A Code One drill, again. This time for a black bear.
The Florida mammals department only had one at the moment, a female named Ladybug, but a new male was due to arrive in a few days, and Virginia Edmonds thought it would be a good idea to do a run-through, especially since there were several new keepers who didn’t know what to do if one of the bears got out and ambled in their direction. Virginia didn’t worry too much about Ladybug, because she was a low-key bear who had never shown the slightest sign of wanting to leave her exhibit, a placid swath of woods and thick grass, with a big dead log where she rooted for grubs and napped for hours.
The only way Ladybug was likely to escape was if someone accidentally left a gate open. Even if that did happen, she was likely to walk right back into her exhibit without a fuss if her keepers approached her slowly and waved an orange within range of her nostrils.
“Ladybug likes oranges and peanut butter,” Virginia explained to a handful of keepers, all of them standing in a circle beside the black bear exhibit. “She’s really easygoing.”
As any keeper quickly learned, animals responded to different types of bribes. Some, such as Herman, were tempted by the promise of human attention. Others, such as Ladybug, followed their stomachs; keepers referred to such animals as “food-motivated.” Since the other bear had not yet arrived at the zoo, Virginia knew nothing about his temperament. All she knew about Sam, the new male, was that he had been captured in the wild as an orphaned cub. If food failed to compel him, Virginia told the keepers, they might have to resort to pepper spray or air horns to frighten him into retreating back toward his exhibit.
“Would a hose turn him around?” asked one keeper.
Virginia nodded. Sometimes, when animals attacked one another in their displays, the staff separated them with a high-pressure hose. “It’s usually a pretty good deterrent,” she said, “except for when you have otters in a pair fighting. They don’t care.”
If either Sam or Ladybug slipped out, it would be imperative to get them back quickly, one way or the other, before they had any chance of barreling through the perimeter fence. This was more for their well-being than the public’s. Black bears tend to be solitary and rather shy. But any large animal that stumbles into a city neighborhood runs a high risk of getting hit by a car or dying in a hail of police bullets, even if the animal hasn’t so much as growled. Lowry Park’s Code One protocols instructed the zoo’s own weapons team—including not just Virginia, but Lee Ann Rottman and Dan Costell—to kill any potentially dangerous animal before it managed to leave the grounds and enter the surrounding neighborhood.
The idea of shooting down Ladybug, or any other animal in the zoo’s collection, was almost too upsetting for Virginia or the rest of the weapons team to contemplate. The assistant curators scheduled the Code One drills regularly, rotating between species, so that their staffs were well versed in all the ways to safely return an animal to its exhibit without resorting to lethal force. Zoos around the world have similar protocols, each adapted to the specific animals in their collections and other variables dictated by their layout and location.
At the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo, the staff prepares for a breakout by one of their polar bears, the species known among zookeepers as among the most likely to kill humans when confronted face-to-face. The keepers stage drills twice a year to simulate a polar bear escaping through a damaged exhibit during an earthquake.
Natural disasters, the ultimate rebuke to human assumptions of control, have a way of obliterating a zoo’s defenses. In the predawn hours of July 17, 1969, a torrential rainstorm flooded the polar bear moat at the Brookfield Zoo outside Chicago and enabled seven of the hulking predators to swim to solid ground. At that hour, the zoo was still virtually empty of humans, but the other exhibits teemed with living snacks the bears could have easily devoured. “However,” writes Vicki Croke, who chronicled the escape in The Modern Ark, “these were the days when zoogoers fed the animals, and the bears headed directly for the snack stand. They ripped open the ice-cream chest and cash register. And after gorging on chips, marshmallows, and ice cream, they were herded back into their enclosure by a Volvo, a pickup truck, and a few blasts from a shotgun.”
