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PAWS helps aging elephants be (relatively) free

Updated 11:01 pm, Friday, July 5, 2013


  • Donna reaches out for a treat at the Oakland Zoo, a pioneer in "protected contact." Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle


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San Andreas, Calaveras County --

Annie, a 55-year-old Asian elephant, is captivated by something in the lake. She swims to the center and gingerly stretches her trunk toward some bubbles rising from a pipe. Judging it harmless, she comes closer, lowers her jaws over the spout, then tilts her head back to spray her own geyser.

"Look at that, she's playing!" said Ed Stewart, owner of a 2,300-acre sanctuary in the Sierra foothills where performing animals recuperate from lifetimes of abuse.

It has been three decades since Stewart and his late partner, Pat Derby, quit their jobs as Hollywood animal trainers to start the nonprofit Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) to rescue lions, tigers, bears and elephants like the ones they once made do tricks. Stewart has continued to campaign tirelessly to remove animals from circuses and to make zoos more humane.

There are 26 tigers, four lions and seven bears at their Ark 2000 refuge, but the poster animal for their efforts has always been the elephant, a roaming creature with a deep biological need for family and the intelligence to recognize itself in a mirror. As the world's largest land mammal, its captivity has always been controversial, ensnared in geopolitical arguments between conservation vs. confinement, culling vs. poaching, and education vs. entertainment.

Stewart and Derby's refuge was the first elephant sanctuary in the United States, and pioneered a humane method of elephant handling that uses no painful bull-hooks to prod, poke and hit the animals into submission.

Fueled by behind-the-scenes video that Stewart gathered of circus and zoo trainers beating, dragging, kicking and electro shocking elephants, public outcry against elephants in captivity is mounting. Traveling circuses are encountering more protests at train stations, and zoos are under increasing pressure to drop violence-based training, to enlarge elephant pens, or to close down their elephant exhibits entirely.

A recent HBO documentary narrated by Lily Tomlin, "An Apology to Elephants," is adding to the rethinking of elephants as entertainment by revealing stories like Annie's.

Annie's story

Before her first birthday, Annie was torn from her family while at a salt lick in India.

A group of men 60-strong ran screaming toward her herd with torches and forced Annie and 18 other juveniles into a crude stockade of logs.

She was sent to the Milwaukee Zoo, where she was hog-tied, dragged on the floor and beaten by keepers who were videotaped jabbing her in sensitive areas above her ear, eyes and anus with the sharp, pointed end of a metal training stick called a bull-hook. The beatings were used to break her will, and make her do stunts such as sitting down at a tea party table with children to promote the zoo.

At night, Annie was chained by the legs for 12 hours or more in a small stall with three other elephants. When unable to roam, captive elephants on a chain gang develop a nervous habit of rocking side to side and dipping their heads for hours at a time, to feel what little movement they can.

Video footage of Annie's training so outraged the public that in 1994 the Milwaukee Zoo sent Annie and a second elephant, Tammy, to Stewart and Derby's refuge. Once free to roam, their bond was so close, that when Tammy eventually died, Annie stood in the doorway of the barn for six months, waiting for her companion to return.

So to see an animal with a history like Annie's enjoying the tickle of bubbles on her mouth has deep meaning for Stewart.

"She has never had free will like this," he said.

Taking the waters

Today, Annie's melancholy has eased, and her favorite place on the Ark 2000 sanctuary is the lake, where she can ease her arthritis, caused by too many decades of standing on concrete. She has 100 acres to roam freely, chew branches and sunbathe on the hillsides.

"We aren't heroes. Ultimately, she is still in an enclosure, but we are at least giving her back her dignity so for a few years she can feel what it's like to be a real elephant," said Stewart, who does not breed at Ark and advocates that zoos follow suit, eventually letting the U.S. zoo elephant population of 288 die out naturally.

Sometimes, he says, he feels like he's shouting in the wind. "Each time I hear another baby elephant is born in a zoo, I think, 'That's another 50-year jail sentence.' "

His philosophy comes after more than three decades studying what happens to elephants in captivity. In 1976, Stewart met Derby while she was promoting her book, "The Lady and her Tiger," an expose about animal abuse and neglect on the sets of "Gunsmoke," "Lassie" and "Flipper." Stewart and Derby shared a like-minded purpose and began lobbying the state to set standards for captive wildlife, and got their first win in 1986 with the signing of AB1620, which dictated that elephants had to be let off chains for at least five hours a day.

