For Cookie, Cha-Cha, Cindy, Mary, Carol, Jean, Nita, and pregnant Connie, the San Diego Zoological Society’s first Asian elephant mother-to-be, it was just another elephant day at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Soon after sunrise, the keepers vigorously dusted off the cows with janitors’ brooms and scrubbed grey, corrugated skins to blue-black. They manicured the huge nails and slicked each long tail with Vaseline. Throughout the day, Mary, Cookie, and Cha-Cha gave rides to park visitors. At 12:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m., before rapt audiences in the Elephant Amphitheater, Carol and Nita negotiated a logging routine, similar to that which their wild cousins execute as lumber camp workers in Asian jungles. The routine demonstrates an elephant’s agility and intelligence (ranked between dolphin and pig), its capacity for precise movement, and its Herculean strength.

After the 3:30 p.m. show, park visitors were invited to assemble at a fence between the amphitheater and elephant yard to dole out apples to the cows gathered there. The cows chirruped. Their trunks furled and unfurled across the fence. From the visitors’ uplifted hands, they deftly picked the apples with their trunks, while park animal trainer Jean Hromadka (pronounced “Row-madka”) answered questions.

“How can you tell an Asian elephant from an African?”

Noting that there are two species of elephant — the African Loxodonta africana and the Elephas maximus — and that the elephants they were feeding were Asian, Hromadka pointed out the park’s African elephants in the distance. The two species can be distinguished by ear size and shape: an African’s ears are larger and roughly the shape of the African continent. The Asian’s ear describes the outline of the Indian subcontinent. Male and female Africans have tusks. Female Asians, and a large percentage of males in some populations, do not have tusks, only nubby outgrowths. The African elephant’s head is relatively flat, while the Asian’s has two humps. The African elephant’s trunk has two fingers at its tip. The Asian elephant’s trunk has one finger.

Extremely sensitive, with 40,000 nerve endings, the trunk’s dexterity is such that an elephant can pick up a dime. Hromadka explained that when the park’s Asian elephant barn was designed, light fixtures were planned in a manner that would keep the elephants from unscrewing the light bulbs.

“Wow,” said several visitors, among whom even older faces showed childlike delight at learning new facts about the exotic animals.

“Why do elephants toss dust on themselves?”

“To protect their delicate skin from sun and insects.”

“How long is an elephant’s trunk?”

“Six to eight feet.”

“What is a trunk?” asked a young boy.

Pushing sun-streaked bangs off her forehead, Hromadka explained that the trunk is both nose and upper lip, that paired nostrils run through its length.

Cookie and Carol twined trunks and thrust the trunk ends into one another’s pink mouths. Calling attention to this behavior, Hromadka said, “Elephants are always touching and caressing one another with their trunks. They are very social, very affectionate, extraordinarily sensitive and intuitive.”

When an elephant places a trunk in another elephant’s mouth, the elephant gathers information. “It’s as if you asked a friend, ‘What’s your stress level today?’ and ‘What did you have for lunch?, said the animal trainer.

Someone wondered aloud how many months an elephant’s pregnancy lasts. Amid sighs prompted by Hromadka’s answer — “Twenty-two!” — a freckle-faced girl piped up, “When will Connie’s baby be born?”

“By the end of July, we hope.”

After more queries, the last visitors drifted away, and the elephants’ workday ended. A pale light — milky, hazy, and tinged with the failing sun’s old gold — hung between the hills that ring the San Pasqual Valley.

Hromadka ordered the cows to tail up, and each cow grabbed the tail of the elephant in front of her with her trunk. Walking in front of the cows, Hromadka, at five feet, seven inches, appeared Lilliputian; the park’s cows range from seven to nine feet in height and weigh from 5000 to 9000 pounds. In a line, the cows followed the trainer into the park’s two-and-a-half-acre Asian elephant yard.

Cha-Cha lazily tossed hay stems onto her back. Nina spewed dust from her trunk onto her back. Ranchipur, the bull, penned alone in his nearby enclosure, trumpeted.

