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BANGALORE, NAIROBI, SALT LAKE CITY, CHICAGO, DETROIT, SAN FRANCISCO––
“In a jumbo victory for Bangalore animal activists, Lord Ganesha
has showered his benediction on Veda, a 6-year-old baby elephant at the
Bannerghatta Biological Park in Karnataka, India. Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh has decided that Veda will not be sent as a diplomatic gift to the
Yerevan Zoo in Armenia,” announced Compassion Unlimited Plus Action
founder Suparna Ganguly on April 29.
“Karnataka
State got their official letter today from the prime minister’s office
that the decision to send the baby elephant has been cancelled,”
Ganguly elaborated to ANIMAL PEOPLE. “We had a Thanksgiving with
the elephants at Bannerghatta.”
Confirmed Govind D. Belgaumkar of The Hindu, “Bangaloreans––schoolchildren
and parents, as well as other animal lovers––on Friday celebrated
the government decision to leave Veda with her mother Vanita, grandmother
Suvarna, brother Gokula, and little sister Gowri. People distributed sweets,
touched Veda, and prayed for her long life.”
That was one week after the Nairobi newspaper The Nation hinted that Youth
for Conservation might have won a parallel struggle to block the export
of as many as 318 elephants, hippos, lions, zebras, giraffes, gazelles,
and members of about 20 other species from Kenya to Thailand.
On March 12 and April 5, respectively, the last elephants left the San
Francisco Zoo and the Detroit Zoo, en route to retirement at the Ark 2000
refuge operated by the Performing Animal Welfare Society sanctuary near
San Andreas, California, following nine months of negotiation among the
zoos, the city governments, the sanctuary, and the American Zoo Association.
The public loves elephants as much as ever, but knowing more about elephants
than ever before, elephant enthusiasts are increasingly skeptical that
elephants can enjoy the quality of life they deserve within the limited
space that zoos afford.
There is growing concern among zoo managers that as elephants go, so go
the crowds, the multi-million-dollar projects, and the prestige that zoos
now enjoy within the global conservation community. Zoos without elephants,
some feel, might just as well be sanctuaries, still with an educational
mission, but quiet homes for animals whom few people think about, rather
than institutions which often win priority support over schools and libraries
in municipal budgeting.
Of the 214 AZA zoos, only 78 have elephants. They attract about two-thirds
of the cumulative annual zoo audience of about 140 million visitors.
“Elephants are probably the most enigmatic and charismatic animals
we have,” Brookfield Zoo director Stuart Strahl recently told William
Mullen and Jon Yates of the Chicago Tribune. “People are drawn to
them because of their size. They are an animal everybody can relate to.”
Thus at least 40 AZA members are either rebuilding or adding elephant
facilities. In Ohio alone, according to John C. Kuehner and Suzanne Hively
of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo is planning
an $18 million elephant habitat, the Toledo Zoo is spending $13 million
to expand its elephant-holding capacity from two to six, the Cincinnati
Zoo spent $6 million on a new elephant exhibit opened in 2001, and hopes
to expand it, and the Columbus Zoo opened a $5 million elephant exhibit
in 1996.
The Alaska Zoo has only one elephant, named Maggie, who arrived in 1983
as a traumatized survivor from a lethal cull at Kruger National Park in
South Africa. Her companion, Annabelle, died in 1997. Maggie is among
the youngest wild-caught females in the U.S., and is considered prime
for breeding, but Alaska Zoo director Tex Edwards has adamantly resisted
pressure from the AZA and activist groups to send her south. The zoo was
built around Maggie and Annabelle. Without an elephant, it might not survive
for long––so it is spending $500,000 to add a treadmill and
other improvements meant to keep Maggie fit and mentally occupied, despite
the absence of companions.
Following
the mammoths
Increasing
public skepticism of zoo elephant keeping is whetted by frequent deaths
among the aging zoo elephant population. The trend is apparent around
the world. The generation of zoo elephants imported before the Convention
on International Trade in Endangered Species took effect in 1972 is rapidly
thinning, and there are few replacements on the global market.
Eleven
African elephants imported from Swaziland in August 2003 were the first
wild-caught elephants to reach the U.S. from abroad in 30 years. The San
Diego Zoo received seven of the Swaziland elephants. The Lowry Park Zoo
in Tampa received the other four.
