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How can we know if Maggie, the Alaska Zoo's sole elephant, is happy? If we say we want her sent away, aren't we saying that we know what will make her happy, that we know what's best for her? And isn't that how she ended up in the zoo to begin with?
Robert Meyerowitz/The Anchorage Press/ February 18, 2005
http://www.anchoragepress.com/archives-2005/coverstoryvol14ed7.shtml
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The Alaska Zoo, with its rough-hewn rails and obvious cages, feels like a throwback to a simpler time and place - say, a Boy Scout camp circa 1965 - more than it resembles modern zoos today, which often strive to seem not like zoos at all. Whether more natural habitats and invisible enclosures make captive animals happier, or simply make visitors feel better about captive animals, they're parts of one more Outside idea that's taking its time coming north.
But the Alaska Zoo is unusual for a better and less subjective reason - because so many of its animals exist in the wild in Alaska. The zoo has two ravens on display, Sam and Grandpa; each injured its wings and came to the zoo from the Bird Treatment and Learning Center. But there are many more ravens at the zoo on any winter's day, just as they alight in every other part of town, scavenging and clowning around. In harsh winters, Alaska Zoo workers swear they've seen their caged and flightless ravens call to wild ravens and then pass their zoo food to them, beak to beak through the wire.
That's just the kind of experience that makes us think, "OK, maybe being in a zoo has its advantages for animals. Maybe it's like a sociable rest home" - but you're snapped out of that reverie when you consider that the experience the caged ravens have is precisely what Maggie, the Alaska Zoo's African elephant, cannot have, because she's the only elephant in Alaska. Yet Maggie was rescued, too, at a time when she faced fates worse than being alone in a place colder than the savanna she came from, and when some people thought less about animal happiness than they do today
Maggie has been in the Alaska Zoo for 21 years, and it now seems as though the controversy surrounding her will only grow, not abate, as long as she stays. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has devoted some effort to keeping Maggie's plight in the public eye, here and elsewhere, and they've been joined by other elephant-welfare groups and an increasing number of Alaska residents, in groups like Friends of Maggie and Free Maggie, all of whom maintain that a zoo in Alaska, on O'Malley Road, is no place for a solitary female elephant. The American Zoo and Aquarium Association, which accredits zoos, says, in its Standards for Elephant Management and Care, that it is "inappropriate to keep highly social female elephants singly." (The Alaska Zoo does not have AZA accreditation, at least partly because it has held onto Maggie.) The AZA also estimates that a zoo-kept female African elephant has a life expectancy of 33 years. Maggie is 22.
People who want Maggie moved say she ought to be able to spend her golden years in the sun, in the company of other elephants, preferably in a sanctuary. "A zoo is not an ideal environment for an elephant," PETA co-founder and president Ingrid Newkirk told me last week. "I'm begging people in Alaska to show that they have a heart for Maggie, not that they want to possess and keep her like she's a prized vase. She's an aging woman, like me" - Newkirk is 55 - "and she wants to be warm and have the companionship of her fellows."
Yet the zoo, which is a private, non-profit organization, plans to expand Maggie's quarters and keep her for at least another three years, says zoo director Louis "Tex" Edwards. When concerns about Maggie's health arose, Edwards said he was sympathetic. The best thing for the zoo, he initially thought, "was to make a clean break and focus on northern animals." Staff members at the zoo were also divided about whether Maggie should stay or go, he said, but in the end the zoo decided to keep her. They were concerned that Maggie, who is used to being an only elephant, wouldn't be able to fit in a herd now, Edwards said, and, more importantly, that the stress of a move could prove fatal.
"My main concern is that they will send her away and she will die," said Rob Smith, the zoo's elephant manager and the person who knows Maggie best. "And who wins then? I don't understand."
In some ways it's a debate typical of the animal rights movement, which fights these battles all the time; but it's different, too, because Alaskans are used to fending off complaints from Outsiders whom they regard as bleeding-heart bunny-lovers, and such griping, in the short run, only tends to make them harden their stands.