Elephant training supervisor Alan Roocroft, Jean Hromadka, and I sat on the edge of the deep concrete moat that surrounds the elephant yard. Whenever the elephants are out of the barn, one person from the six-member park Asian elephant staff remains with the herd. “Someone is always available to them if they need something or if there’s an argument. Caring for elephants in captivity,” Roocroft smiled wryly, “is labor intensive.”

Six feet tall, a chock of sun-bleached brown hair above startling azure eyes, and dressed in the park khaki uniform, thirty-nine-year-old Roocroft has a movie star’s good looks. He has worked with elephants for almost two-thirds of his life. His passion for these animals, whose progenitors roamed Earth millions of years ago, led him from his home in England (where he quit school at fourteen and shortly after became a keeper in the Manchester Zoo) to Sri Lanka and the zoo in Hamburg, Germany, where he worked for ten years. Since 1983 Roocroft has been at the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

Hromadka began her own career with elephants after graduation from high school. One of the few women elephant trainers in the United States, she joined the park staff in 1984 and is national president of the American Association of Zookeepers.

Listening to Roocroft and Hromadka, one learns that to care for elephants takes more than the college degrees in zoology and biology that they do not have. An elephant presents a many-tonned demand for physical care. Hromadka talks — ruefully — of her year at Cincinnati Zoo, how in below-zero temperatures, she hauled wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow load of urine-soaked hay from the stalls.

The job requires muscle and more than muscle. Roocroft and Hromadka spoke of the need for dedication, compassion, and, added Roocroft, “the willingness to put up with the monotony, day after day, of hauling hay, shoveling shit, scrubbing out the barn, and scrubbing down the animals.”

In captivity the elephant is entirely dependent on its caretakers. It also can — and does — kill those caretakers. More keepers are injured or killed by elephants than by any other animal in zoos and circuses. Yet even with the hard work and danger, Hromadka vowed she would be an elephant keeper even if she were not paid. Roocroft agreed that even if he didn’t have a family to feed, he would work for beer money. (The pay isn’t great anyway. Hromadka, with thirteen years’ experience, recently received a raise to ten dollars an hour. Roocroft, one of the highest paid zoo elephant supervisors, earns approximately $30,000 a year.)

Cha-Cha and Mary ambled toward us. “Prut-prut-prut-chirrup-chirrup,” the elephants made a low, suppressed sound with their lips. Cha-Cha stretched out her trunk toward Roocroft. Moist pink skin lines the interior of the trunk, which is ringed at its aperture with black hairs. The fingerlike projection wriggled at the end of the trunk, and her cool, wet trunk tip brushed my hand. She put her trunk in my palm, and her breath, exhaled out her trunk, was hot. The black sensory hairs at her trunk’s tip brushed my arm and tickled.

Twelve-year-old Connie, her delivery date then just four to six weeks away, looked little different from other cows in the herd. At birth an elephant calf may weight more than 200 pounds, yet Connie didn’t bulge. Her ankles were swollen, as are those of many a mammal mother nearing her delivery date, and she trod slowly. As we watched, she went laboriously down on her back legs and then turned to one side and lay down in the dusty yard. Nineteen-year-old Carol quickly joined Connie and stood over her, shading her from the sun.

Carol had become protective of Connie in the last months: “If Connie starts to roar,” said Roocroft, “Carol is right there.”

In 1974, Asian elephants were declared endangered, and since then, only nine have legally entered the U.S. Today there are 365 Asian elephants in the United States, in zoos, parks, circuses, and with private owners. (An Asian elephant sold within the United States may cost as much as $45,000.) Of these 365, only thirty-two are bulls. In order to replenish zoo and circus herds, captive breeding has become necessary.

Portland’s Washington Park Zoo, whose twenty-five-year-old breeding program is the oldest in the United States, has produced twenty-four live births and nineteen survivors, several of whom are now grandmothers in the Portland herd. Other U.S. institutions currently breeding Asian elephants in captivity include the Miami Metro-Zoo with three live births, the Bronx Zoo, the Houston Zoo, Tulsa Zoo, Tampa’s Bush Gardens, and Florida’s Circus World. In 1984 the San Diego Wild Animal Park opened a $360,000 state-of-the-art breeding facility: a barn for ten cows that included a maternity stall; a separate barn for a resident bull; a keeper’s apartment adjacent to the maternity stall, where keepers and veterinarians can conduct twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance of expectant and new mothers and have quick access for specialized care.

