Nit doesn’t say Toey could do all those things, but right up to the end, he cried. Tears still ran down his cheeks, Nit told me the last time she went home to Rayong and visited him.
“Same age me,” Nit said. “Porty-three! Bery old. He cannot work. He bery sad. I whistle a song to him. Remember Nit! Looking to me when I whistle.”
I can see Nit and Toey in the field when they were young. Toey is chomping grass. Nit whistles a song. He slowly raises his bovine head with its curlicue horns and looks at her, crying.
Toey died a few months ago and was buried alongside one of the fields where he labored nearly all his life.
The World’s Fastest Elephant
“The question of the day is: how fast can an elephant run across a level, thirty-meter field when not scared for his (or her) life, but motivated and reasonably fit?”
The person asking this question, and who had ten elephants lined up waiting to provide a possible answer, was John Hutchinson, a recent graduate of the University of California at Berkeley whose post-graduate work brought him to Thailand to find the world’s fastest elephant, a query that not only was given credence, but paid for with an academic grant.
My question: is this a question a grown man should even ask? It’s widely conceded that the world’s fastest animal is the cheetah, a sleek sprinting machine native to Africa that has been clocked in pursuit of its prey over short distances at an astonishing 68 miles (110 kilometers) per hour.
The pronghorn antelope, another African resident, comes in second at 61 mph (98 kph), not quite fast enough to escape a cheetah’s pursuit, except that the antelope is more suited for longer runs.
Other maximum speeds, most of them measured over a quarter-mile (0.4 km) distance, include the lion and the ostrich at 61 mph (80 kph); quarter horse, 47 mph (76 kph); coyote, 43 mph (69 kph); greyhound, 39 mph (63 kph); domestic rabbit, 35 mph (56 kph); giraffe, 32 mph (51 kph); grizzly bear, 30 mph (48 kph); and man, 26 mph (42 kph). Followed, at some distance, by the squirrel at 12 (19 kph), the domestic pig at 11 (18 kph) and the barnyard chicken at 9 (14 kph).
Back to the elephants and John, who told me he was trying to link evolutionary biology and bio-mechanics, two fields, he assured me, that hadn’t been talking to each other lately. Which is what brought us to a field behind Rajamangala Institute of Technology in Surin, Thailand, during that town’s Annual Elephant Round-Up.
“What,” I asked, “do you do to ‘motivate’ the elephants?” John said that on the first day’s trials, they tried it both with and without the trainers called mahouts on top. They also tried shouting and banging empty plastic water bottles together as they ran behind the elephant. And they positioned other elephants—friends of the animal being tested—at the finish line to give him (or her) something to run toward.
The idea was to get the elephant up to a full gallop when the animal crossed an infra-red beam, starting the clock. Thirty meters and a few seconds later the elephant passed a second beam and the clock stopped. Identical tests with Asian elephants in California showed the fastest to move at four meters per second, or about ten miles per hour. John said he thought that was the limit, a “wall,” so to speak, comparable to the four-minute mile that humans once were thought unable to surpass.
Then John met, via the internet, Richard Lair, another Californian, but one who has lived in Thailand for about twenty years and is on the staff of the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang, a small town about an hour’s drive from Chiang Mai. He told John his elephants could, in a manner of speaking, run circles around the ones at the San Francisco Zoo, which is where John had tested his pachyderms while working on his doctorate. That prompted John to find some research money and come to Surin, where, indeed, on the first day’s run, he timed an elephant running just short of fifteen miles an hour. You have to understand that for John, this was more exciting than the consultancy he did on Jurassic Park.
“The general question is, how does body size affect the range of an animal’s movements,” John explained when I asked why even bother. “How do big things handle being big? Another question is how do the elephants do what they do, because at fifteen miles per hour, they should, like all other animals, including humans, when running at full speed, have all feet in the air at some point. But elephants always have one foot on the ground.”
He said humans were able to perform certain “tricks” to move faster and keep one foot on the ground at all times. Speed-walkers integrated a hip movement that enabled them to walk fast. And then, John added, there was something called “Groucho-running.” It was, he said, named for Groucho Marx, who stooped and sort of duck-walked in the movies, enabling him to accelerate his pace and maintain uninterrupted contact with the earth.
“Elephants are doing something we haven’t figured out yet,” John said. It was, he implied, the challenge of his young academic life.
As we talked, seven spots were painted on each elephant on the side facing the cameras that would record the run—on the top of the shoulder (or scapula), at the shoulder joint, on the elbow and wrists on the front leg, and on the hip, knee and ankle of the rear leg. In this fashion, the movement could later be tracked by drawing stick figures based on the film showing their movement as if in slow motion.
The first elephant was led into position. This was a three-year-old named Pop and he calmly walked the measured distance in a little over twenty seconds, a preliminary timing made with which to compare a gallop. He was then returned to the starting position.
Now, his mahout stood behind him with two empty plastic water bottles and started banging them together and screaming. Pop took off, the mahout in hot pursuit, still banging and yelling, and the relatively tiny beast was at full gallop when he passed the first light beam, tail curled upward as is always true when elephants run, his fat little legs pumping.
John stepped to the counter and read the finish time. “Four-point-nine-two seconds!” Not a record, but faster than a California elephant and I could tell that John’s heart was beating faster, too.
The second elephant was led to the start position. This was May and she was six and had no interest whatsoever in playing this silly game. She walked both laps.
“We’ll give her another chance later,” said Richard Lair, diplomatically.
I suggested to John that I thought maybe the reason Thai elephants ran faster than California elephants was the animals in San Francisco led a more sedentary lifestyle.
“That’s a good word,” said one of John’s associates, who stood near the clock with a clipboard. “Sedentary.”
“Yes,” said John, “but it still doesn’t explain how the elephants always keep one foot on the ground.”
I said I didn’t think it was because the elephants were “Groucho-running.”
In fact, the only thing I was sure of was that Groucho would’ve liked to have been there.
FUNNY BUSINESS
The Rubber Barons
When I was growing up in the United States, the word “rubber,” in the plural, referred to overshoes you pulled onto your feet when it rained. In association with the word “check,” it meant you had insufficient funds in the bank and the check bounced. Affix it to another word and “rubberneck” meant to look about or stare with curiosity.
Some friends of my parents played a “rubber” of bridge, meaning a round or series of play until one side won two out of three games. In the United Kingdom, it was the word used for eraser, because they were made from rubber and when they fell off your school desk they bounced all over the classroom floor.