Threatening to cull more than 1,000 elephants per year, beginning in October
2005 and continuing until the Kruger National Park population is cut from
circa 13,000 to less than half as many, the South African government would
like to export as many elephants as zoos are willing to take. But most
zoos are reluctant to engage in the bruising public relations battle with
anti-captivity activists that typically accompanies applications for CITES
import permits.
The least confrontational way for a zoo to get elephants is to breed them.
Yet, of about 150 Asian and 150 African elephants still alive at AZA member
zoos, fewer than 100 are believed to have reproductive potential.
“If we don’t do better, in 30 years there won’t be elephants
for exhibits,” warned Reid Park Zoo administrator Susan Basford on
March 1.
Basford told Joe Burchell of the Arizona Daily Star that if the city of
Tucson does not fund an $8 million expansion of the present half-acre
elephant facility to three acres, two of the three Reid Park elephants
may need to be relocated in order to have room to breed.
Only 30 African elephants have been born in the U.S. since the first one,
in 1950. Asian elephants did not reproduce in the U.S. until 1962, when
Packy, 43, was born at the Oregon Zoo in Portland. Eighty-seven Asian
elephants have been born at U.S. zoos since then, including 27 at the
Oregon Zoo. Many other zoos have had elephant births, but only 17 African
elephant calves and 51 Asian elephant calves have survived their first
year.
In one frustrating recent case, Bella, an eight-month-old African elephant
calf, was bottle-fed at the Houston Zoo after her mother refused to nurse
her. Bella seemed to be past the most precarious part of her infancy,
but on April 12, 2005 suffered a severe femur fracture in a fall. She
was euthanized when three days of orthopedic treatment failed.
“It just wasn’t going to work,” Houston Zoo director Rick
Barongi told Salatheia Bryant of the Houston Chronicle. “It wasn’t
an easy break to fix. Everybody agreed that it was asking too much of
this calf.”
Bella’s mother, Shanti, is again pregnant.
Barongi previously assembled the elephant collection at Walt Disney World’s
Wild Animal Kingdom. Two of the Disney elephants gave birth successfully,
in May 2003 and July 2004, but on April 24 an unborn calf died there when
the mother, Ibala, 26, did not sustain labor. An induced labor failed
to produce a birth.
“Zoos think it’s their God-given right to have an elephant,”
zoo elephant management consultant Alan Roocroft recently told Chris Metinko
of the Contra Costa Times, “but elephants are not doing well in captivity.
There are so many ailments they can get, and their surroundings are different.
They walk less. They are overweight. They get foot problems. It’s
not unusual,” Roocroft pointed out, “for an elephant to die
in captivity, and, even after an autopsy, we don’t know why.”
Such criticisms come often from animal rights activists and other critics
of zoos, but Roocroft is the retired longtime senior elephant keeper at
the San Diego Zoo & Wild Animal Park, and is among the most frequent
targets in zoo management of activist attacks.
Letting
elephants go
Under
intensifying activist pressure, some zoos are rethinking the wisdom of
keeping elephants, for possibly the first time since elephant exhibitions
began, and the success of early exhibitors inspired emulation.
The San Francisco Zoo and Detroit Zoo opted out of elephant keeping more
than five years after the Mesker Park Zoo & Botanic Garden in Evansville,
Indiana sent Bunny, the last elephant it had, to the Elephant Sanctuary
in Hohenwald, Tennesee. But the Mesker Park Zoo, the first to voluntarily
give up keeping elephants for stated humane reasons, had already lost
AZA accreditation for selling macaques in violation of the AZA animal
relinquishment policy.
The San Francisco and Detroit Zoos are members in good standing––although
the AZA initially threatened both with loss of accreditation for allowing
the elephants to leave the accredited zoo community. The Detroit Zoo elephants
were eventually waived outside the zoo system after the AZA officially
learned that they had been exposed at one time to a potentially fatal
transmissible disease. The San Francisco Zoo is to undergo a status review
in 2006.
The San Francisco Zoo actually divested of elephants in two stages. Thai-born
Tinkerbelle was trucked to San Andreas on November 28, 2004. Lulu, an
African elephant, followed four months later. Celebration of her arrival
at San Andreas was dampened when Tinkerbelle, long suffering from chronic
degenerative foot ailments, took a turn for the worse. On March 24 she
collapsed and was euthanized.
