The day I spent with Portland elephant keeper Jeb Barsh, he compared the city to a zoo. Comparing the city government to zookeepers, Jeb said, essentially their job is the same: to keep a population as happy as possible inside a confined area. Portland's size is limited by the Urban Growth Boundary—our cage, so to speak—and somehow we've all got to coexist within this limited space. Here's a look inside the other zoo, plus a few more animal-related events.
The Elephant Men
"Working with elephants is an obsession," says Jeb Barsh. "It sucks you in. Dealing with their psyches is such an honor."
In keeping with Katherine Dunn's theory that every Portlander has three lives, Jeb's an elephant keeper, a writer of songs, fiction, and poetry, and a father to his two-year-old son. He went to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he wanted to write a children's book about elephants. For research he went to the local zoo to volunteer. That was eleven years ago.
Portlands status as an elephant factory Jeb calls "an accident of nature." In the late 1950s the zoo bought Thonglaw, a highly sexual bull, and four fertile cows, including Belle, who gave birth to Packy in 1962, the first elephant to be born and survive in captivity in forty-three years. Until then, no one knew much about an elephant's pregnancy.
Tom Nelsen, a volunteer in the Elephant House, says, "The veterinarian sat here for three months because we didn't know how long an elephant's gestation period would be."
Thonglaw sired fifteen calves before dying at the age of thirty. The first, Packy, has sired seven, including Rama, the zoo's twenty-year-old bull.
"Elephants are in a crisis on earth," Jeb says. "They're running out of habitat. In the wild an Asian elephant only lives twenty-one years out of a possible seventy." He says, "My job isn't to phantom a perfect world for them. My job is to take where they are and make the best of it. I have to do today what I can do right now."
Jeb has a scar running through his top lip, near the right corner. Movie star handsome, he has longish hair curling over each ear and resting on his collar. He has gray eyes and a rough two-day start to a goatee. Maybe it's his shorts or his muscular legs from hiking and rock climbing, but every couple of seconds a different woman steps up to ask him something.
Between questions, he says, "There's a tendency among those of us who work with animals to disappear into our animals. That's why I like to keep one foot out here among people. To continue to spread the word to people about the mystery and joy of elephants. It's an honor to be here."
He says, "Every day of an elephant's life, it's collecting memories. We just try to keep mixing it up for them so their lives are interesting. They have the largest brains of any mammal on earth. We administer to their heads, not just their bodies. Every day, I know how these seven feel. From those feelings we plan our day."
In the Elephant House, Jeb's staff includes Tom, Bob, and Steve—three very big men. They care for the zoo's seven elephants, three males and four females. The females are social and will hang together, but the males each stay off alone unless it's time to mate. In 2002 the zoo's most famous elephant, Packy, celebrated his fortieth birthday. Krista Swan, the zoo's event coordinator, says, "Picture this fourteen-thousand-pound elephant eating a cake frosted with peanut butter, with raw carrots as candles, while thousands of people sing 'Happy Birthday,' all of them wearing huge, floppy elephant ears made of recycled paper." She says, "Elephants communicate by moving their ears. God only knows what Packy thought they were all saying to each other."
Elephants can live for sixty or more years. Keep April 14 free, and you too can wear the big ears and sing to Packy.
The zoo's smallest elephant is Chendra (meaning "Bird of Paradise" in Malay), an Asian elephant who was just a calf when she and her mother raided a Malaysian palm oil plantation. Her mother was shot dead, and Chendra was blinded in one eye and maimed in one leg. She was kept in a children's school until she was too big, then moved to Portland, where the zoo hoped she'd become best friends with Rose-Tu, another female Asian elephant the same age. The problem is, Rose-Tu is the daughter of Me-Tu and Hugo. "Rose-Tu is a brat," Krista says. "And she just harasses Chendra." Rose-Tu's favorite attack is to grab Chendra's tail. She'll hold the tail tight between her rear legs and reach back with her trunk to pluck out the tail's sensitive black hairs.
"At first," Krista says, "people talked about writing a series of children's books about Chendra and her best friend Rose-Tu... Then they thought: maybe not..."
Jeb doesn't worry. "Rose-Tu's a healthy kid," he says. "She's pushing and prodding her environment."
Chendra, he says, is a "pocket elephant," from a landlocked population of genetically unique elephants, and she'll probably be a smaller adult. Her blind eye is filled with pink and white muscle. Her good eye is brown and may turn a bright gold in maturity. She's only one ton, while Rose-Tu at the same age is two tons.
"I don't know why," Jeb says, "but they gave Chendra my birthday, February 20, so she's a Pisces."
About Hugo, Jeb Barsh says, "He's the 'Anti-Packy.' Some people call him 'Hugo the Horrible,' but he's my favorite bull. He's got such an energy field when you're with him. He's like a hot rock!" Jeb says, "He is the truth! He's energy personified! He's a hot daddy! He's a ride in a fast car!"
Hugo was captured in Thailand at about age four, and came to Portland via another zoo and a circus. "Everything I could say about Packy," Jeb says, "you could say the opposite about Hugo."
Hugo has a straight tail. Packy and all his descendants have a genetic trait for crooked tails. As a young elephant the tip of Hugo's trunk—equivalent to a human's thumb— was bitten off, so he's a little clumsy at grabbing items.
Jeb, Tom, Bob, and Steve explain how elephants walk on just the tip of their toes, protecting the sensitive pad in the center of their feet. They can stop a rolling apple without bruising it. Their trunks have forty thousand muscles, and can weigh five hundred pounds and hold five gallons of water. Each elephant has only four teeth, all of them huge. They go through six sets of these teeth and typically die of starvation after wearing out the last set. Up to 80 percent of their communication is via "infrasound," subaudible sounds that for years led people to think elephants had ESP and could read each other's minds.
"An elephant's brain is four and a half times bigger than mine," Jeb says. "It's fifty percent more convoluted, so they're incredible problem solvers." He explains, "The elephant's brain has all these pathways for storing memory. As herbivores they don't need to be 'wily.'" One reason why elephants carry so much memory is because they're so destructive to their environment that they need to constantly know where to find more food.
"They're touchingly similar to human beings," Jeb says. "They show a great deal of affection for each other. They're curious. They stay together as a family unit and won't abandon an elderly member. They even seem to mourn the death of each other."
Asian elephants have been crowded out of their habitat for centuries, and now only forty thousand are left in the world. As a pragmatist, Jeb Barsh talks about Charles Darwin's idea that extinction is a natural, acceptable event. And maybe there is no more place for these huge, charismatic animals that require so many resources to live.