When Hurricane Andrew roared through south Florida in 1992, much of the Miami Metrozoo was smashed to rubble, even though its building had been designed to withstand winds of up to 120 miles an hour. The free-flight aviary had literally been blown away and with it several hundred rare birds, including hornbills and fairy bluebirds. The majority of the zoo’s most dangerous animals were secure, having been locked up before the Category 5 storm made landfall, but the crocodile pool was jammed with so much debris that the keepers literally couldn’t see if the man-eating reptiles were still in the water. Later, one croc was discovered strolling in a service hallway. Other animals roamed aimlessly among the ruins. An antelope was seen walking through what was left of the administration building. A 450-pound Galápagos tortoise was recovered from a nearby street. A state trooper sighted an argus pheasant on the Florida Turnpike and returned it to the zoo in the backseat of his cruiser. A group of monkeys was caught while running down Coral Reef Drive, but it was later discovered that the storm had liberated them not from the zoo but from a nearby primate research center.
Lowry Park, located a short distance from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, had been buffeted by tropical storms in the past, but had never taken a direct hit from a monster like Andrew. The zoo’s hurricane plan called for most of the animals, including the birds, to be evacuated into the zoo’s night houses and into the underground chambers of the manatee viewing center. Even so, there was no guarantee that the manatees would be spared from whatever was cast into their pools or that the buildings could withstand a sustained assault by Category 5 winds. The possibilities of such a catastrophe were sobering. But if an animal were going to be freed from an exhibit at Lowry Park, it was likely to be due not to nature’s fury but to human error. The majority of zoo escapes, all around the world, result from mistakes made by keepers or by the architects who design the barriers. In recent decades, as cages have been replaced by open exhibits bounded by moats and walls instead of metal bars, the challenge of containing the inhabitants has become more complex. Sometimes zoo designers underestimate how high a certain species can leap or how well it can swim. No matter how carefully the humans draw their blueprints, they cannot predict every variable that might motivate an animal to act in unexpected ways that propel it into the world waiting on the other side of the moat.
In one of the more disturbing animal escapes of recent years, a Siberian tiger named Tatiana scaled the wall of its grotto at the San Francisco Zoo just as the zoo was closing on Christmas Day. She attacked three young men, killing one and severely injuring another. Calling 911 from his cell phone, one of the men frantically pleaded with a dispatcher to send the paramedics to help his brother, who was bleeding from bite wounds. Both of them were outside one of the zoo’s snack bars, but the manager would not let them inside because he believed they were drunk and had been fighting. The dispatcher explained that the paramedics could not enter the zoo grounds until police went in first and located the tiger.
“What do you mean?” said the caller. “My brother’s going to die out here!”
“OK, calm down, all right? . . . I’ll stay on the line with you. If the paramedics get hurt, they cannot help your brother, so you need to calm down and—”
“Send more paramedics, then! . . . Can you fly a helicopter right here? Because I don’t see no ambulance here.”
As officers made their way to the scene, they found the dead man on the ground outside Tatiana’s exhibit, his throat gashed, and a trail of blood that led to the snack bar, where the seriously wounded man and his brother had fled as the brother called for help. By now the tiger had stalked the two survivors to the outside of the snack bar and was standing over the wounded man. As the officers approached, she pounced on him again and continued biting him until the officers distracted her and got her to move away before they opened fire and killed her.
The San Francisco Zoo and police investigators scrambled to piece together some explanation of how Tatiana had managed to climb over a wall that had held her inside for years. Reports quickly surfaced that the three young men might have antagonized the tiger. Shortly before the attack, two of them had been seen taunting lions in a nearby exhibit. An attorney for the men denied they had done anything wrong, but later, one of the men acknowledged to his father that he and the others had stood on a railing in front of the tiger’s wall, yelling and waving at Tatiana. In the blizzard of news articles that followed, zoo officials theorized that perhaps the men had dangled a branch or even their legs over the wall, giving Tatiana something to grab. Chunks of concrete had been found in her hind claws, suggesting the intensity of her determination to climb the wall. It became clear that the zoo bore some responsibility, however, when investigators announced that the wall was only twelve and a half feet high—barely half the height the zoo had previously claimed and several feet shorter than the AZA recommended for tiger enclosures.