“It’s a downhill slope once the foot is rotting away,”
In Defense of Animals president Elliot Katz told Patricia Yollin of the
San Francisco Chronicle. “Elephants’ feet were never made to
stand on unyielding surfaces like concrete. It takes time, but it’s
definitely a death sentence,” Katz said.
San Francisco Zoo director of animal care and conservation Bob Jenkins
agreed. ”The condition she was suffering from probably started 38
years ago, when it was standard to keep elephants on concrete,” Jenkins
told Yollin. “Those decisions were made by my forebears.”
The San Francisco Zoo, located at the present site since 1922, had exhibited
elephants since 1925, in rivalry with the Oakland Zoo, which was founded
in 1922.
Oakland Zoo founding curator Henry Snow reputedly showed off baby elephants
by hauling them to public events in his open-topped town car. The Oakland
Zoo developed a nationally publicized bad reputation after a succession
of young African elephants died there, continuing to have incidents long
after Snow’s time.
In the 1980s, current Oakland Zoo general curator Colleen Kinzley lost
part of one hand to an accident involving a rampaging elephant, and another
keeper was killed by a bull elephant in musth.
In June 1991 the Oakland Zoo became the first in the U.S. to shift to
the “protected contact” method of elephant handling, in which
direct contact between elephants and keepers is minimized. Protected contact
rapidly swept the zoo world, becoming the industry standard approach to
elephant handling by the late 1990s.
The AZA now requires all trainers at elephant-keeping accredited zoos
to minimize contact with elephants by using a restraint device when doing
potentially dangerous care.
The Oakland Zoo elephant facilities are praised––if elephants
are to be kept by zoos at all––by Katz of IDA, PAWS Ark 2000
founder Pat Derby, Elephant Sanctuary at Hohenwald founder Carol Buckley,
and other opponents of elephant exhibition.
Last
episode of Lota saga
At
the PAWS Ark 2000 sanctuary, the former Detroit Zoo elephants are reportedly
mixing well with the Asian elephants who were already there. A live web
camera is soon to go online to make their activities visible.
Winky, 52, is more-or-less back home, having lived at the Sacramento Zoo
about 70 miles away until the Detroit Zoo acquired her in 1991.
“Wanda, 48, had a rougher life,” wrote Detroit Free Press reporter
Hugh McDiarmid Jr., “working for the Disney company on the Mickey
Mouse Show, and moving to private collections after that. She was given
to the San Antonio Zoo, where she was once pushed into a moat and injured
during a fight with another elephant. Then she went to the Fort Worth
Zoo and in 1994, to Detroit. During much of her life she was chained and
unable to move freely,” according to Detroit Zoo director of conservation
and animal welfare Scott Carter.
The Elephant Sanctuary would have been 600 miles closer than PAWS Ark
2000, but Detroit Zoo director Ron Kagen opted to send Winky and Wanda
to Ark 2000, he said, because the PAWS facilities are close to the veterinary
school at the University of California at Davis.
The Elephant Sanctuary was the retirement home of Lota, 51, who died of
tuberculosis on February 9, 2005.
“Lota was the single most important individual in raising awareness
of captive elephants, but she gave her life to do it,” Elephant Sanctuary
founder Carol Buckley told Jackie Loohauis of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
A longtime resident of the Milwaukee County Zoo, Lota was in 1990 transferred
to the Hawthorn Corporation, begun by then-traveling circus operator John
Cuneo in 1957. By 1990 Cuneo had long since discovered more profit in
leasing animals to other circuses and boarding exotic animals.
A television camera caught Lota collapsing as she was loaded into a Hawthorn
trailer to leave the zoo. Removing Lota from Hawthorn became an activist
cause celebre. The Milwaukee County Zoo eventually tried unsuccessfully
to retrieve her. Cuneo declined an offer of $230,000 for Lota from actor
Kevin Nealon, who wanted to send her to the Elephant Sanctuary, but in
November 2004 finally let her go, under pressure of an agreement with
the USDA to divest of his elephants in settlement of penalties for multiple
Animal Welfare Act violations.
Lota’s death was relatively little noticed amid the furor erupting
in Chicago after Peaches, 55, the oldest African elephant in North America,
collapsed at the Lincoln Park Zoo early on January 17. She was euthanized
that evening.