Connie is their first pregnant Asian elephant. But because of her youth, she was not slated to be bred first. The program began with Carol and with then-thirty-year-old Cookie. For three months, keepers collected blood and urine samples from the two cows. (Long before the breeding program began, the cows were taught to defecate before shows. When urine samples began to be taken, the cows were easily trained to urinate into a bucket. The command used, said Hromadka, is “Pissy, pissy.”) Sample analyses led park veterinarians to recommend Carol for the first elephant mother, and her keepers then took daily blood and urine samples to pinpoint when she would ovulate.

In the wild, breeding takes care of itself. Had the park’s Asian cows stayed in Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, or Burma, and had their lives been without catastrophe, they would have been born into a family of six or seven elephants. The female calf would have remained a part of that unit for her lifetime of sixty, even seventy years.

Elephants form matriarchal family units, and among the females, a pecking order exists. The lead elephant, or matriarch, is usually the herd’s oldest and knows where and in what seasons to find food. By virtue of this knowledge, she is herd leader and social arbiter. When a bull calf reaches puberty, he leaves the group to join a bachelor herd or to live alone. Males will sometimes be a mile away, close enough to the cows to know — by smell — when a cow is in estrus. Only when a cow is standing heat is the mature bull allowed to enter the matriarchal herd.

In most mammals, vagina and urethra open separately into a shallow vestibule. The female elephant’s vagina and urethra open into a urinogenital canal, three feet long. This canal opens at the vulva in front of the hind legs. Normally, the elephant’s vulva faces forward, but during copulation, it shifts downward and to the rear.

An elephant’s penis in erection is proportionate in length to the vaginal canal. When the bull runs, chasing a cow, if his penis is erect, it will stick straight out, swing like a pendulum, and bounce off his back legs. Yet even with its great length, the penis does not reach the cervix. For spermatozoa to enter the uterus, large ejaculate volume is required. An elephant produces more than a quart.

Artificial insemination — “A.I.” — is made difficult in part by the vaginal canal’s length. Roocroft explained, “A.I. is too invasive. To do an A.I., you have to spread an elephant’s legs with chains. You don’t know what effect that has on them, having them spread-legged. I’m a great believer in not doing what you don’t have to. What if you end up with an elephant that has gone haywire for a reason you’ve created?”

In late 1984, both Cookie and Carol were introduced to the 11,000-pound Ranchipur in the bull’s separate yard. “It seemed,” said Hromadka, “That Carol and Ranchi had the better thing going, so we kept them together for over six months. Their relationship seemed to develop, but then it went the other way. They got bored with each other. Days passed, and they ignored each other. Then some days, Rachi would pursue her. They would spar. Carol would become frightened, and the more fear she showed, the more Ranchi grew to dislike her. Still, he began to try to mount her. But by then, Carol was adamant. She refused him and ultimately became afraid of him.

As winter of 1984 blossomed into spring of 1985, and Ranchipur and Carol cooled toward one another, the daily notes on breeding activity that headed the top of each page in the keepers’ diary became increasingly pessimistic. Ranchi was reported, two days in a row, as “very nervous.”

1. March 2, 1985: “Carol and Ranchi — everything but.”
2. March 3: “Ranchi — v. relaxed but minimal contact.”
3. March 4: “Same.”
4. March 5: “No problems. No breeding.”
5. March 8: “Ranchi attempted several mountings.”
6. March 10: “Ranchi continues to mount with no penetration.”
7. By April 23: “Ranchi — Breeding — ha.”

In May, Ranchi went into musth, that period when adult male Asian elephants become moody, quixotic, aggressive, and potentially dangerous to herd and keepers. (During musth, says Roocroft, a bull is “no longer earthbound.”) Ranchi’s eyes grew bright and glassy, and his gaze faraway. He began to urinate — uncontrollably — down his back legs. From his temporal glands, situated on the side of the head between eye and ear, the watery “temporal flow,” smelling strongly of “elephant,” began.