The zoo drew more criticism that March when a team of AZA inspectors completed a report showing that the zoo was seriously understaffed and generally unprepared for a serious Code One. Although the inspectors praised the zoo’s response once it became clear that a tiger was on the loose, the report laid out the failings that had combined to turn the incident into such a nightmarish muddle: the refusal of the snack bar manager to give the two injured men safe haven inside the restaurant; confusion over how many tigers had escaped, or whether it was a tiger or a lion; rusted and broken cages in the night houses that had almost resulted in the escape of a snow leopard earlier that year; employees who either didn’t know or didn’t follow the Code One protocols; others who had left their walkie-talkies back in their offices and therefore had not heard the warning. Because it was Christmas, almost all of the staff had been sent home early. Only two keepers and one vet tech remained on the grounds, and one of those keepers—a member of the weapons team—did not have keys to the room where a shotgun was stored. Once he got the shotgun, he could not find the keys for a zoo vehicle to drive to the site of the attack. The inspectors saved their most damning criticism for the final paragraph:
It appeared to the inspection team that the zoo lacks enough supervisory personnel in the animal care department to effectively train, oversee, and enforce existing policies and procedures. The zoo is too often chasing problems rather than proactively addressing known concerns. This will require a shift in culture and the supervisory and maintenance to make it happen.
The message was clear: An understaffed zoo with untrained employees, attempting to watch over dangerous animals, was a tragedy waiting to happen. If more keepers had been on duty late that day, one might have seen the young men teasing the lions and kicked them out of the zoo before they moved on to the tiger grotto. Nobody would have died. Tatiana would have been called back into her night house to sleep through what remained of Christmas.
On the night of the tiger escape, the AZA’s top public relations official received an emergency call from the San Francisco Zoo’s P.R. man, alerting him to the bad news. The AZA spokesman, an expert in crisis management, was just leaving a holiday celebration at his in-laws’ house, but he and the San Francisco spokesman immediately began coordinating a response to the coming deluge of media phone calls. For the AZA, and for all zoos, a high-profile escape resulting in the death of a human being was a catastrophe that struck at the core of their mission. For years, the AZA had been working to counter the critiques of PETA and other animal-rights groups who dismissed zoos as wretched prisons and publicized lists of all the occasions when animals had broken free and attacked. From the organization’s viewpoint, almost nothing could be more horrendous than an escaped Siberian tiger slashing one man’s throat and then stalking another in front of a snack bar.
A high-profile escape was much more damaging than a barrage of scare headlines. Such incidents undermined the promise on which all zoos are built and the assumptions that all visitors embrace as they enter the front gates. Whenever an animal unlatched a gate or leaped a fence, it breached the allegedly impenetrable divide between the spectators and the spectacle, proving that the humans were not in control and that the animals retained a will and a determination that could not always be thwarted. Every animal escape, even with a species that was relatively harmless, was a slap at our claim of dominion.
The truth was, animals broke out of their enclosures more often than zoos were eager to admit. Gorillas burst through doors of their night houses. Elephant calves squeezed through the bars of their stalls. In the majority of cases, the animals were returned safely without injury to them or anyone else. The San Francisco tiger case was the first time a zoo escape had resulted in the death of a visitor at any AZA institution since the group had been founded in 1974. One of the most unsettling things about the case was that the young men had stepped to the edge of the barrier between themselves and the tiger and essentially dared her to cross it. Convinced of their own inviolability, they seemed unaware that they were at the precipice, taunting death.
Humans are drawn to danger every day in zoos around the world. Like the young men in San Francisco, many feel at liberty to lean over the railings and yell. Sometimes they throw things, just to provoke a response. Other visitors stand in silence, mesmerized by the awareness that they are staring across a frontier between life and death, the past and future, the noise of their own interior monologues and the unmapped worlds inside the animals. At that frontier, primal energy surges. A few people, overtaken with mania, climb across the rail and into the exhibits, compelled to either embrace nature or conquer it. In The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright tells how Taliban fighters became possessed with such a sense of omnipotence after the fall of Kabul that one jumped into a bear’s cage at the city zoo and cut off the bear’s nose, “reputedly because the animal’s ‘beard’ was not long enough. Another fighter, intoxicated by events and his own power, leaped into the lion’s den and cried out, ‘I am the lion now!’ The lion killed him. Another Taliban soldier threw a grenade into the den, blinding the animal. These two, the noseless bear and the blind lion, together with two wolves, were the only animals that survived the Taliban rule.”
