In strong contrast with the stealthy and noiseless manner in which elephants steal away from a lurking danger, or an ambush discovered, from an open attack accompanied with the noise of fire-arms they rush away at headlong speed, quite regardless of the noise they make. On one occasion a herd which I was designing to attack, and had approached to within forty yards, as its members were feeding in some thick bushes, discovered my presence and retreated so silently that they had been gone five minutes before I discovered what their sudden quietude really meant. In this instance, as in several others, the still alarm was communicated by silent signals, or sign-language.
At the Zoological Park we reared an African pygmy elephant (Elephas pumilio). When his slender little tusks grew to eighteen inches in length he made some interesting uses of them. Once when the keepers wished to lead him upon our large platform scales, the trembling of the platform frightened him. He conceived the idea that it was unsafe, and therefore that he must keep off. He backed away, halted, and refused to leave solid ground. The men pushed him. He backed, and trumpeted a shrill protest. The men pushed harder, and forced him forward. Trumpeting his wild alarm and his protest against what he regarded as murder, he fell upon his knees and drove his tusks into the earth, quite up to his mouth, to anchor himself firmly to the solid ground. It was pathetic, but also amusing. When Congo finally was pushed upon the scales and weighed, he left the trembling instrument of torture with an air of disgust and disapproval that was quite as eloquent as words. On several occasions when taken out for exercise in the park, he endeavored to hinder the return to quarters by anchoring himself to Mother Earth.
Congo once startled us by his knowledge of the usefulness of doors. For a time he was kept in a compartment that had an outside door running sidewise on a trolley track, and controlled by two hanging chains, one to close it and one to open it. Each chain had on its end a stout iron ring for a handle. One chilly morning when I went to see Congo, I asked his keeper to open his door, so that he could go out.
The keeper did so, by pulling the right hand chain. The moment the draft of chilly outer air struck Congo, who stood in the centre of his stall facing me, he impatiently wheeled about, walked up to the left hand chain, grabbed it with his trunk, slipped the ring over one of his tusks, then inclined his head downward and with an irritated tug pulled the door shut with a spiteful slam. "Open it again," I said to the keeper.
He did so, and in the same way, but with a visible increase in irritation, Congo closed it in the same manner as before. Again the keeper opened the door, and this time, with a real exhibition of temper Congo again thrust the ring over his tusk, and brought the door shut with a resounding bang. It was his regular habit to close that door, or to open it, when he felt like more air or less air; and who is there who will say that the act was due to "instinct" in a jungle-bred animal, or anything else than original thought. The ring on his tusk was his own invention, as a means to a desired end.
Every elephant that we ever have had has become, through his own initiative and experimenting, an expert in unfastening the latches of doors and gates, and in untying chains and ropes. Gunda always knew enough to attack the padlocks on his leg chains, and break them if possible. No ordinary clevis would hold him. When the pin was threaded at one end and screwed into its place, Gunda would work at it, hour by hour, until he would start it to unscrewing, and then his trunk-tip would do the rest. The only clevis that he could not open was one in which a stout cotter pin was passed through the end of the clevis-pin and strongly bent.
Through reasons emanating in his own savage brain, Gunda took strong dislikes to several of our park people. He hated Dick Richards,—the keeper of Alice. He hated a certain messenger boy, a certain laborer, a painter and Mr. Ditmars. Toward me he was tolerant, and never rushed at me to kill me, as he always did to his pet aversions. He stood in open fear of his own keeper, Walter Thuman, until he had studied out a plan to catch him off his guard and "get him." Then he launched his long-contemplated attack, and Thuman was almost killed.
Our present (1921) male African elephant, Kartoum, is not so hostile toward people, but his insatiable desire is to break and to smash all of his environment that can be bent or broken. His ingenuity in finding ways to damage doors and gates, and to bend or to break steel beams, is amazing. His greatest feat consisted in breaking squarely in two, by pushing with his head, a 90-pound steel railroad iron used as the top bar of his fence. He knows the mechanism of the latch of the ponderous steel door between his two box stalls, and nothing but a small pin that only human fingers can manipulate suffices to thwart his efforts to control the latch.
Kartoum has gone over every inch of surface of his two apartments, his doors, gates and fences, to find something that he can break or damage. The steel linings of his apartment walls, originally five feet high, we have been compelled to extend upward to a height of nine feet, to save the brick walls from being battered and disfigured. He has searched his steel fences throughout, in order to find their weakest points, and concentrate his attacks upon them. If the sharp-pointed iron spikes three inches long that are set all over his doors are perfectly solid, he respects them, but if one is the least bit loose in its socket, he works at it until he finally breaks it off.
I invite any Doubting Thomas who thinks that Kartoum does not "think" and "reason" to try his own thinking and reasoning at inventing for Kartoum's door a latch that a keeper can easily and surely open and close at a distance of ten feet, and that will be Kartoum-proof. As for ourselves, three or four seemingly intelligent officers and keepers, and a capable foreman of construction, have all they can do to keep ahead of that one elephant, so great is his ingenuity in thwarting our ways and means to restrain him.