other-animals

[other-animals]

2018-06-23

Scientific name: Elephas maximus indicus Common name: Indian Elephant

I arrive at the “Elephant Community Center” just in time to see several of its residents get fed. Three of the National Zoo’s six elephants are here, one in one corner and two in the other, all presumably seeking shade from what is shaping up to be a stickier-than-average day for early June.

The Elephant Community Center has a similar sort of institutional feel to its human equivalent, the kind of place that has vomit-colored linoleum floors and bulletin boards lined along their edges with crinkly store-bought trim and peppered with ads for pet sitters and piano lessons. The elephant incarnation of this is not unlike a warehouse, with hydraulically operated sliding doors that lead to the outdoor enclosures and a long dirt ramp separating the occupants from their audience. The zookeepers use this ramp as a proscenium of sorts, jogging back and forth in khaki shorts and polos lugging enormous tubs of fruits and forage, fielding questions from errant toddlers along the way. On the far wall someone has smeared some mud into the shape of a heart, an unintended nod, it seems, to the notion of an elephant bulletin board.

The elephants are looming behind a hefty cable fence, looking vaguely in this context like boxers against the ropes. Their heads, approximately the size of small weather balloons, are crowned by two symmetrical lumps at the fore of the skull, a formation that suggests cartoonishly bulging brains. Their trunks, projecting downwards with a limpness that belies their muscularity, are of a length calibrated to drag gently along the ground when at rest—though they are almost never at rest and instead are usually waving through the air, tentacle-like, touching this here and that there with all the whimsy of a toddler in a gift shop. Their state of near-hairlessness, which would, I’m sure, be horrifying if it occurred in paler tones, is somehow made innocuous by their uniform grayness, which lends them both a solemnity and a geological semblance, as though they were rudely carved from river rock. According to one keeper, all the elephants here are female, a designation that can be discerned by counting the number of protuberances on the tip of the trunk. Of the two directly in front of me, the one on the left is significantly larger than the one on the right, who is apparently nearly seventy years old and came to America in the 1960s as a gift from—the keeper tells us—“the children of India.” (How or why this child-initiated feat of international diplomacy was accomplished is not, to my mind, satisfactorily explained, though the same factoid is repeated on multiple plaques and infographics around the zoo.)

Children—I am contemplating, as kids of multiple shapes and sizes press around me, gurgling and screaming and waving their arms—are supposed to like animals; such a liking is encouraged and even enforced. As a child, one’s clothing is adorned with animals; the characters in the books one reads are animals; the stuffed toys one sleeps with at night are animals. The zoo is above all a place for children, a fact that is becoming all the more clear to me as a single woman in her late twenties surrounded, at this moment, by a burgeoning crowd of families, not merely nuclear but emphatically extended: grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles, cousins and stepparents, teenagers and infants, all taking cell phone photos of themselves and each other, all bickering and wiping noses and having variations on a conversation like this:

Parent: “See the elephant? Wow! See the elephant?” Child: “It’s so big!”

One girl, witnessing an elephant moving a clod of dirt with its trunk, yells out with more excitement than disgust, “He’s eating poop!” while her father, sensing a teachable moment, rejoins, “We don’t eat poop, do we?”

Adults, after all, are not supposed to like animals, at least not in the way that children like animals—not wholeheartedly, not obsessively, not in a tumultuous, proto-romantic way. Adults should like animals civilly and calmly, with detachment and humor, with an understanding that the line between “us” and “them” is firm. Those with the audacity to breach this boundary must be censured, with women of course bearing the brunt of our consternation—witness the scorn heaped on “cat ladies” and “horse girls,” while men and their dogs are exalted, even admired, their proud, manly relationship anthologized in countless books and films. It is, at least in part, the sexlessness of children that absolves them from the stigma of loving animals too much, and one wonders—at least I have, in certain moments—whether men experience the female love of animals as a tacit threat of sorts, requiring immediate mockery and shame lest women should flee into the arms of, oh I don’t know, an elephant.

There is, I’ll admit, a seeming gentleness there, and certainly nothing more alien than you can find in the eyes of a man who has stopped loving you. The keepers—there are three, one per elephant—have begun their feeding ritual, which is fascinating in its intricacy and tailored, apparently, to each individual elephant’s needs. They begin by emptying a dry quart or so of what look like pink lozenges into a bucket, which they administer to the elephants in two different ways. The younger elephant on the left has them placed into her trunk, which she then delicately lifts and inserts into her mouth; the older elephant has them placed directly into her mouth by the keeper, who takes a handful of lozenges and reaches her arm up to the elbow into her charge’s waiting maw, holding it there dutifully until its contents have been accepted and swallowed down into the gray depths below. From my vantage—I am only twenty feet or so away—I can see an almost unsettling amount of detail: the way the elephants’ mouths are almost puppet-like in nature, with the pinkness of their tongues seemingly attached on all sides, more of a smooth muscle lining than an organ per se. The lower lip, rather than “closing” the mouth, dangles down in a long, fleshy taper—suspended, perhaps, in prehistoric time, decorated at its nadir with a wiry tuft of hair. Such a mouth is inherently, inchoately clumsy, with a comedic tendency to spontaneously release its contents; this is an animal that eats inexactly, abundantly, with anatomically enforced abandon.

The lozenges—which I later learn are called “leaf eater biscuits,” high fiber protein bars formulated for zoo animals whose first few ingredients are soybean meal, corn gluten meal, soybean hulls, and sugar beet pulp (which explains the weird pink color)—are followed by a series of fruits and vegetables that can’t possibly resemble the elephants’ native diet and seem instead to be whatever was on sale in the produce section at Costco: an entire green pear, a stem of broccoli, half an extra-large carrot, a whole raw sweet potato, two red delicious apples, one granny smith apple. These are followed by a measured amount of “Triple Crown Grass Forage”—I read the name off the bag as it’s emptied into a bucket—which, for the younger elephant, is eaten straight, and for the older elephant, is mixed with water and administered as a kind of grassy porridge, delivered handful by handful as one would feed a baby, a human handful resembling (to an elephant) a spoonful.

I feel mesmerized by this process and its methodical, almost clinical intimacy, the keeper on the right reaching over and over into the vulvar folds of the older elephant’s mouth, speaking quietly and conversationally as she does so—not baby talk, just regular talk, although I can’t make out the words. I am thinking about the extreme and shocking violence of captivity, trying to square it in my head with the necessity of caretaking, the way that you have to treat something nicely if you never intend to set it free. I have slept with men who treated me exactly in this way, their artful violence obscured by calm rituals of caretaking: the drinks that were paid for, the hands that were held, the doors that were opened, the stories that were listened to, and me all the while rattling around the cage of their good intentions.

I am over-identifying with the elephants, maybe; I am finding them too relatable. Their immense and impossible wildness is getting lost in my comparisons. They have walked through the world’s last remaining rainforests; they have known danger and suffering I will never understand. But wasn’t it Thoreau that said “It is vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. there is none such.” The wildness in me greets the wildness in you. If I could I’d set you free.