In Berlin, where the crowds swooned over the hand-raising of a polar bear cub named Knut, a man climbed into the shallow pool of the polar bear exhibit in 2008 and tried to approach Knut, who by then was two years old and weighed 440 pounds. Keepers managed to lure the young bear away with a leg of beef before he reached the intruder. As the man was led away, soaked and cold, he explained that he had felt lonely and believed Knut was lonely too. A few months later, a teacher despairing over her inability to find a job climbed into the same exhibit and sloshed through the water toward several bears sunning themselves nearby. One, not Knut, promptly swam out and bit her arms and legs. She survived, but only after the staff pushed the bear away with poles and lowered a rope and harness to rescue her. Afterward, a spokesman noted that the woman had endangered not only herself but the staff and the bears. If necessary, he said, the zoo’s weapons team had been prepared to shoot the bear if that had proved the only way to save the woman.
A number of people have entered zoo enclosures to commit suicide. At the Lisbon Zoo, a man mourning the death of his son jumped into a pit with a pride of ten lions and was quickly dispatched by a lioness who broke his neck. In Washington, D.C., a drifter distraught over a custody battle for her children climbed down a nine-foot wall in 1995 and swam across a moat at the National Zoo to sacrifice herself in the jaws of two lions. A paranoid schizophrenic with a history of violent episodes, the woman told people she was the sister of Jesus Christ and that she and Jesus had grown up together in a house with President Clinton. She had once told a police officer to shoot her. The morning after she crossed the moat, a keeper discovered her body, face-up and mauled beyond recognition. Her arms and hands had been chewed off. On the blood-covered ground investigators found a barrette dislodged from her hair and a Sony Walkman containing a cassette of Christian singer Amy Grant’s House of Love.
At Lowry Park, no one had ever heard a Code Two come across the walkie-talkies. As far as the staff could recall, a visitor had never fallen or climbed into any exhibit with a dangerous animal. A number of Code Ones had been declared over the years, but none where an animal or person was hurt. The primate department held the record for escapes. Chester was still infamous for his repeated ascents to the roof of the night house. From there it would have been no trouble for him to make a break into the rest of the zoo, but he never showed an interest. Perhaps he just coveted the glory of being able to gaze upon his fellow chimps from such a height. On another occasion, one of the Colobus monkeys had climbed onto a branch that reached too far across a moat and used it as a bridge to the public sidewalk. Covered in long black hair fringed with white, Colobus monkeys are striking, and this one gave visitors a jolt as it tore through the grounds, clearly distressed and lost. The monkey was soon retrieved, and the tree branch was trimmed.
The zoo’s most serious Code One had occurred in 1991 when the radios crackled with a report that one of the orangutans was out. Lex Salisbury, then the curator, worried for a moment that it might be Rango, the big male. But it turned out to be Rudy, a young female who inched her way up a rock façade and then scaled the roof of the orang building. Visitors who had watched her stage the breakout alerted the staff and then were evacuated. Once he arrived, Lex took over, as usual. He was confident that Rudy didn’t intend to attack anyone. She was new and was having trouble fitting in with the other orangutans and had only climbed out of the exhibit to escape another confrontation. Lex called to Rudy, holding out his hand, and she made her way down to him, ready to surrender. Obviously frightened, the orang needed comfort and climbed eagerly into his arms. She would not let go until he carried her back to the safety of her bedroom in the night house.
“As soon as I saw it wasn’t Rango,” Lex said afterward, “I knew it wasn’t going to be a problem, because the females we can walk right up to.”
In the zoo world, orangutans are known as escape artists. Typically much calmer and quieter than chimps, they are inquisitive and love to spend hours figuring out how to put things together or take them apart. Their species practices these engineering skills high in the jungle canopies of Indonesia, where they have been observed tying branches and vines together and manipulating the tension of saplings to move more easily through the trees. In zoos, they are famed for their ability to devise ingenious ways of slipping from their enclosures. According to Eugene Linden, author of The Octopus and the Orangutan, they sometimes make handcrafted tools to escape captivity. One orang used a wire to pick a lock, and another used a piece of cardboard to dislodge a security pin that held the doors of his cage closed. Others have proven their skill at unscrewing bolts. “Orangutans,” Linden writes, “have made insulating gloves out of straw in order to climb over electrified fences.”