Recent studies indicate that musth occurs once, sometimes twice yearly in adult male Asian elephants, at a time when the male hormone testosterone reaches high levels. Musth is not ticked off cyclically but seems instead to be related to the elephant’s nutritional health status. Only a male in a nutritionally high state will enter musth.

Unlike cows, who have sixteen-week estrus cycles, bulls are not “seasonal,” and musth does not parallel the cow’s cycle. Males come into musth irrespective of the cows’ estrus cycles. In the depths of musth, the male cannot breed. Coming in and going out of musth, he can breed but is unlikely to do so.

Bull herds also maintain a pecking order. The oldest, largest bulls acquire first access to those cows ready for breeding. Veterinarian Michael Schmitt of Portland’s Woodland Park Zoo suggests that musth is a “dominance determiner.” Bulls, says Schmitt, are so hidebound in their dominance hierarchy that without the insane, aggressive fury brought on by musth, the oldest, biggest bulls might remain a herd’s only breeders. When a younger male meets an older male to whom he has been submissive for perhaps twenty-five years, the younger knows that old male is boss. But in musth, that younger bull may “go off his head with male hormones,” challenge that dominant bull, knock him down, and so earn first access to breeding cows.

All through June and July of 1985, the keepers’ notes read “No breeding” and “Breeding — none, but R chased Carol aggressively for fifteen minutes, bit her tail, causing mild abrasions.”

Then, on August 27, a keeper wrote: “Ranchi introduced into cow yard.”

Hromadka said that by then, the keepers had given up on Carol and decided to place Ranchi in the main yard and let the herd take it from there. The elephants, it was concluded, needed time to develop relationships. “Ranchi had never really spent much time in the cows’ yard. So the first few weeks, we would let the girls out and then release Ranchi into the yard. The cows would scream and roar. As he began to spend more time with them, cows who felt comfortable with him would hang out with him. Some of the cows even began to follow him around.

“He was really good in the yard. Just a few times we had problems. Really, the only time the situation with Ranchi and the cows got bad was at the end of his musth period. He wasn’t quite ready. But he was, as Alan [Roocroft] phrased it, hot [dangerous]. And the cows knew it. Ranchi came out in the yard, and the cows took one look at him and went the other way. It was like they were announcing, ‘This guy’s bad news!’ He chased them hard that day, so vigorously we feared a cow would end up in the moat. So we put him back in his enclosure.”

During September, his musth passed, Ranchipur was put again into the cow yard. He and Carol continued to avoid one another. “No breeding” filled the keepers’ diary pages through mid-September. Then when they had begun to despair, young Connie began to show interest in Ranchipur. “She became a shameless little flirt,” said Hromadka. “She’d hang around Ranchi and scream. She’d turn her rear end to him and back right up into his face and squeal and chirp. Ranchi would sniff her. But other than that, he’d never pay much attention to her.”

In the last days of September, Ranchi rather abruptly started to court Connie. “They spent a lot of time touching each other. It was all very gentle and very nice.

“Then Ranchi just turned. He went after her. He chased her for three days back and forth around the yard. Suddenly, Connie seemed terrified. But he pursued her anyway, relentlessly. You knew to stay out of his way. He’d run right by you. He’d be bearing down on Connie, whipping around the corner.

“On September 29, late in the afternoon, Ranchi and Connie were at the end of the cow yard. Connie was facing downhill. Ranchi came up behind her and mounted. It was as if someone had shot Connie with a paralyzing gun. She stood absolutely still. He mounted her three times in a row. The next day, again, he was in and out of her several times.

“I think that until then, Ranchi didn’t have his technique down.”

In the wild, young bulls, in play or out of sexual frustration, will mount other males. That play teaches them to stand up and mount. Ranchipur’s first days in the cows’ yard were his first experiences as an adult male with females. “He had to learn to stand and mount,” said Hromadka.