Peaches and two other female African elephants, Tatima, 35, and Wankie,
36, were transferred from much larger quarters at the San Diego Wild Animal
Park in April 2003, against considerable opposition from activists who
contended that they would have difficulty withstanding the cold Chicago
climate––even though the Lincoln Park Zoo had built a $23 million
habitat in which to keep the elephants.
“They’re saying Peaches died of old age, but she died of the
stress of living in Chicago,” former San Diego Wild Animal Park elephant
keeper Ray Ryan told Tara Burghart of Associated Press.
Tatima died in October 2004 from Mycobacterium szulgai, a rare bacterial
infection similar to tuberculosis. PETA and In Defense of Animals then
asked the Lincoln Park Zoo to send Peaches and Wankie to The Elephant
Sanctuary.
Following Peaches’ death, the request was renewed on behalf of Wankie,
who was unable to bear young and was therefore not part of the AZA African
elephant Species Survival Plan.
Instead, Wankie was sent by truck on April 28 to join African elephants
named Hy Dari and Christy at a newly opened $5.5 million elephant facility
at the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City, the centerpiece of a $10.2 million
Hogle Zoo remake. Although the move was announced ahead of time, the exact
date and time of departure were kept secret to avoid demonstrations by
PETA in Chicago and the Utah Animal Rights Coalition in Salt Lake City.
On April 30, Wankie collapsed as the truck rolled through Nebraska. She
received emergency treatment, then was hauled on to the Hogle Zoo. She
was pronounced irrecoverable and euthanized at 3:30 a.m. on May 1. A post-mortem
did not immediately establish the exact cause of death, which was believed
to be related to chronic leg or foot ailments.
The USDA announced that it would investigate. Chicago alderman George
Cardenas introduced a resolution to keep the Lincoln Park Zoo from acquiring
more elephants.
Lincoln Park Zoo director Kevin Bell said that the elephant habitat would
be converted to house Bactrian camels, pending completion of a longterm
study of the feasibility of keeping elephants healthy in a northern climate.
“For the foreseeable future,” Bell told Patricia Ward Biederman
of the Los Angeles Times, “we are not going to bring elephants back.”
“I question whether elephants can be kept in any northern zoos,”
Amboseli Trust for Elephants founder Cynthia Moss told Jeremy Manier and
William Mullen of the Chicago Tribune. Moss, who has studied elephants
in Kenya for more than 30 years, opined that no more than a dozen zoos
in the U.S. should keep elephants.
Three
deaths helped Veda
Though
Peaches, Tatima, and Wankie were African elephants, their fate was noted
in India as debate over the intended exile of Veda to Armenia intensified.
The perception that a cold climate killed them may have saved Veda.
Veda was to have joined a nine-year-old male elephant named Grandik at
the Yerevan Zoo in December 2004, in consummation of an “arranged
marriage” brokered in 1999 by then-Indian prime minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee.
Veda was a last-minute substitution for the original “bride,”
Komala, age 8, of the Mysore Zoo. Komala was to have departed for Armenia
on October 14, 2004, but instead died abruptly from symptoms resembling
the August 2004 zinc phosphide poisonings of two other elephants, Ganesha
and Roopa, and a lion-tailed macaque. All three elephants and the macaque
were believed to have been given rat poison by disgruntled zoo staff.
The “arranged marriage,” involving either Komala or Veda, was
opposed from the first by People for Animals founder Maneka Gandhi, who
was minister of state for animal welfare at the time Komala was promised.
“The Yerevan Zoo has no elephants because each time they get them,
the elephants die,” Mrs. Gandhi told Prime Minister Singh. “One
elephant was shot dead when he escaped in the early 1970s. One elephant,
suffering from malnutrition and hypothermia, slipped on ice and died in
the early 1990s. The Yerevan Zoo has no affiliations with any zoo associations
or federations and is therefore not required to follow any rules or regulations,”
Mrs. Gandhi asserted.
India proved to be much more accepting of arranged marriages for humans
than for elephants.
“India sends gift elephant to die in Armenian winter,” headlined
Kounteya Sinha in The Asian Age, of Delhi.
“This young elephant is being sent to a certain death,” affirmed
Ambika Shukla of People for Animals. “The Yerevan Zoo lacks proper
housing, grazing, and the space needed to support an elephant. Worst is
its climatic unsuitability. During the cold months the elephants are caged
in heated sheds with no opportunity to walk or exercise.”