In the twelve years since Rudy’s field trip on top of the orang building, there had been no particularly memorable escapes. A turkey got out one day, and guinea fowl were known to sneak from their pens and strut with impunity through the grounds, prompting the staff to send out an alert on their walkie-talkies.
“Code One, rooster,” they’d say, stifling giggles.
No one joked about the possibility of an elephant Code One, especially since the arrival of the four wild juveniles from Swaziland. Elephants were extremely unpredictable, especially ones who were unaccustomed to captivity, and their size and strength made them difficult to stop or bring down. When they broke free of their handlers at circuses or in parades, they sometimes went berserk, bulldozing through fences and into traffic, killing anyone in their path, even after they had been shot multiple times. To make sure that everyone on the staff knew what to do in case one of the elephants escaped, Brian French had posted a set of Code One recommendations on bulletin boards.
Do not approach animal, hide behind something, i.e. tree, vehicle, building, etc.
Do not fall down when getting away. This is what they look for when attacking.
Do not try to scare animal to direct it, it will take this as a challenge and likely charge. (Females will be more likely to complete the charge and males will likely stop about 10 feet short, but do not hold your ground, get out of sight, they can run 32 mph for about 10 minutes.)
If elephant is out of sight of its building, it will likely have to be shot, so all gun-trained staff (ACs, curators, vet) should be equipped with appropriate weapons. (We do have tranquilizers strong enough for elephants but can only be used in certain situations.)
Clearly the possibilities were awful. The perimeter fence, which ran only a few yards from the elephant building, would not present a serious obstacle. If an elephant went on a rampage, it would not take more than thirty seconds for the animal to break through and charge into neighboring backyards. By the time the weapons team was summoned, the elephant could easily be deep into the neighborhood.
In case anyone at Lowry Park needed reminding as to how dangerous elephants could be, a wall of the keepers’ break room was adorned with a memorial to Char-Lee Torre, the handler killed by an elephant. Char-Lee had worked at Lowry Park in the early 1990s, not long after the new zoo opened. Like so many keepers, she grew up with animals and was constantly rescuing cormorants and turtles and iguanas. When one of her animals died, she would preside over a funeral in the backyard. When she was hired, she had just received a degree in education from the University of South Florida. She was interested in conservation.
“The night before she died,” remembered her mother, Cheryl Pejack, “we were talking about her getting a bachelor’s degree in zoology.”
Char-Lee wanted to be the curator of a zoo. But at twenty-four, she knew she had to prove herself. Not long after she arrived at Lowry Park, she had been offered a chance to become an elephant trainer and work with Tillie, an Asian elephant who had spent most of her life in captivity. Around Tampa, Tillie was a minor celebrity. Aside from performing in shows every day at the zoo, she starred in television commercials for Bob’s Carpet Mart, where she was shown walking across carpet to prove the fabric’s toughness. At the time, Lowry Park’s elephant handlers worked side by side with the elephants, escorting them to and from the elephant building and guiding them through their daily performances, signaling them to raise their trunks and stand on their hind legs and turn in circles. For all her obedient displays, however, Tillie had begun acting erratically, repeatedly nudging and pushing Char-Lee.
The incidents followed a pattern frequently observed with Asian elephants contemplating a fatal attack on a keeper. According to a survey of elephant care managers from around the country, African elephants tend to lash out suddenly, while Asian elephants typically show more patience, waiting for the right moment to strike. Often they give warnings, shoving their keepers against a wall or flicking them with their tails. Sometimes the elephants are testing their keepers, assessing whether they’re weak enough to be nudged aside in the hierarchy; sometimes they simply don’t like the human assigned to care for them. New trainers, still learning the moods and personalities of their elephants, are particularly vulnerable. It would not have been surprising, then, if Tillie was contemplating a move against her new trainer. Char-Lee was not just the most inexperienced member of the elephant-care staff but also the youngest and smallest. And although she tried to be as commanding a presence as possible, Char-Lee exuded a gentleness that would have made it difficult for her to assert dominance over a thirty-three-year-old elephant. By the time she was introduced to Char-Lee, Tillie had spent three decades in captivity and was infinitely more experienced at judging the power dynamics between her species and humans. Tillie had been at Lowry Park, watching keepers come and go, for more than five years. Moved between institutions and owners most of her life, she had been studying a long line of handlers and had been assessing their strengths and weaknesses literally since Char-Lee was in kindergarten. How long would it have taken Tillie to size up her new trainer? A week? A day?