"Elephants are wild animals," a local man wrote in an email circulated among many Alaska residents this week. "No one owns them. It is wrong to hold such an intelligent animal in a prison for human amusement."
That prompted a reply from another local man.
What about all the other animals, shouldn't we let them all out of our Alaska Zoo and set them free where they came from and belong? Why stop here in Alaska, let's tell all the zoos all over this world to let the animals go, and put them back in the lands where they came from, "free" to roam and get poached! If you want wolves or pushy liberals, we have all you want, just come and get them! Maggie, "our" elephant, and all the other Alaska Zoo animals, are doing fine and don't really need to be rescued by you and your groups!
Thusly are the poles of the argument defined on the Last Frontier, a place where whales are still hauled from the sea to feed whole villages, and even children have opinions about game management.
Tex Edwards is a thoughtful-seeming man who speaks deliberately. But when I pressed him about the kind of free-Maggie mail he's gotten lately - the elephant and the controversy were featured on the front page of the New York Times a few Sundays back - he bristled.
"Where are you from?" he asked.
I eventually conceded that I had spent some time in New York.
A lot of hostile emails seemed to come from the same place, he said.
A few minutes after 6:30 one recent morning, I drove south from downtown to O'Malley, through the deep darkness, the lights on the Hillside glittering above. It was six below zero, and so dark I drove right past the zoo before doubling back and parking at its north end, behind the elephant house.
Rob Smith, Maggie's lead attendant, led me inside. In the winter, Maggie lives in what is essentially a huge cage inside an even bigger room, with a small, adjoining office for humans. The big room was warm, lit and steamy from hot water used for cleaning.
People who say they love Maggie contend that no elephant should have to survive the cold and dark of Alaska winters. "Why do I get the feeling that people think she's in a lean-to stuck in the corner of a snowdrift?" Smith said.
He gave me a quick safety lecture - basically to run back into the office if anything happened with Maggie, "which it won't," he said. Maggie is unrestrained within her cage except when she eats breakfast, for about half an hour, so zoo workers can clean in her enclosure; at those times, one of her front legs is chained to a cage bar.
In the office, Smith and an assistant mixed 10 pounds of barley, alfalfa, molasses and corn, with a garnish of carrots and apples, in a plastic tub. Maggie came to the edge of the enclosure and rolled her trunk out, searching; the finger-like extensions at the tip of her nose flapped and grasped as the length of her trunk undulated like a leggy sea plant.
In the wild, an adult female African elephant like Maggie would typically spend most of her waking day looking for food. In the zoo, Smith and others bring Maggie's food to her. She has leisure that a wild elephant never knows.
After breakfast, it was time for Maggie's treat: Necco wafers. Smith unwrapped a roll of the candy and held one out, which Maggie snatched with her trunk and popped in her mouth, displaying the tiny pastel wafer on her massive tongue. It looked like she was smiling. Almost instantly she extended her trunk for another.
"Good elephant, stay," Smith said.
In August, the zoo's board of directors met and considered two either/or propositions. The first was to move Maggie to another zoo, in North Carolina, which they rejected. The second, which they approved, listed steps the zoo would take to make Maggie happier, including adding more staff at the elephant house, so Maggie is alone less often; Smith now has three co-workers instead of one, which means this elephant is alone from about seven at night till seven in the morning. Elephants usually sleep three to four hours a night. The zoo also determined to hide Maggie's food so she would have to do some work in order to eat, which theoretically would be a step toward a life of foraging. At the moment, that doesn't seem practical, however; with her trunk, in a relatively small space, Maggie can find food anywhere.
