Violation by Sallie Tisdale Page A

famous elephants to the city of Portland for $20,000, payable within a month. A citizens’ committee was formed, and money began to trickle in: schoolchildren donated nickels; unions made donations from pension funds; charity car washes, bowling tournaments, square dances were held. The thriving baby, already accustomed to long lines of sightseers willing to wait hours for a two-minute view, was named Packy in a radio-station contest. Before the deadline had passed, Berry closed the deal and threw in Thonglaw and Pet for nothing. Thonglaw, during his extended winter vacation, had mated several times, and almost immediately the keepers realized that Rosy was pregnant; a few weeks later, they discovered that both Tuy Hoa and Pet were pregnant as well. Thonglaw’s dynasty had begun.
    WHEN MICHAEL SCHMIDT , fresh from the University of Minnesota, arrived at Washington Park in 1973 to serve as the veterinarian, there were eight elephants in residence: Rosy and herdaughter, Me-Tu; Tuy Hoa and her daughter, Hanako; Thonglaw; Belle; Packy; and Pet. Both Pet and Hanako were pregnant. Thonglaw had sired ten calves; eight had survived, and all but Hanako and Me-Tu had been given or sold to zoos and circuses. Portland was elephant-happy. Packy had a birthday party every year, at which thousands of people cheered him on as he ate a forty-pound cake of whole wheat, carrots, and peanut butter. The zoo was developing an adoption program, encouraging businesses and groups to pay the cost of feeding a particular elephant for a year at a time.
    â€œWhen I arrived, I had no special interest in elephants,” Schmidt confessed to me one morning. We were in his office at the animal hospital, a flat-roofed inconspicuous building set in a draw filled with ferns and willow trees, behind the beaver and otter exhibits. “But you have to, here. This place was unique—the only place in the Western Hemisphere actually breeding elephants, and it had been the only place for years. We’re still the only zoo with second-generation births. This was the biggest thing that this small zoo in the West was doing, and it was outdoing the Bronx Zoo and the San Diego Zoo and all the others in a very difficult task. So it wasn’t a matter of whether or not to get involved—you’d better get involved.”
    Schmidt began teaching himself elephant medicine. He quickly discovered that Washington Park’s success was something of an accident; no one really knew why Portland’s elephants bred and other zoos’ elephants did not. Schmidt began the first methodical testing of the elephants, making daily observations. He wanted to understand their reproduction and ultimately—by still undiscovered techniques of artificial insemination—increase it. One of the few things that were known about elephant reproduction by that time was the estrous cycle. In 1971, three biologists who had studied plantation elephants in Sri Lanka published a paper concluding that the elephant ovulates every twenty-two days. A second paper described a behavior seen in the bulls—an elaborate gesture in which the trunk is placed in a spot of urine and curled into the mouth. The authors called it urine testing, and suspectedthat the bull was checking cow urine for signs of fertility. Schmidt began seeing the gesture, too. “No one was paying any attention to this behavior,” he told me. “I looked at it and thought, Well, that’s certainly a way to tell if the bull is interested in a particular cow.”
    Schmidt thought that the attractant had to be a pheromone of some kind, and he invented the sniff test, making use of the elephant barn’s hydraulic doors, which can be opened an inch at a time. The sniff test is a rather impolite but simple method of allowing a bull contact with a cow without endangering either cow or keeper. In a sniff test, Schmidt and the keepers place a bull on one side of a door opened wide enough for