That spring, as Char-Lee struggled to assert her authority over Tillie, elephant-care managers across the country were sounding warnings at the alarming rate of deaths among keepers working free contact. The movement was already under way to abolish free contact and replace it with protected contact. Originally developed by animal behavioral specialists at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, the new protocol radically challenged the methods humans had used to train elephants for thousands of years.
San Diego had decided to try the new safety protocol after the death of one of their own elephant keepers and after a particularly ugly scandal over the park’s treatment of its elephants. In 1988, the city erupted over the revelation that some of San Diego’s handlers had beaten a disobedient elephant for days with ax handles while she was chained and screaming. Backed up by their superiors, the handlers defended the beating by arguing that it had been necessary to bring a dangerous elephant to heel. Without physical discipline, they said, more keepers would die.
Protected contact, modeled after training methods used with killer whales, showed another way. Keepers would not step into an enclosure with the elephants. A barrier would always stand between them, allowing a handler to back safely away if an elephant became aggressive. Positive reinforcement and operant conditioning would guide every action. If an elephant followed a command, he would be rewarded with an apple. No more beatings. No more screaming. The worst thing that would happen to an uncooperative elephant would be for the keeper to withhold attention. Essentially, physical discipline would be replaced by a time-out. The elephant would always have a choice, and the keeper would no longer have to become the matriarch. The system was more humane for the elephants and much safer for the humans.
Skeptics scoffed, saying that elephants were not cocker spaniels who could be bribed with a biscuit. But a test run, conducted over months with some of San Diego’s most intractable elephants, proved otherwise. One subject, a twelve-thousand-pound African bull named Chico, was considered the park’s most dangerous elephant. He was so aggressive, his keepers risked their lives every time they went near him. He had been chained for years. Inside a zoo, caring for an elephant’s feet is essential. Their toenails and the thick skin on the soles of their feet require regular pedicures, because elephants tend to walk much shorter distances than they would in the wild, and their foot pads grow faster than they wear down. If the pads aren’t trimmed, the skin can crack and develop an infection that sweeps through the rest of the body—the leading cause of mortality in captive elephants. The San Diego staff was so terrified of Chico, no one had dared give him a pedicure in years.
When the team of behavioral specialists decided to try protected contact with Chico, they cut some openings, fitted with doors that locked, in the high gate of the African bull yard. A bar was welded over the top of the gate so Chico couldn’t get to them with his trunk. Then, using sliced apples and carrots and praise, they trained Chico to raise his feet, one at a time, into a cradle fashioned beside one of the openings in the gate, so the staff could reach his toenails and footpads. Sometimes the bull reverted to his old aggression and charged. When he was truly angry, he would lunge up onto the wall, roaring and rearing up like Godzilla. It didn’t matter. The keepers would back away and let him have his tantrum. When he calmed down, they’d lure him back with another treat and return to their work. By the time they were done, Chico had a pedicure on all four feet, and San Diego was ready to switch to protected contact for good. The behavioral specialists wrote papers detailing their methods and results—pamphlets for the revolution—and the word spread.
Resistance was apocalyptic. Veteran keepers insisted that the new protocol would not work, that it was unacceptable to erect a permanent barrier between them and the animals. They understood that free contact was dangerous, and believed it was their right to take that risk. Elephant handling was one of the few departments of the zoo where male keepers outnumbered the women, and the men responded the way male primates often do when confronted with a challenge. At San Diego, the elephants adapted quickly to the new system, but the humans did not. At first the old guard tried to ignore the specialist heading the conversion. Then they debated him. Then they vandalized his car. In the end, they lost anyway. Every keeper who had worked in free contact quit or was transferred. Soon the revolution reached other zoos, and protected contact gradually began to supplant the old system.