I stepped to the side of her enclosure, where there was a gap wide enough to let her trunk pass through. She quickly found me and grabbed my foot with the end of her trunk, which was surprisingly strong, not at all floppy as I'd imagined, but a constantly moving tube of ringed muscles with enough suction that it was clear she wasn't letting go of my foot unless she wanted to. When Smith told her to be polite, she released my foot, but then ran the tip of her trunk over my elbow and poked at the pocket of my fleece. I looked across to her big, brown, cloudy eye, which seemed impossibly far away, as though it belonged to a different animal than the one that was at that moment pulling at my wristwatch with the tip of her trunk. Then she examined my glasses, which instantly clouded.
"Maggie, enough!" Smith said.
I asked Smith if he thought Maggie was happy, and he said he didn't know how to answer that. Then he talked about Babar and Dumbo and the silly ways elephants have been depicted. "The truth is, elephants aren't big and squishy and gray," he said. "They're - pardon the language - fuckin' mean as hell."
I asked Smith if Maggie was ever affectionate, and he told me a story.
It was a summer day and Maggie was in the pond in her adjoining yard. "She came out and lay down, totally soaking wet," he said, "and she lay her trunk down in the sand and scooted over so the front of her nose, between her tusks, was touching me, just lightly touching my leg. And she lay there and took a nap, touching me like that, for about 20 minutes. Then she woke up and gave me this look, like, 'Hey!' - like it was third grade, like she was embarrassed to be caught being affectionate. Like she had a reputation to protect. It was the coolest moment I've had here."
African elephants often make a low rumbling sound. For centuries, hunters and game wardens thought it was their noisy digestive system. At the same time, some observers wondered how elephants in the wild were able to assemble silently, without visual cues. As elephants were studied more intensely in the 1980s, Katy Payne, an acoustic biologist, discovered that they're capable of sending messages to one another across great distances, at frequencies too low for humans to hear, although the high end of that communication might sound to astute people like a low rumble. Then, too, naturalists say that what people hear could be a simpler expression of elephant contentment, like a cat's purr.
Does Maggie rumble? I asked Smith.
"She does it all the time," he said, "a really low rumble."
Smith sometimes tries to make a similar noise back at her.
The modern elephant evolved about 15 million years ago. For almost all of its existence it was a lordly creature, dominating mountains and plains, but then people discovered that an elephant could be a weapon. People used elephants in ancient combat much like the modern tank, to intimidate foot soldiers and destroy enemy fortifications. From that time on, its fate seemed sealed. Then came zoos.
Ancient Egyptians, the first to capture and tame elephants, also established the first zoo, about 3,500 years ago, a private royal collection. The Romans tamed elephants, training them to do tricks such as kneeling and writing Latin phrases in the sand with their trunks. Pliny the Elder gives an account of an especially diligent elephant in Rome that failed to learn tricks with its master and was discovered alone in the moonlight, practicing.
The Romans also taught elephants to fight each other and pitted them in contests against bulls, rhinoceroses, and gladiators. In 55 BC, the Roman general Pompey staged a series of games that culminated with 20 elephants put in the ring against javelin-wielding African tribesman, the Gaetulians. One elephant put up a notable fight that day, writes Martin Meredith, a British researcher:
Wounded in its feet, it crawled on its knees towards the Gaetulians, snatching their shields and tossing them into the air. Another elephant was killed by a single blow from a javelin, which struck it just below the eye. The remaining elephants then tried to escape by breaking through the iron barriers of the enclosure protecting spectators. When their attempt failed, they stood in the arena waving their trunks in desperation and trumpeting piteously.
Elephants became all but unknown in Europe in the Middle Ages. In the 13th century, Henry III unveiled an elephant, a gift to him from Louis IX of France. It survived in the dank Tower of London for about two years.
Zoos fared a little better. They were reborn along with so many other things in the Renaissance in Europe, benefiting from the great voyages of exploration, when mariners brought strange animals home from their travels as gifts for their sovereigns. In France in the 18th century, crowds assembled at the royal menagerie at Versailles to see an elephant uncork bottles of wine with its trunk and take tobacco from snuffboxes.
