Goodbyes, Elephant Attacks, and Births

January 14th
Today was a good day. Aside from working way later than usual, the events that unraveled throughout the morning, afternoon and evening were…satisfying. In the morning we rushed off to the normal routine of preparing diets (the term for meals), shoveling and sweeping hay and poo, hosing, and driving around various trucks that, by my standard, are far past their due dates for the dump. And yet…they all somehow still run. Like everyone on this farm, they’ve got just enough left at the end of the day to get the job done and to do the job right.
Tomorrow is Zoe and Pete’s last day here. They’ve finished the one-month internship that Gail and I still have two weeks left of. It’ll be sad to see them go, but it’ll mean that the days may end up more structured than they have been lately, which will be quite nice. With so many people (seven) there’s not always something for everyone to do, so more often than not there’s a loner off in the distance sweeping up the same stray poolets (as Stacey, a new intern, calls small pieces of poop) over and over. Rather than getting things done more quickly, tasks tend to get performed just as well in a less efficient manner. So good riddance to you both, but I shall miss your jolly company.
After lunch we went down to the Asian barn where Booper, a retired circus elephant, was marched out of her yard to give Zoe and Pete their graduation rides. Poor Booper has had foot problems lately, and recently it’s spread to her whole front right leg. She’s been favoring her left side, and flinches and barks whenever Scott tells her to lift. (Lift is the generic command a trainer uses to get an elephant to lift a leg, usually to either keep them steady while doing something or to put on or take off a leg chain) So, Zoe and Pete got their ride, and afterward Booper was rewarded with the solution to her foot problems. Because of the swelling and the heat Scott could feel in her upper leg, he decided the leg needed to be drained, In order to do so, the infection essentially needs to either be opened up or cut out. In the last case where Booper’s same foot got infected, they cut out the infection, something I think was avoided today by simply opening the skin where her nail meets her foot (essentially the cuticle, if it were a hand). It was hard to watch, because you could see her trying not to move, but she’d flinch and close her eyes tighter every time he yanked another piece off to reveal more of the infected flesh. Hopefully it’ll have drained some by tomorrow.
In the evening we all went about doing our own things as we usually do, ate dinner, and drove off to the Baskin Robbins to get Scott a pint of his favorite ice cream as a sort of bribe to show us his various elephant tapes he kept stored in his house. Gail and I baked him cookies, another demand he made in return for the movies. They were all different movies about elephant attacks, and after each one he’d ask us what went wrong. In one it was simply an issue of doing too much, where the trainer kept repeating the same command whether or not the elephant was complying or not, and wasn’t enforcing the command when it wasn’t. Another was a simple case of stupidity in allowing a 14-year old to be a licensed trainer, and another yet was a trainer’s failure to acknowledge the danger of introducing a stranger to a downright mean elephant. The results? A man pushed and kicked across a yard, a man thrown against a wall through the brute force of an elephant barreling through a gate, and a boy trampled by an agitated elephant. It’s true, these animals are highly intelligent, and they are vindictive, but they can also be downright mean, and often without legitimate reason. When an elephant decides it wants to kill you, for whatever reason, you don’t have much of a chance. You can continue to work with that elephant until it finds the perfect moment, or you can accept that you will forever be in danger with that animal and discontinue working with it. Whatever your choice, staying with the animal is a certain death wish. They will not forget the decision they made, nor will they go back on it.
The last video wasn’t one about death, but about birth. Scott had told us many times about how many captive females will reject, even kill their babies, when they birth a calf. Eight out of ten pregnant captive elephants will try to kill their baby. Many will accept the calf after the mother has realized what it is, and I never really understood why that motherly instinct didn’t just simply kick in until Scott explained it.
“Imagine being a woman, outcast from all of society. You never see any other humans, never hear about babies, never hold a doll in your entire life. Somehow you become pregnant, and 9 months later you’re in the worst pain you’ve ever felt. Suddenly something’s coming out of you, and all you know is that it’s hurting you. What are you going to do? You either run from it or you hurt it back,” he said. Of course as humans we understand not to hurt our babies because we go into the situation understanding what will come out of it. On the other end of the spectrum, a wild animal that needs a matriarchal society to understand birth is without that novelty and thus rejects what’s hurting it. In the wild some females still kill their babies, but the matriarchs are there to act as a sort of guide through the birthing, and to guard the baby once it’s born. With the matriarch protecting the thing the mother recognizes as the source of pain, the mother begins to understand she shouldn’t hurt it back. In captivity, humans must intervene seconds after birth to pull the baby out of the mother’s reach so as to avoid bodily harm to the calf, as we saw in one of the videos where a trainer failed to tie up the cow in labor. It sounds bad to tie up an elephant that’s giving birth, but it forces them into the best birthing position and keeps them from accidentally or purposely stomping the baby once it’s out. I suppose that if you think about it, maternal instinct in humans is actually a taught thing; we learn it first from our mothers, then teach it to our daughters, and so on. It really is something, being here and learning all about their behaviors. It's not everything you'd expect, but it sure makes you open your eyes to the realities of what it means to care for wild animals in such a way that you both protect them and maintain the utmost respect for the wildness.