In big letters, Alan Roocroft wrote in the keepers’ diary for September 29, 1985, “Ranchi introduced into cow yard, a full copulation on Connie, semen sample collected 12:15 p.m., 2:30 p.m.… Connie brought in with Ranchi at 4 p.m., allowed to eat till 7 p.m., then we released into yard again. At 9:45 p.m., Ranchi mounted Connie again. Full copulation.… 10:45 p.m. — separated them.” On September 30, Roocroft wrote, “Ranchi and Connie stayed close throughout the day but both appeared tired, no attempted mounts.” October 1, “Full copulation on Connie, 11:45 p.m.”

“We began immediately, then,” said Roocroft, “to take Connie’s blood. We monitored samples for five months, until we knew, for sure, that she was pregnant.”

Hromadka stood, brushed off from her khaki shirt strands of hay dropped on her by the cows. With two other keepers, she had to go ready stalls for the night.

Roocroft invited me to walk with him in the yard among the elephant herds. In zoos outside Asia, the captive herd is entirely artificial, its members all from different family units, different herds, even different countries. “You take Ringling, or Carsons and Barnes, they have a lot of elephants. The chance of one of those elephants being related to another is a million to one. How important is it that an animal is kept with its family, if what you want is an elephant who will do sit-ups?”

We stood near Carol and Cha-Cha, who were plucking the last few stems of hay off the ground and placing them in their mouths. I stroked Cha-Cha’s flank. The skin, which at a distance appeared rough and harsh, felt smooth under my hand and shuddered, as if my fingers might be troubling insects.

We strolled between the big grey cows. Their stomachs rumbled. Inhalation and exhalation made enormous bellows of the rib cages. I asked Roocroft if he believed it important that elephants remained in family units. He looked at me indignantly. “It’s got to be important. It’s getting right to the root of the whole thing, isn’t it? It’s getting right down to where these animals come from. Why do they keep gnus and zebras together? They don’t keep them in little pens, do they? They’re herd animals. Elephants have a far greater capacity of intelligence, far superior instinct. It’s got to be just as important to them as it is to be a zebra or giraffe or group of apes.… You can put a gazelle in a ramshackle old barn and get away with it,” said Roocroft, bitterness tingeing his voice. “An elephant will walk right through a wooden wall.”

Many zoo collections, which in the case of elephants may number one solitary creature, are made up entirely of misfits, problem animals, “throwouts,” said Roocroft, “animals nobody wants, animals who have been through many different hands. But if that’s all you can get, that’s all you can get.”

Telling me to stay close behind him, he walked rapidly about the yard, from one elephant to another. “Connie,” he said, as we approached her, “she’s a children’s zoo fugitive [San Diego children’s zoo], an animal that’s been taught how to hurt people, you know, ‘Let the cute little elephant chase you. Isn’t it fun?

He pointed to Carol. “She came straight from the wilds. She came here from Thailand when she was two and only a baby. She’s been two years in this society.

“Cookie came from Bush Gardens. No one could handle her there. She’s thirty-one now. She’s been at the park for seven years.

“Mary came from Baton Rouge. Another outcast.

“Cindy, she’s a real nice elephant. There’s no doubt about that. Just screwed up. (Cindy had worked in a Nevada “entertainment complex” and lived in a shed with a billy goat for company before she was transferred to Tacoma’s Defiance Zoo. There she lived alone for seventeen years.)

“Cha-Cha came from Denver Zoo. She’s sixteen now.

“Jean came here as a baby. She’s been here all her life.

“Nita is forty. She came from the circus. She was given to us by a circus family. She’s a good animal. Her character is good. Wouldn’t hurt a fly, this one.”

Cindy clucked and chirruped. Roocroft patted her upper shoulder.

Time had come to take the elephants into the barn for the night. Roocroft and I went into his office, the wall of which adjoins and affords a view, through thick glass windows, into the cows’ stalls. A television monitor glimmered on the desk. On its screen, we watched Hromadka lead Connie into the maternity stall, twice the size of the other stalls and protected by bars. While Connie rustled through a heap of hay, sweet feed, apples, and carrots, Hromadka affixed chains around Connie’s ankles. (The chains are looped on alternating legs and do permit some movement. Chains are switched nightly, to avoid abrasions.)