In the early 19th century, zoological collections opened to the public in Paris, Vienna and Dublin, the forerunners of the modern zoo. They could be quite grim. In 1908, Carl Hagenback, an entrepreneur from Hamburg, Germany, opened a zoo that was significant on two counts: it was the first to exhibit tropical animals in a northern clime, and the first to give zoo animals access to the outdoors, which was thought to be a visionary step.
Zoos spread across the U.S. in the early 20th century as a burgeoning scientific age combined with a new interest in parks and recreation. It was a movement that boomed in the 1950s, as Americans discovered the combined joys of leisure, cars and highways. It was also a time when many American zoos began to forfeit any research ambitions in favor of becoming competitive recreation centers.
The Alaska Zoo began with an elephant. In 1965, Chiffon Tissue held a contest: The dealer who ordered the most Chiffon products could choose either $3,500 or a baby elephant, delivered. In Anchorage, Jack Snyder, who owned the Foodland supermarket, teamed up with a Fairbanks grocer; they stocked up on Chiffon products, won the contest, and chose the elephant. Folks from Chiffon's advertising department later said including a baby elephant as an alternative to cash was a joke they inserted at the last minute, never dreaming someone would take it instead of $3,500. But Snyder wanted a zoo in time for Alaska's centennial, in 1967, and he wanted to start one with an elephant.
Annabelle, a four-year-old Asian elephant, was the prize. She was flown to Fairbanks, where she was exhibited in a grocery store parking lot for a few weeks, chained to a concrete block. Then she was taken up to Nome, where they showed her in the armory for a weekend, before she found a new home in a heated horse barn at Sammye Seawell's Diamond H horse stables, on O'Malley Road. Three years later, Seawell founded the Alaska Zoo next door, with Annabelle its core.
Annabelle, an even-tempered elephant, was a popular attraction at the zoo, particularly known for the Abstract Expressionist paintings she made with a brush held in her trunk, which resembled the work of Willem de Kooning in his decline.
The appearance of zoos began to change again in the late 1970s and '80s, favoring still more natural enclosures to satisfy visitors made sophisticated by nature documentaries and jet travel. That's also when the first concerted critics were heard, charging that the public can learn little more from zoos than the behavior of an animal in captivity, and leave a zoo with a tummy full of coke and hot dogs and a distorted idea of the animal kingdom.
It was in the 1980s, too, that scientists completed extensive and groundbreaking studies of African elephants in the wild. Herds were tracked, and gradually it became clear that elephant calves and cows had distinctly social lives and rituals. African elephant society is matriarchal, we now know. Adult bulls often are segregated from a herd for nine months of the year; the other three, they travel from one herd to the next, trying to mate with as many females as possible. Meanwhile, the cows and calves remain in highly social groups, the cows for life. Generally, there are no lone cows.
In the 1980s, African elephants were imperiled as never before. The trade in ivory was accelerating, and the elephants, which had been moved to game preserves, were overgrazing. The government of Zimbabwe, like some other African states, culled their herds. From 1981 to 1988, Zimbabwe slaughtered nearly 25,000 elephants, selling the ivory and other body parts. Biologists, conservationists and others protested what they said was senseless killing, but there were also conservationists who supported programs like Zimbabwe's as sound game management.
"Some idea of the possible range of elephant communication is given by an incident that occurred in the Hwange area of Zimbabwe," Martin Meredith writes in Elephant Destiny:
Living on a private wildlife sanctuary adjacent to Hwange National Park were a group of about 80 elephants, a familiar sight to tourists at the lodge there. On the day that a culling operation started in the national park, 90 miles away, the elephants disappeared. They were found several days later in the opposite corner of the sanctuary as far away from the park boundary as they could get.
