsley Hospital in London who treats victims of extreme trauma, 
among them former child soldiers from the Lord’s Resistance Army. De Zulueta, 
an acquaintance of Eve Abe’s, grew up in Uganda in the early 1960’s on the 
outskirts of Queen Elizabeth National Park, near where her father, a malaria 
doctor, had set up camp as part of a malaria-eradication program. For a time she 
had her own elephant, orphaned by poaching, that local villagers had given to 
her father, who brought it home to the family garage, where it immediately 
bonded with an orphan antelope and dog already residing there. 

“He was doing fine,” de Zulueta told me of the pet elephant. “My mother was 
loving it and feeding it, and then my parents realized, How can we keep this 
elephant that is going to grow bigger than the garage? So they gave it to who 
they thought were the experts. They sent him to the Entebbe Zoo, and although 
they gave him all the right food and everything, he was a lonely little 
elephant, and he died. He had no attachment.” 

For de Zulueta, the parallel that Abe draws between the plight of war 
orphans, human and elephant, is painfully apt, yet also provides some cause for hope, 
given the often startling capacity of both animals for recovery. She told me 
that one Ugandan war orphan she is currently treating lost all the members of 
his family except for two older brothers. Remarkably, one of those brothers, 
while serving in the Ugandan Army, rescued the younger sibling from the Lord’s 
Resistance Army; the older brother’s unit had captured the rebel battalion in 
which his younger brother had been forced to fight. 

The two brothers eventually made their way to London, and for the past two 
years, the younger brother has been going through a gradual process of recovery 
in the care of Maudsley Hospital. Much of the rehabilitation, according to de 
Zulueta, especially in the early stages, relies on the basic human trauma 
therapy principles now being applied to elephants: providing decent living 
quarters, establishing a sense of safety and of attachment to a larger community and 
allowing freedom of choice. After that have come the more complex treatments 
tailored to the human brain’s particular cognitive capacities: things like 
reliving the original traumatic experience and being taught to modulate feelings 
through early detection of hyperarousal and through breathing techniques. And 
the healing of trauma, as de Zulueta describes it, turns out to have physical 
correlatives in the brain just as its wounding does. 

“What I say is, we find bypass,” she explained. “We bypass the wounded areas 
using various techniques. Some of the wounds are not healable. Their scars 
remain. But there is hope because the brain is an enormous computer, and you can 
learn to bypass its wounds by finding different methods of approaching life. 
Of course there may be moments when something happens and the old wound 
becomes unbearable. Still, people do recover. The boy I’ve been telling you about is 
18 now, and he has survived very well in terms of his emotional health and 
capacities. He’s a lovely, lovely man. And he’s a poet. He writes beautiful 
poetry.” 

On the afternoon in July that I left the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, 
Carol Buckley and Scott Blais seemed in particularly good spirits. Misty was only 
weeks away from the end of her quarantine, and she would soon be able to 
socialize with some of her old cohorts from the Hawthorn Corporation: eight female 
Asians that had been given over to the sanctuary. I would meet the lot of 
them that day, driving from one to the next on the back of Buckley’s four-wheeler 
across the sanctuary’s savanna-like stretches. Buckley and Blais refer to 
them collectively as the Divas. 

Buckley and Blais told me that they got word not long ago of a significant 
breakthrough in a campaign of theirs to get elephants out of entertainment and 
zoos: the Bronx Zoo, one of the oldest and most formidable zoos in the country, 
had announced that upon the death of the zoo’s three current elephant 
inhabitants, Patty, Maxine and Happy, it would phase out its elephant exhibit on 
social-behavioral grounds — an acknowledgment of a new awareness of the 
elephant’s very particular sensibility and needs. “They’re really taking the lead,” 
Buckley told me. “Zoos don’t want to concede the inappropriateness of keeping 
elephants in such confines. But if we as a society determine that an animal 
like this suffers in captivity, if the information shows us that they do, hey, we 
are the stewards. You’d think we’d want to do the right thing.” 

Four days later, I received an e-mail message from Gay Bradshaw, who consults 
with Buckley and Blais on their various stress-therapy strategies. She wrote 
that one of the sanctuary’s elephants, an Asian named Winkie, had just killed 
a 36-year-old female assistant caretaker and critically injured the male 
caretaker who’d tried to save her. 

People who work with animals on a daily basis can tell you all kinds of 
stories about their distinct personalities and natures. I’d gotten, in fact, an 
elaborate breakdown from Buckley and Blais on the various elephants at the 
sanctuary and their sociopolitical maneuverings within the sanctuary’s distinct 
elephant culture, and I went to my notebook to get a fix again on Winkie. A 
40-year-old, 7,600-pound female from Burma, she came to the sanctuary in 2000 from 
the Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison, Wisc., where she had a reputation for lashing 
out at keepers. When Winkie first arrived at the sanctuary, Buckley told me, 
she used to jump merely upon being touched and then would wait for a 
confrontation. But when it never came, she slowly calmed down. “Has never lashed out at 
primary keepers,” my last note on Winkie reads, “but has at secondary ones.” 

Bradshaw’s e-mail message concludes: “A stunning illustration of trauma in 
elephants. The indelible etching.” 

I thought back to a moment in Queen Elizabeth National Park this past June. 
As Nelson Okello and I sat waiting for the matriarch and her calf to pass, he 
mentioned to me an odd little detail about the killing two months earlier of 
the man from the village of Katwe, something that, the more I thought about it, 
seemed to capture this particularly fraught moment we’ve arrived at with the 
elephants. Okello said that after the man’s killing, the elephant herd buried 
him as it would one of its own, carefully covering the body with earth and 
brush and then standing vigil over it. 

Even as we’re forcing them out, it seems, the elephants are going out of 
their way to put us, the keepers, in an ever more discomfiting place, challenging 
us to preserve someplace for them, the ones who in many ways seem to regard 
the matter of life and death more devoutly than we. In fact, elephant culture 
could be considered the precursor of our own, the first permanent human 
settlements having sprung up around the desire of wandering tribes to stay by the 
graves of their dead. “The city of the dead,” as Lewis Mumford once wrote, 
“antedates the city of the living.” 

When a group of villagers from Katwe went out to reclaim the man’s body for 
his family’s funeral rites, the elephants refused to budge. Human remains, a 
number of researchers have observed, are the only other ones that elephants will 
treat as they do their own. In the end, the villagers resorted to a tactic 
that has long been etched in the elephant’s collective memory, firing volleys of 
gunfire into the air at close range, finally scaring the mourning herd away. 

Charles Siebert, a contributing writer, is at work on “Humanzee,” a book 
about humans and chimpanzees.

-End 2 of 2-

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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