Violation by Sallie Tisdale

world.”
    Some elephant keepers wondered if elephants could breed successfully in captivity; Morgan Berry told anyone who would listen that they would breed only in natural conditions. Elephant science was an esoteric and undeveloped field in the early 1960s. No one was certain of the length of the gestation period, and almost nothing was known of the estrous cycle, because cows show no overt signs of fertility. Wild bulls were thought to mate throughout the year, since elephant calves are born in all seasons; what may appear to be a season—a preponderance of births in a few months’time, for instance—can be tied to drought and famine, rather than to seasonal ovulation.
    The only real experience with elephant reproduction came from the work camps of Southeast Asia, but the animals in such camps have never been systematically bred. Traditionally, they are released from their chains at night to wander the nearby forests and eat; the mahouts round them up each morning, having tracked each one by the sound of the bell around its neck. (After Jim Sanford returned from a trip to Thailand, he told me that the elephants sometimes used their trunks to stuff mud in the bells, which muffled the sound. “I wondered why they didn’t just tear the bell off,” he said. “Well, they get chastised for that. But stuffing mud in it isn’t against the rules.”) The cows mate at night with wild bulls, and the resulting calves are genetically sound and born to work. The working bulls are conditioned not to mate, according to Dr. Michael Schmidt, the Washington Park veterinarian. “Riders are afraid that if the bulls have total freedom of action and express sexual behavior, they will inevitably turn on the riders and kill them—which the bulls often do anyway,” he told me. “The riders will do whatever they can to control that. A young bull who has an erection is beaten. So young bulls get the idea that being interested in cows is too painful, and their libido decreases to the point where they are just not interested in mating if there are people around.”
    In this country, bulls with erections are sometimes punished, but for a different reason. The mature bull elephant’s penis, which weighs more than forty pounds, is long and flexible; this enables it to reach the female’s cervix, at the end of a twisting, back-angled tube and well hidden from the world. The penis has tendons that allow it to make “searching” motions, from side to side and up and down, in the vaginal canal. I’ve watched Packy roaming around the yard with his penis fully extended and bumping against his hind legs as he seems to swagger for the viewing public. Such an unabashed offering by the male is deemed too great an embarrassment in most zoos and circuses. But the principaldisincentive to elephant births in the United States is environmental. Many zoos keep only one or two elephants, and these are almost always cows; there have never been many mature bulls in this country. An unsocialized cow and a skeptical bull will be brought together as strangers, by keepers with no understanding of fertility; little wonder that the attempt has seldom been successful.
    Beginning in January of 1962, when Belle’s breast development made her pregnancy undeniable, a vigil was kept at Washington Park; no one knew when she might deliver, or how difficult the labor might be. It was a long wait. At 5:58 a.m. on April 14—a gestation, according to Morgan Berry’s dates, of 635 days—Belle delivered a male calf in good health, after an hour of active labor. Mother clamped the umbilical cord with her trunk, and Thonglaw promptly ate his congratulatory cigar. The event was front-page news across the country. Less than twenty-four hours after the birth, Berry received an offer for Belle and her baby—$30,000 from the Brookfield Zoo, outside Chicago. The next day, Berry offered the two suddenly