If there were such things as false teeth for elephants, Mom probably would have had them. Nature fitted her with a poor dental display, and around the menagerie in which she is the herd-head the attendants are almost constantly dosing her for anything from sore gums to cavities. There came a time when Mom produced a tooth which needed pulling.
It caused a conference. The superintendent knew that he couldn’t rummage around in her mouth with a pair of forceps and yank out that tooth with a block and tackle. Besides, there was no way to chain her sufficiently for a slow, pulling process. In addition, animal men, propagandists to the contrary, are as a rule soft-hearted.
So, the task with Mom was to get that tooth out as quickly as possible, and with a minimum of pain. The elephant superintendent drove a stake deep into the ground before Mom, sent her to her haunches, and then, as tenderly as possible, fastened one end of a piece of baling wire to the tooth and the other to the stake. Whereupon he walked away, picked up his bull-hook, deliberately approached Frieda and whacked her on the trunk.
Frieda squealed as though her life were in danger, and Mom jerked to her feet, bellowed, stared in goggle-eyed fashion, then, suddenly forgetful of the animal she had sought to succor, jammed her trunk into her mouth, felt about carefully, and squealed happily. The tooth lay on the ground, where it had been yanked by the baling wire as Mom jumped to her feet! It was the old story over again, of the boy and a piece of twine tied to the door knob. Human remedies work with elephants also, even to the extent of paregoric when they get the colic.
And human prejudices, for that matter. You’ve seen, perhaps, the man who will take a drink himself, but who abhors drunkenness? The same thing has been found among elephants, and in at least one case, it has ended in tragedy. Again it was Old Mom, and the place was a Pacific coast metropolis.
Old Mom is a toper. She loves a drink better than anything else in the world, except candy or peanuts. Whisky is excellent, beer better, and she had been known—in other days—to drink five gallons of cheap wine without losing her dignity. But she loathes intoxication; in fact, only one of her keepers ever was able to approach her in an intoxicated state, and he, simply to show that the rule was breakable, inevitably slept off his drunkenness beneath her, while Old Mom would weave all night in protective wakefulness. Perhaps a genuine affection might be held responsible for this; the other case was one of simple acquaintanceship.
A canvasman about the show had been in the habit of giving Mom a bit of a nip now and then, and because she enjoyed it and watched for him, believed that he had found the absolute way to her heart. On the day of the tragedy, he arrived at the circus grounds drunk, and at once hurried for the picket line.
“Here, Mom,” and he reached for a bottle in his hip pocket, “come on an’ have drinksh with me!”
To his surprise, Old Mom didn’t curl her trunk in the usual fashion of delight and wait for him to pour a half pint down her throat. Instead, she lowered her head and gently, though forcibly, pushed him away. The canvasman reeled to her again.
“Wash matter wi’ you, Mom!”