In 1983, a Zimbabwe cull left five baby elephants watching on grassy plains as all the adults in their herds, all the elephants they'd ever known, were cut down around their ears. The five orphans were purchased by Americans and flown to the Catskill Game Farm, a private zoo in Upstate New York.
Sammye Seawell wanted a companion for Annabelle. She flew to the game farm and picked out Maggie, then six months old, "just this tiny thing, waist-high, with these enormous ears," she recently recalled. "We wanted an elephant and she was the nicest one." They named her Maggie, she said, because they'd never heard of an elephant with that name.
In the wild, an elephant calf typically stays with its mother for two or three years. This one had a lot to learn about being an elephant when she arrived in September, 1983, in cargo on a commercial flight to Anchorage.
"So now you've got an elephant," Annabelle, "who doesn't understand she's an elephant, raising an elephant who doesn't know what the hell's going on," Rob Smith said as we talked in the elephant house behind Maggie's broad back.
Smith, who is 41, grew up around farms in Ohio. He joined the army, and when he got out, in Alaska, after jumping from airplanes with the 82nd Airborne and going to war in Grenada and Saudi Arabia, he saw an ad in the paper for a zookeeper and went to the Alaska Zoo to apply. The job had been filled by the time Smith arrived, but the zoo did have an opening.
"What do you think about elephants?" he was asked.
"I said, 'I don't think of elephants.'"
Nevertheless, he got a job with them. Next, David Hall, the elephant manager, quit. Smith assumed that was the end of his work with elephants, too - he figured Hall had a unique relationship with Annabelle and Maggie that kept them all safe.
Smith didn't want to face the elephants alone. The zoo convinced him to give it a try.
One day, after Hall quit, Smith was alone with Maggie in the elephant house; Annabelle was out in the yard. He took a broomstick with him, expecting a showdown. Maggie charged, and as she swooped down, intent, for all he knew, on squashing him like a bug, Smith took the broomstick and hit her with it as hard as he could across her forehead, he said, snapping the stick. Maggie stopped and walked away, and their relationship was born.
Their adrenalized moment of truth "was like Grenada, jumping out of an airplane, being shot at in combat, getting married and my daughter being born, all rolled into one," Smith said.
Annabelle was still the star elephant then. "Everybody liked Annie and nobody liked Maggie," he recalled." If anything got broken down here (in the elephant house), it was always Maggie who did it. And that's a hell of a shadow to grow up in."
It made Maggie ornery, Smith said. When visitors came, she sometimes flung snot or stones at them across impressive distances. They tried to get Maggie to paint, too, but she'd "knock the brush on the easel or suck the paint," Smith said. "She clearly gets very bored with it very easily."
Maggie was jealous of Annabelle, Sammye Seawell said. "There was a time there when (Maggie) was so bad we had to keep her chained for a whileŠ T This is how we know she's happy now. The day after Annabelle died" - from a foot infection, in 1997 - "her behavior improved."
Still, said Smith, Maggie delights in "scaring people" - charging the bars in her enclosure and slapping the bars with her trunk. "Like an elephant," he said.
Ingrid Newkirk, the president and co-founder of PETA, has trained herself never to lose sight of the larger problem. If you have any leaning toward animal rights, even just the slightest tilt, even if you merely have a pet that you regard as a family member, pretending it came voluntarily to live with you, talking to Newkirk can be as powerful as listening to a skillful preacher or a gifted salesperson.
Newkirk grew up in New Delhi, India, and worked in Maryland and Washington, D.C. as an animal protection officer and deputy sheriff before she founded PETA, in 1980. PETA is still regarded as an extremist organization in many quarters, but a cursory visit to its website shows this tally of "recent victories":
AVMA Ends Support for Cruel Starvation of Hens!
