In the Zoological Park we have had, and still have, a persistent case of it in a female Indian elephant now twenty-three years of age, named "Alice." Her mental ailment several times manifested itself in Luna Park, her former home; but when we purchased the animal her former owners carelessly forgot to mention it.
Four days after Alice reached her new temporary home in our Antelope House, and while being marched around the Park for exercise, she heard the strident cry of one of our mountain lions, and immediately turned and bolted.
Young as she was at that time, her two strong and able-bodied keepers, Thuman and Bayreuther, were utterly unable to restrain her. She surged straight forward for the front door of the Reptile House, and into that building she went, with the two keepers literally swinging from her ears.
As the great beast suddenly loomed up above the crowd of sightseers in the quiet building, the crowd screamed and became almost panic-stricken.
Partly by her own volition and partly by encouragement, she circumnavigated the turtle-bank and went out.
Once outside she went where she pleased, and the keepers were quite unable to control her. Half an hour later she again headed for the Reptile House and we knew that she would again try to enter.
In view of the great array of plate glass cases in that building, many of them containing venomous cobras, rattlesnakes, moccasins and bushmasters, we were thoroughly frightened at the prospect of that crazy beast again coming within reach of them.
With our men fighting frantically, and exhausted by their prolonged efforts to control her, Alice again entered the Reptile House. As she attempted to pass into the main hall,—the danger zone,—our men succeeded in chaining her front feet to the two steel posts of the guard rail, set solidly in concrete on each side of the doorway. Alice tried to pull up those posts by their roots, but they held; and there in front of the Crocodile Pool the keepers and I camped for the night. We fed her hay and bread, to keep her partially occupied, and wondered what she would do in the morning when we would attempt to remove her.
Soon after dawn a force of keepers arrived. Chaining the elephant's front feet together so that she could not step more than a foot, we loosed the chains from the two posts and ordered her to come to an "about face," and go out. Instead of doing that she determinedly advanced toward the right, and came within reach of twelve handsome glazed cases of live reptiles that stood on a long table. Frantically the men tried to drive her back. For answer she put her two front feet on the top bar of the steel guard rail and smashed ten feet of it to the floor. Then she began to butt those glass snake cages off their table, one by one.
"Boom!" "Bang!" "Crash!" they went on the floor, one after another. Soon fourteen banded rattlesnakes of junior size were wriggling over the floor. "Smash" went more cases. The Reptile House was in a great uproar. Soon the big wall cases would be reached, and then—I would be obliged to shoot her dead, to avoid a general delivery of poisonous serpents, and big pythons from twenty to twenty-two feet long. The room resounded with our shouts, and the angry trumpeting of Alice.