“We are doing more observation since Connie became pregnant,” said Roocroft. “With the help of the video camera above Connie’s stall, I can monitor her nighttime activity.” Each morning Roocroft replays videotape of the previous night. He checks the tape for changes in Connie’s sleeping and eating habits. “Here,” he said, showing a segment of tape, “she went down and at one o’clock and didn’t get up until four. Three hours is a long time for an elephant. The average is about forty-five minutes.”

As Connie’s pregnancy had progressed, Roocroft came to see himself even less than before in the role of trainer. “Training elephants was a big deal, and it still is. You can train elephants to do this, that, and the other. But it’s not a need in my life anymore. Building a relationship with the individual elephant has become more important. Nutrition. Health care. The things that are going to keep them here longer.”

He eventually altered her performance routines. “We don’t do any off-the-ground movements now — no headstands, no hind-leg walks. It came to me one day, really, as if someone wrote it on the wall. I was out in the yard fifteen minutes before a show started, and Ranchipur was mating Connie, and I’m thinking, ‘I can’t put Connie in the show now. She can’t do hind-leg walks.

What would happen to her?’ I asked myself and the answer came back, ‘I don’t know what would happen.’ Maybe some people don’t care if the fetus drops out or mothers rupture themselves.” Roocroft was not sure hind-leg walks would harm a pregnant elephant, but he felt better not to continue them. “The consequences,” he said, “are potentially too great.”

We walked out of his office into the barn. “Let’s go down the line,” he said. We stopped in front of Connie’s stall where a sign on the wall read MATERNITY WARD. “Come around here,” said Roocroft, motioning me to stand by him, next to Connie’s right foreleg. He took a nipple between a thumb and finger and squeezed liquid into my open palm.

“It’s milk,” I said, awed.

Roocroft smiled, patted Connie’s flank resoundingly, and said, “She might even give birth tonight.”

We stood at the far end of the barn and looked down through the stalls. With their trunks, the cows lifted up hay from the stacks arranged in front of them. They pushed the stems into their mouths and chewed. The sound of chewing filled the barn.

“The other night I was here by myself until late,” said Roocroft. “I looked up from my desk, through the observation panel. It was as if someone had given a command — and they all started to make their beds. First, Mary went down, then Cindy. Then Cha-Cha, then Nita. Then, everyone was down, sleeping. It was the biggest thrill to see them — without any command — do that.”

Hromadka joined us. Sweat streaked her bangs, the back of her khaki shirt, her arms. Sweat dripped off her nose and button pearl earrings. “I always warn women who want to work as elephant keepers, ‘This isn’t a glamour job. You can’t have long fingernails, and your back is going to hurt at night.

She and I sat down on a ledge opposite the herd. Roocroft, ever restless, stood.

I asked why the cows were chained. “If they weren’t on chains,” said Roocroft, “they would urinate in their own food. They’d fight. They would intimidate each other overnight.”

“To be on chains a certain number of hours every night,” said Hromadka, “is a necessary part of a captive elephant’s existence, if only to reinforce their awareness that they are under control.” She added that chains, once an elephant becomes accustomed to them, offer a sense of security. “It’s like being tucked in at night. The chains become their security blankets.”

“Once they leave the wild and come here,” said Hromadka, “their lives are changed. It’s not like they can screw off and migrate. They’re here for good. Some keepers will argue against chains. They feel that it is too much an interference with natural behavior. I think people who use that argument are fooling themselves.”

Roocroft agreed. “If you are going to admit that you have these animals in an artificial environment, you might as well go the whole hog and keep them artificially. Some people romanticize. In the Chester Zoo [where Roocroft worked early in his career], elephants were not chained at night. They were together, male and female, African and Asian, all the time. The elephant supervisor there was a great zoo-without-bars fanatic. Not chaining worked to a certain extent. But we didn’t have any control over the elephants, and that didn’t seem to bother him. And it didn’t bother me at the time, because I knew no better.”

While Roocroft was at Chester Zoo, the Asian elephant Sheba had the first hybrid baby. Her mate was Bubbles Jumbelina, an African bull. Had Chester Zoo’s elephants been chained at night, this most likely would not have happened. “The Wildlife Species Survival Plan people, they throw up when they hear things like that. That’s about the lowest you can get, to let an Asian and African breed.”