Responded Yerevan zoo director Sahak Abovyan “There are 50,000 elephants
in India but the protesters do not want to give us just one. They are
very odd people.”
That won Abovyan few friends in India when amplified by Habib Beary of
BBC News in Bangalore.
“The central government [in Delhi] has taken a decision. We are only
following orders,” Karnataka state Principal Conservator of Wildlife
Ram Mohan Ray told Beary.
The Karnataka High Court ruled on March 4 against a CUPA claim that sending
Veda to Armenia would violate the 1972 Wildlife Act.
Despite winning in the court of law, the Indian External Affairs Ministry
lost in the court of public opinion.
Ganguly celebrated only briefly before beginning to strategize on behalf
of Grandik.
Also originally from India, Grandik “was gifted to Moscow years ago,”
wrote Belgaumkar. In 1999, shortly before the deal to acquire Veda was
made, “The authorities in Moscow transferred him to Armenia.”
“He is all alone there. Maybe he should be brought back to India,”
said Ganguly.
Ganguly credited ANIMAL PEOPLE with introducing her to Armenian activists
who helped to win cancellation of the transfer of the elephant by documenting
the conditions at the Yerevan Zoo and demonstrating that Armenian public
opinion did not favor acquiring an elephant who would suffer.
Armenian President Robert Kocharian reportedly requested a female elephant
as a companion for Grandik by presenting to Vajpayee several drawings
by Armenian children depicting Grandik with a “wife.”
Enlisting the help of children has been a classic elephant acquisition
ploy since 1955, when children donated pennies to help the San Francisco
Zoo to buy an African elephant after the previous resident elephant died.
Penny, as the acquisition was named, lived at the zoo for 40 years.
But children from both India and Armenia, as well as throughout Europe
and the U.S., signed electronic petitions against moving Veda.
Thai
deals still pending
The
proposed Thai acquisition of animals including elephants from Kenya and
a similar deal that would send Thai elephants to Australia and New Zealand
are still pending.
Elephants have reportedly never bred successfully in either Australia
or New Zealand, but the Taronga Zoo in Sydney and Melbourne Zoo in Australia
and the Auckland Zoo in New Zealand in 1998 formed an elephant breeding
consortium with the Monarto Open Range Zoo and the Sunshine Coast Australia
Zoo. The latter is operated by Crocodile Hunter TV series star Steve Irwin.
The consortium goal is to produce a self-sustaining Australia/New Zealand
zoo population of about 40 elephants. After plans to acquire elephants
from Indonesia fell through in 2002, the Taronga Zoo spent $40 million
(Australian) and the Melbourne Zoo spent $14 million (Australian) in preparation
to receive nine young Asian elephants from the Chiang Mai Night Safari
Zoo in Thailand in trade for two koalas.
“The project has become increasingly troubled since elephants were
selected from Thai tourist camps a year ago,” reported Andrew Darby
of the Melbourne Age on March 25, 2005. “The two proven breeders
were lost to the group. One died of snakebite. Another was rejected after
she was found to be age 40, not 20, according to Environment Department
letters” obtained through document requests filed by the Royal SPCA
of Australia, Humane Society International, and International Fund for
Animal Welfare.
“The zoos refused to provide details of their application or say
where the nine elephants eventually chosen were being held,” continued
Darby.
“According to non-government sources, they went into pre-export quarantine
in October 2004 at a rural campus of Thailand’s Mahidol University.
Scheduled to stay there for 90 days before a further three-month quarantine
on the Cocos Islands, the eight females and one male have been confined
in Thailand ever since.”
A hint as to how the elephants might have been kept occupied came in February
2005, when The Nation reported that the Chiang Mai Night Safari staff
had trained an elephant to use a flush toilet. “All seven elephants
at the Palaad Tawanron camp,” near the zoo, “are being potty-trained,”
wrote Atcha Piyatanang of The Nation. “After a mere couple of days’
worth of training, Diew and one of his mates can already do their business
in a civilised manner.”
But this may not have been the same group of off-exhibit Chiang Mai Night
Safari elephants.
Thai
opposition
While
seeking to import African elephants from Kenya, Thailand has long been
the leading exporter of Asian elephants––chiefly to zoos, although
five Thai work elephants and their mahouts were sent to Indonesia in 1997
under a 10-year contract to help round up wild elephants displaced by
illegal logging and forest fires.