Another 675 Animals Saved From Testing
PUMA Pulls Commercial in Which Young Chimpanzee Was Used
One Hundred Starving Horses Seized in California
Canada Goose Killer Slapped With Federal Citation
PETA has been called "the most successful radical organization in America." Even its bitterest critics allow as much. ActivistCash.com, a website run by the Center for Consumer Freedom, which appears to be a lobbying front for the restaurant, alcohol and tobacco industries, says PETA's strategy is "to stake out extreme, ridiculous, offensive, and often laughable positions, in order to constantly redefine the edge of what's considered 'acceptable' philosophy and protest activity. Ten years ago, throwing fake blood on a fur coat, agitating for vegan cafeteria food, or objecting to biology-class dissection were unusual behaviors. Today, these are commonplaceŠ"A"
As backhanded compliments go, it's a pretty good one.
I told Newkirk that one of the great concerns I hear at the Alaska Zoo and in Alaska in general is that Outside activists like PETA are trying to tell 49th-staters what to do. Caving in to PETA about Maggie must seem like a step down a slippery slope, and then where will they be? Will they even have a zoo or jobs tomorrow? What, ultimately, does she want? I asked.
"Our ultimate goal is peace on earth," she said, a little bitingly. "Which is totally unrealistic," she continued. "So yes, we would like an end to all exploitation of animals - all behavior that zoos engage in which is exploitative. But that's not how we fight our battles. We have very practical steps that people can take nowŠ A All we're asking is that they allow Maggie to live out her dotage in the company of other elephants. We'll have nothing else to do with (the Alaska Zoo) in the foreseeable future if they do that but (to) praise them."
"Maybe," I said, "if they give up the elephant, they're afraid it'll end with you taking away their steak dinners."
"And it'll be great!" she said. "You shouldn't be afraid of where it's going."
"It seems possible to imagine a less cruel world," I said, "but can you imagine a cruelty-free world? Isn't there a wall we'd hit?"
"Bring it on," she said.
Last year, Ron Kagan, the director of the Detroit Zoo, concluded that his institution could not adequately care for its elephants in a northern climate; the animals suffer when kept indoors during long winters, he believed, putting them at risk of arthritis and foot infections. He permanently closed his elephant exhibit and wanted to move its two aging inhabitants, Winky and Wanda, who were already arthritic, to the Performing Animal Welfare Society, a California sanctuary that PETA endorses. Both elephants had been captured in the wild as babies, and each had spent about five decades on exhibit in U.S. zoos. The American Zoo and Aquarium Association, which accredits zoos, objected, saying Winky and Wanda were needed as companions for elephants at other zoos. Kagan insisted, and the elephants were moved to the sanctuary.
Paul Naquin, a Georgetown University student pursuing a doctorate of philosophy, is the author of a chapter in the forthcoming second edition of The Human Use of Animals: Case Studies in Ethical Choice. Naquin's chapter is about elephants kept in cold-climate zoos; it focuses on Winky and Wanda and touches on Maggie. When I asked Naquin about Maggie, he said he didn't think the case for moving her was clear-cut - "otherwise," he said, "it wouldn't be an ethical dilemma."
One complicating issue, Naquist said, is that elephants are so intelligent in general, which means that different elephants might have different needs. Elephants generally need social groups, Naquin said, "but like humans, there are some that are just lonersŠ w what I've read about Maggie leaves me uncertain."
No one seems to doubt that had Maggie been left with her herd in Zimbabwe, she would have grown up as an active part of a group of elephants - but that's not what happened. And here she is.
I asked Rob Smith if he'd ever thought the zoo should get another elephant after Annabelle died. He told me that he thought it was possible, if the zoo could come up with about $140,000 - which, as it happens, is considerably less than they're proposing to spend on improvements for Maggie, including a giant treadmill to keep her in shape.
"I still want more elephants," Smith said. "You know, if somebody dropped off a dozen at the back gate, I'd take care of 'em. Personally, I don't think you can have too many elephants."
The zoo's plans for Maggie also call for enlarging the elephant house. I asked Tex Edwards, the zoo director, the same question: Despite the outcry now about Maggie, has he considered bringing another African elephant to Alaska?