Another use to which chains are put is herd management. Within the herd, each elephant’s needs have to be cared for, however high or low in the matriarchal system that elephant is. It is necessary to keep the cows in the barn in an order in which they feel comfortable.

Roocroft and I walked down the row in front of the stalls, and he explained the barn order. “Jean cannot go next to Mary. Cha-Cha cannot go next to Cookie. Carol cannot go next to anyone. These two — Jean and Cha-Cha — are adolescents, they are feeling their oats. The ones that don’t give a shit — like Cookie and Carol — are twenty-one and thirty-one-year-olds.

“Out in the yard, Jean had begun to hit Nita. Her aggressive behavior is not a matter of fault, nor does it indicate she is a bad animal. But Jean has such a strong personality that she doesn’t think anything of stepping on Nita. The only time she stops is when Nita kicks shit out of her. I have to let Jean bop on Nita until Nita says, to me, ‘Whoa!’ because Nita is not really paying any attention to Jean. Jean doesn’t pose any kind of threat to Nita’s position as matriarch.

“The first time Nita turned on Jean, I knew it was time to act. I gave Nita the advantage. I put Jean in the same stall overnight with Nita, but I put Jean up against the barn wall, between the wall and Nita, and let Nita play ping-pong with her all night.”

Jean, he continued, also harried Mary, an animal who is particularly timid and unagressive. “Mary needs to come up more in the herd. Jean doesn’t need to come up any more. She’s too far up as it is.”

Neither Jean’s and Mary’s difficulties had yet reached a stage at which Roocroft believed Jean could be chained in a position that allowed physical advantage to Mary. “I’ve got to wait until Mary comes unglued and knocks Jean over and hurts her. Only then can I put them together and let Mary work Jean out.

“In the wild, they do this [establish a natural pecking order] themselves. They would be sisters. Here, they are all together, many of them near in age to one another.” And the use of chains, said Roocroft, helps keepers adjust the elephants’ relationships.

In the wild, the pregnant cow chooses another cow, usually a sister or a relative. That cow will act as “auntie.” “The mother and the auntie will choose a secluded, protected spot, with plentiful grass for fodder,” said Roocroft. “There will be a tree, perhaps, for shade. Most often they will choose a spot next to water. But it depends where they are when she’s ready to give birth. They’ll choose a hairpin bend in the river, so they can defend it or hear anything that comes through the water. They know to do that. It’s not just coincidence that they’re there, at that bend in the river.

“The mother and the auntie may circle the area, stamping down grass until they have flattened an area the size of a circus ring. That becomes the ‘maternity ward.

The auntie does not, however, act as a midwife. “No one helps there,” said Roocroft. “In the wild, all the auntie does is to lengthen the odds of the baby living. It’s only tigers, tigers and man, that endanger a calf in the wild. And the tiger, it will be a tiger who is pushed beyond a certain limit. The tiger will approach the elephant only when there’s nothing else available. It’s usually the auntie the tiger tries first to stampede. The tiger will jump on the auntie’s back, then attack the mother. Nine times out of ten, the tiger doesn’t get the baby.”

All at once abashed, Roocroft interrupted himself. “But who knows what goes on in the jungle? I don’t.”

Noting that Carol had become protective of Connie as Connie’s pregnancy progressed, Roocroft felt that perhaps Carol’s instinct was driving her to assume the auntie role. “We tried it. I had Carol in next to Connie here in the barn at night. But it backfired. I found marks on Connie’s back the next morning. Tusk marks. That was it. I separated them. I didn’t want see those marks on her back. I wanted to see something more. I wanted to see a bond develop.” Roocroft had come to believe, he said, that because in captivity, Carol had never been part of a herd with a pregnant mother, her occasional protectiveness toward Connie was “as far as she can take the relationship.”

In the wild, relationships such as those between a mother and auntie evolve. “You’d see more of a unity than we have here. The aunties and other cows would have had babies before and would know what was happening.”

