Making baby elephants

LAST WINTER, during an unusually sharp November chill, tens of thousands of Seattleites shivered in line for hours to get a brief peek at the city's new favorite celebrity: a 235-pound baby elephant. This weekend, thousands more will turn out to celebrate Hansa's first birthday. Zoo managers, politicians, and business sponsors will salute the half-ton bundle of adorability as a conservation triumph. But for Seattle's elephants, Hansa's birth is a decidedly mixed blessing. For their endangered species, beset by everything from ivory poachers and land-grabbing plantations at home to herpes and tuberculosis epidemics in this country, captive breeding offers no conservation panacea—just a tangle of troubling questions and difficult trade-offs.

To understand those trade-offs, you need a sense of the stakes. More than other zoo animals, more than almost any trophy save skyscrapers and sports stadiums, elephants are badges of civic aspiration and pride. Again and again, ever since the Post-Intelligencer launched Seattle's first elephant campaign in 1910, boosters have boosted, voters have voted bonds, and schoolchildren have collected pennies to acquire elephants and build barns to hold them. But one prize always eluded Seattle.

Seattle's bad baby luck began in 1962, when Seattle animal dealer and showman Morgan Berry sent two young elephants to stay at Portland's zoo. One of them was imperceptibly pregnant. The result: Oregon hosted America's first elephant birth in 44 years. Twenty-one more babies followed, and Portland became the world capital of captive elephant breeding. Up north, Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo tried and failed for six years to artificially inseminate its most eligible elephant cow, placid Chai. So in September 1998, it sent Chai to the leading elephant love motel, Dickerson Park Zoo in Springfield, Mo., for a date with the celebrated elephant lothario Onyx. The next year Seattle had the Holy Grail of zookeeping: an Asian elephant (the more endangered species) carrying a female calf who might produce yet another generation of babies.

The Seattle Times ran regular "Chai's Baby Diary" updates, and Seattle's KING 5 positioned itself as the baby elephant channel with ongoing "Pachyderm Project" reports. Hype hit overdrive on Nov. 3, 2000, when Chai delivered a healthy 235-pound tyke. Zoo attendance rose 171 percent over the previous November and doubled projections through the winter. The mania peaked again in March, when the zoo staged a Thai-themed "Name the Baby Elephant" contest modeled on the Indianapolis Zoo's successful promotion of its recent elephant births. Thousands of Seattleites learned how to say "Hope" and "Peace" in Thai. An appraiser inspecting my house saw Asian art there and had one question: "Do you have a Thai dictionary? I promised my son I'd help him name the elephant!"

The winning name, Hansa—"Supreme Happiness"—seemed just the prescription for a town rocked by earthquake, riots, a terrorist scare, the dot-gone bust, and Boeing's defection. "Seattle hadn't had a lot of good news for a while," says zoo marketing director Mary Lee Hanley. "People needed something warm and fuzzy." Like Southeast Asian kingdoms seeking peace and prosperity by acquiring white elephants, Seattle turned to a baby elephant to lift its spirits and, maybe, its luck. Despite the economic malaise, voters handily passed new parks and zoo bonds. Mayor Schell even tried to ride the wave, posing with Hansa on a campaign flyer. (Luck can only do so much.)

After three years of flat or slumping attendance, Hansa has given Woodland Park momentum just when it needs it (see "Going Private" p. 33). Her adorable image graces every sort of promotional paraphernalia, from calendars and membership cards to a special "Art Wolfe mouse pad." Fans are invited to attend her "special private birthday celebration" for $150 a pop. Now other zoos can envy Seattle; nothing else draws crowds like a baby elephant, except perhaps giant pandas. And it costs millions to rent them from China, if you can.

Hanley and other zoo officials in Seattle and Indianapolis bristle at the suggestion that that's why they go to so much trouble to get baby elephants. "Sure, it's a marketing dream," concedes Hanley. "But that's not why she was bred." The important thing, zoo officials insist, is conservation—enriching the captive-elephant gene pool with Chai's unique genetic legacy. Judy Gagen, Hanley's counterpart in Indianapolis, insists that her zoo's two African- elephant calves, conceived through artificial insemination, "cost us more than we'll ever make." Perhaps, but what Indianapolis made is substantial: a half-million-dollar rise in ticket sales in the year its babies arrived and, more important, $10 million in donations largely credited to them. "It's all show business," Seattle's lead elephant keeper, Pat Maluy, joked at the mania's peak.

Woodland Park director Mike Waller estimates that, what with travel, stud fees, vets, staffing, artificial-insemination trials, baby-proofing the grounds, and so on, Woodland Park spent about $165,000 to acquire Supreme Happiness. That sum would go far in an impoverished country like Myanmar (formerly Burma), where $1,000 can keep 25 rangers in the field protecting wild elephants for a month.

AND WHAT DO the elephants get from captive breeding? At first, Seattle's got disruption, trauma, isolation, and increased confinement. Two days after Chai arrived in Missouri, tired and underweight after 60 hours on the road, the Dickerson Park keepers set out to establish control. But she didn't respond when the lead keeper prodded her with his bull hook; he used a different "cueing point" than Woodland Park. He persisted, and the famously easygoing Chai did something she never did in Seattle: She swung her head, butting him. The keepers retreated, conferred, and decided to counter this "aggression" in classic fashion. They poked her again; she swung her head again. The three of them "disciplined" her with wooden ax handles. Thereafter, she submitted without incident.