A new home

Encouraged by animal activists who needed a place to retire rescued zoo and circus animals, Stewart and Derby opened their first sanctuary, in Galt (Sacramento County), in 1985. Their first residents were an African lion, a baboon, a few bears and a mountain lion.

Today Ark 2000 is home to eight aging elephants, six female and two male, including Lulu, who came in 2005, when the San Francisco Zoo decided to shutter its elephant exhibit after the deaths of two of its pachyderms.

While most elephants in the wild make it to their 60s, most captive elephants die in their 20s, and the majority due to chronic joint and foot-related problems and infections exacerbated by inactivity and the effects of being penned or chained for days and weeks at a time, according to a 2012 Seattle Times analysis of the 390 elephant fatalities at zoos in the past half century.

Exotic-animal veterinarian Jackie Gai, who attends to all the animals at Ark, says the performing pachyderms typically suffer from worn-away cartilage between their joints, which create spurs from bones rubbing together. Sometimes the spurs break off and become floating bone pieces in their tissue called "joint mice."

"Their joints are so swollen they just can't bend their wrists and ankles anymore," she said. "Elephants were not made to do handstands and ride bicycles. Or stand in one place all their lives. It's too much weight on their bones."

In the last two decades, concerns over elephants in captivity have led at least 22 zoos - including San Francisco, Detroit, Philadelphia and Chicago - to close their elephant exhibits or announce plans to do so.

Other zoos have taken steps to mitigate problems. The Pittsburgh Zoo owns a 724-acre preserve that more mimics a natural African environment. A 225-acre sanctuary is being created in Florida where zoos will be able to send unwanted male elephants.

And more than half of all zoos now use the same hands-off, reward-based elephant training technique pioneered at PAWS, and which the San Diego Zoo called "protected contact." Instead of keepers getting inside elephant pens with bull-hooks ("free contact"), keepers like Jeff and Gina Kinzley at the Oakland Zoo always stay outside the fence, and use bamboo poles to point and direct the elephant to move in a certain direction, then reward with treats. Each morning, the elephants lift their feet through the fence for a manicure-pedicure, so their nails can get filed down and the cracks of their pads washed to prevent infections.

The technique, necessary to provide the elephants with medical treatments and grooming, was modeled after target poles dipped in the water to train seals and dolphins to swim to a target. Oakland Zoo switched to protected contact in 1991, after a zookeeper was trampled in the elephant enclosure.

"That made everyone here take a hard look at how to manage elephants safely," senior elephant keeper Jeff Kinzley said. "We don't poke or prod them to do anything. We ask. And they can walk away if they don't feel like it."

A model to follow

Oakland was the first zoo to use protected contact with all its elephants, and became a model for what will soon be required of all zoos nationwide.

The Oakland Zoo management has taken a vocal stance against elephant abuse, testifying in lawsuits against circuses and bull-hooks, and teaching children about protected contact and circus abuse at an annual Celebrating Elephants fundraiser that benefits the Amboseli Trust for Elephants conservation program in Kenya.

When Jeff Kinzley started working at the zoo 18 years ago, elephants Donna and M'Dunda used to rock and bob compulsively for nearly the entire day. Now, with more room to roam, and no fear of being hit with the bull-hook, they have relaxed and bob only a couple of hours a day, he said.

Chained elephants continue to bob even years after they are set free, Stewart said. True to legend, their memories are long. One former elephant named 71 at Ark used to run in a panicked circle every time a helicopter flew overhead, remembering the government-ordered cull that killed his family when he was captured in Africa as a baby.

"Their whole lives they lived in fear, waiting for their next beating," Kinzley said. "To keep them in line, keepers never allowed them to make an independent movement. The elephants just shut down their brains. Now that we stay out of their enclosure, there's no danger, so I can ask them to stick their ears out, to show me their eye, or to give me their trunk. They get to think, and decide if they want a treat for it. And they always do."

Yum. Bran slurry

A slurry of watery bran is their favorite, and carrots or tangerines is a close runner-up. At Ark, for really special requests from the veterinarian, the elephants like a Jelly Belly - so delicious they will roll one around on their tongue until it dissolves.

The latest zoo to shutter its elephant program is Toronto's, which is in negotiations to send its last three geriatric elephants to Ark 2000, using $800,000 from former game show host Bob Barker to pay for plane fare. That will put Stewart's herd at 11, the maximum he's willing to support.

"We have to give them enough room," Stewart said. "We don't want to turn into the very thing we're trying to stop."