Yes, Edwards said, he had, adding, "We have no plans to do it at this time - but we wouldn't rule it out."
Almost none of the experts the zoo has consulted were concerned about Maggie being so far north, he said. "Almost all of them were concerned about her being alone."
If that's true, I said, then the way out of this flap would be to get another elephant?
"I'm not arguing with you," he said.
There was a joke that I loved when I was little:
A man is driving down the highway when he sees a truck by the side of the road. He stops and asks the driver if he needs help.
"Yes," the truck driver says. "I have this truck full of penguins and I have to take them to the zoo, but I'm waiting for a repair. Could you take them for me, and I'll meet you there as soon as my truck's fixed?"
"Sure," says the man. He crams the penguins in his sedan and they drive down the highway.
Some time later, his vehicle finally repaired, the truck driver sets out for the zoo; but before he gets there, he sees the man with the sedan in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen, the penguins clustered around him.
"Hey!" the truck driver says, "I thought you agreed to take those penguins to the zoo."
"I did," the man says, "and we spent a long time there and you still hadn't come, and we'd seen all the exhibits, so I took them to a movie and now we're having ice cream."
I loved that joke because the man is such a blessed fool that he assumes that penguins should be treated like children. It never occurs to him to lock them up.
Animals in a zoo fascinate me because I can see them. At the same time, I don't ever really suppose they want to be there, any more than my childhood collie really wanted us to dress him up. I just blind myself to that elephant in the room to satisfy my curiosity. I'd bet I'm not the only person at the zoo lying to myself this way, pretending that this is somehow a choice the zebra or the leopard would make. What worries me is this: Isn't saying we want zoos to remain really to say that our interest in other animals is more important than their happiness?
Yet how can we know if Maggie's happy? Even Rob Smith isn't sure. If we say we want her sent away, aren't we saying that we know what will make her happy, that we know what's best for her? And isn't that how she ended up in the zoo to begin with?
Here's what I do know: I never realized how magnificent elephants were until I spent a few hours near Maggie in the Alaska Zoo. With Smith there, I felt I had little to worry about and was even careless; in my mind, my fascination outweighed the risk. To feel that trunk nuzzling me was to appreciate how strong and otherworldly an elephant seems when one is so close you can touch her, and she touches you.
I'm not sure the average zoo visitor, for whose benefit Maggie was brought here, has anything like my experience. One recent Saturday morning I went to the zoo during regular hours and went to the back, to the elephant house. It was a bitterly cold day, and the elephant house was warm. I watched as people trooped in until the gallery held about twenty folks, families with toddlers in strollers, mothers and fathers with just their eyes and the tops of their noses showing above their scarves, two Goth teen girls and several soldiers. They all stopped for a moment once they were inside and looked at Maggie, but Maggie wasn't doing anything much that morning, just standing in her enclosure, her broad rump at a 45-degree angle to the audience, her head in shadow. She was doing what I imagine she spends much of her time doing, just standing around.
"It's very easy to think she's sad," Rob Smith said, "because you walk in here, you smell the elephant smell, your kid goes, 'Oh, Mommy, it stinks, let's go' - you've been there three minutes, she hasn't done anything and you think she's sad. Well, what does a happy elephant look like?"
The visitors that cold morning noted that this was indeed an elephant, as promised, and a few read aloud from the sign above their heads that talked about the size and shape and parts of African elephants, and the danger they face nowadays in the wild, but eventually everyone in the room ceased to pay the elephant much attention at all, which made sense, since Maggie didn't seem interested in them either. But it was cold outside. So the people lingered and soon were enveloped in their conversations, their heads turned away from the enclosure, and, except for a loud snort every now and then that punctuated their chatter about work and school and hockey practice, it was as though they had no idea they were in a room with an elephant.
Contact Robert Meyerowitz at robert@anchoragepress.com
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