Back in the office, Roocroft put on a videotape, in black-and-white, of the Tokyo Zoo’s Asian elephant cow giving birth. This particular elephant was giving birth for the first time. She stood in her stall. From time to time, her face contorted. She lifted a back leg, lifted her tail. “She’s having contractions,” Hromadka explained. A great flow of water gushed from the elephant’s vulva. As we watched, the water — amniotic fluid that protects the unborn calf — flooded the floor. “Here,” said Hromadka, “we will put down lots of hay.”

Hromadka and Roocroft gazed intently at the small screen as the cow began to kick at her calf. Hromadka mentioned that at one zoo where a birth had taken place, although the keeper knew mothers kick a newborn to get it to stand, the mother’s violence so terrified him that he jumped in and grabbed the baby.

Still encased under the membranous hood, the calf struggled weakly with its limbs. Using her trunk and forefoot, the Tokyo mother began to peel away the membrane until it was removed. She nudged the calf. After several tries, it stood up on its own for a few seconds, then tumbled, then stood.

“The birth makes such a mess,” said Hromadka, “on the floor — the amniotic fluid, the placenta — that keepers wear boots to assist a birth.”

We watched as the calf, its trunk no more than a snout, searched for its mother’s teat. Once the teat was located, the calf stood, wobbling, between its mother’s forelegs and began to suckle. In a room outside the stall, Japanese keepers smiled, bowed to one another, and shook hands.

Once a calf is born into a captive situation, said Roocroft, “anything can happen. Sometimes the mother will kill her baby. A new mother doesn’t know what a baby is. Or the auntie may want to take over the baby. Say, the auntie goes in and starts to push Connie around. That’s the last thing you want. And some of the cows’ dispositions may just flip overnight. But we won’t know until the baby actually hits the ground and the cows come into contact with the baby and define their role with him or her.

“Introducing the baby to the herd will be a slow, careful process. Nita, the matriarch, will get first crack, then Carol, then these two, Jean and Cha-Cha, and then Cookie, then Cindy.

“They will have their own little world around the calf. The real test will be the behavior of the herd with the baby, not with Connie. Because of her youth, Connie has got no status in the herd. She’s of no consequence as far as the pecking order.”

Roocroft, who wants eventually to have twenty cows and two bulls at the park, said, “We’ve got to get on the bloody road here. Jean and Cha-Cha are next.”

A little more than two weeks ago, on Monday, July 27, Connie appeared to be in labor. She lifted her tail and her back leg. She began to stretch and squat. Alan Roocroft and several of the Asian elephant staff stayed with her in the barn overnight, as they had since mid-July. But Connie did not give birth that night or the next. She continued to show signs of labor, stretching and squatting, but still no calf appeared. With each day, she became more weary. Six days later, on Sunday, August 2, at 3:51 p.m., having carried her baby for 672 days, Connie delivered a female calf.

The calf, which emerged trunk and legs first, rather than the normal position of rear end first, was stillborn. She was quite large, weighing 333 pounds (on record, the largest Asian elephant calf born in captivity weighed 370 pounds). After Connie had expelled the calf, said Roocroft, “she just stood there looking at it. She stepped back. Her stepping back wasn’t out of any submissive behavior toward us. She seemed not to be interested in it. She allowed us to touch it, and we tried to revive it for about ten minutes, taking water out of the lungs and pumping on the heart.”

What happened? “It’s doubtful we’ll ever really have a final answer,” said Wild Animal Park veterinarian Jim Oosterhuis. “Any time you have a first-time mother in any species, you have the risk of a problem.” Oosterhuis surmised that the calf had become incorrectly positioned in the uterus and was not able, as it grew larger, to get into proper alignment. Autopsy reports indicate that the calf was alive up to six hours before birth.

“Connie will be ‘cycling’ again in three months,” said Roocroft. “The bull, Ranchipur, is in musth at the moment. As soon as he comes out, more cows will be introduced to him. Jean is possibly pregnant. In five months, we’ll know.”

On July 27, from a list of twelve names given him earlier, Charles Schroeder, the retired Zoological Society director, chose two for the calf: Omar, should it be a male, and Nandi for a newborn female. “So she did have a name,” said Roocroft.