Violation by Sallie Tisdale Read Free Book Online

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 shewoke 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.
    â€œOne 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?’”
    â€œCome 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 withheavy 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.