An international incident ensued when the mahouts returned to Thailand
in June 1998, complaining that they had not been paid. The elephants were
finally repatriated, with great public fanfare, on December 31, 1999.
Elephant exports have been a politically sensitive subject in Thailand
ever since.
The controversy grew hotter in 2004 when China offered to buy 200 elephants.
Of the first eight elephants sent to China, two died.
Opposition to the Chiang Mai deal with the Australia/ New Zealand elephant-breeding
consortium is as intense within Thailand as within the would-be recipient
nations. There are about 2,000 domesticated elephants in Thailand, and
2,600 in the wild––enough to be often perceived as a nuisance,
but barely half as many as a human generation ago.
“Exchanging rare animals for commercial purposes is no longer acceptable.
Many of our wild animals were maltreated and have died in such animal
exchange projects,” Wildlife Foundation of Thailand secretary-general
Surapol Duangkhae told Kultida Samabuddhi of The Bangkok Post.
“Even a light trade in elephants is not acceptable,” echoed
Friends of the Asian Elephant founder Soraida Salwala, to Sydney Morning
Herald Bangkok correspondent Walaiporn Mekkreangkrai. “It encourages
the trade. They [zoo animal dealers] go into Laos and Myanmar to get more
babies,” Soraida alleged.
By law, Thailand dealers are only allowed to sell domesticated elephants.
In 1993, Soraida said, the going price for a domesticated baby elephant
was about $2,000. Now it is about $17,000, a significant temptation to
people in a position to take short-cuts.
Thai interim natural resources and environment minister Suvit Khunkitti
responded to scrutiny of the Chiang Mai deal by reportedly trying to expedite
it.
“He also ordered officials to complete the koala shelter at the Night
Safari zoo by April, as instructed by prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra,”
wrote Kultida Samabuddhi.
The elephants to be exported were already waiting in a pre-quarantine
facility, but Australian environment minister Ian Campbell balked at issuing
import permits.
As of early May, both the elephants-for-koalas swap with the Australia/New
Zealand consortium and the 300-animal deal with Kenya were still pending––and
Thai officials seemed to be trying to slow down the Kenyan transaction.
“This issue cannot be hurried up,” Thai senator Mme Pensak told
The Nation, on a visit to Kenya. “We have no memorandum of understanding
on this at all,” Pensak said.
Whatever deal might eventually be worked out will exclude elephants, reported
Ecoterra International, a 10-nation activist collaboration.
“No mahouts (elephant trainers) will be sent to Kenya and the whole
plan of training Kenyan elephants is off,” Ecoterra claimed.
Suvit Khunkitti, who will be “left holding the bag” if either
international elephant deal fails, inherited responsibility for completing
the deals from his immediate predecessor, Plodprasop Suraswadi, who is
still reputedly a power behind the scenes.
Plodprasop Suraswadi lost the Thai wildlife ministry after a Thai senate
panel in late 2004 found reason to believe that he illegally issued permits
allowing the Sri Racha Tiger Zoo to sell 100 tigers to China. The panel
concluded that the tiger sale was a commercial transaction, not a legitimate
attempt to conserve the species.
Big money is also involved in the Chiang Mai Night Safari Park attempt
to buy elephants and other animals from Kenya. The park management offered
Kenya $1 million for the animals, Agence France-Presse reported.
“The ‘donation’ was requested by acting tourism minister
Raphael Tuju during President Mwai Kibaki’s visit to Thailand last
October,” added Mugo Njeru of The Nation.
The role of elephants in establishing the status of national leaders was
already centuries old in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and China circa 2,500
years ago, when an elephant became the totem of Buddha. The idea might
have spread west with the Carthaginian general Hannibal, but apparently
caught on only after the Crusades opened trade routes to India, enabling
Indian animal trainers to venture into Europe.
In 1245 the emperor Frederick II traveled with an elephant while struggling
to keep Germany, Austria, and Italy united as the Holy Roman Empire.
Ten years later, in 1255, Henry III of England brought an elephant across
the English Channel to assist in trying to unite the eventual United Kingdom.
Frederick II learned, as Hannibal had 1,400 years earlier, that elephants
do not thrive on the cold side of the Alps. Henry III found that giving
his elephant wine to ward off the winter chill caused the elephant to
die from hypothermia.