In the midst of these upheavals, Char-Lee stood next to Tillie every day and looked up into the eyes of an animal already plotting her death. Both the young handler and the elephant were trapped in a system of dominance that was already outdated. Tillie had certainly suffered under free contact. Like so many other elephants, she too had been punished over the years and was still chained every night in the elephant house. None of this was her fault, or Char-Lee’s. Lowry Park’s management was aware of the changes sweeping through elephant care at other zoos. For the moment, though, Lowry Park was sticking with the old system. In 1993, the new zoo was busy celebrating its five-year anniversary. The focus, in those early years, was the conservation of threatened Florida species such as the manatee, a cause whose importance was undeniable. Lowry Park was already receiving the highest praise.
“I consider it to be one of the very best zoological parks of its size anywhere in the country,” said the chief administrative officer of the AZA.
The zoo’s budget, even smaller in those days, was already stretched by the massive expenses involved in the manatee care. There was little chance of scraping together the millions of dollars required to build the new facilities necessary to carry out protected contact. Besides, Lex Salisbury and others believed that with two cows and no bulls, the risk was minimal and manageable. Tillie and the other female, Minyak, had been working side by side with their keepers for years without serious incident.
Maybe Char-Lee wondered why protected contact hadn’t yet been adopted at Lowry Park. Maybe not. But she knew something was wrong. Tillie’s warnings began almost immediately after Char-Lee started working with her. One day in April, the elephant tried to edge her off a platform. That June, during one of the daily shows in front of the public, Tillie ignored Char-Lee’s commands and shoved the young trainer into the hip-deep water of the moat that bordered the performance area, and kept the elephants back from the crowds.
“No,” Char-Lee told Tillie, managing to keep her balance.
The aggression worried her enough that she talked about it with her supervisors. One of them later wrote her a note referencing “your incident with Tillie.” The supervisors were concerned too—so much that they took the unusual step of flying in a nationally recognized elephant handler from a Chicago zoo to review the procedures and talk with Char-Lee and the other elephant keepers. At home, Char-Lee put on a brave face. Her mother sensed that she was scared and was not telling her everything. Char-Lee didn’t want to worry her mother and felt she could not afford to look timid in front of her fellow keepers. It made no sense to Cheryl Pejack. Why was a novice being allowed to continue working with an elephant who was clearly testing her? Char-Lee weighed 105 pounds. Tillie weighed close to four tons. One night late that July, Char-Lee’s mother asked her daughter what she would do if one of the elephants attacked. “Are there guns there?” Pejack remembered asking. “Is there a place you can hide yourself?”
Char-Lee told her mother she would do what she could. When her little brother asked about her safety, Char-Lee reminded him that she carried a buck knife on her belt. Her mother couldn’t believe it. A knife?
“What’s that going to do?” Pejack said.
Char-Lee said she’d be fine. She felt privileged to work with such magnificent creatures.
The next morning, July 30, Tillie decided the moment was right. Char-Lee had just unchained her and was preparing to lead her out of the barn when Tillie knocked her to the ground and began to kick her. Char-Lee tried to crawl to safety, but the elephant repeatedly dragged her back with her trunk. A nearby keeper fought to pull the elephant away. By the time Tillie stopped, Char-Lee’s torso and lungs had been severely injured and much of her hair and scalp had been peeled from her head. As she waited for a medical helicopter to land on the grounds and fly her to nearby St. Joseph’s Hospital, she was still conscious. She said she couldn’t breathe. She asked about Tillie.
“Don’t hurt the elephant,” she said.
By the time her family reached the hospital, Char-Lee was dead. That day, she had been carrying the knife she’d talked about with her little brother. In her wallet, her family found a folded piece of paper with several lines of verse copied in Char-Lee’s cursive. The paper was yellowed. She had been keeping it for some time.
Mourn not for us, for we have seen the light . . .
Grieve but for those who go alone, unwise, to die in darkness . . .
Ten years after her death, photos of Char-Lee Torre still hung in the break room. One showed her with the two elephants she trained, including the one that would eventually kill her. In the photo, Char-Lee is beaming. Tillie towers beside her.