Handlers Face Elephantine Risks -- Statistically, Pachyderm Training One Of Most Dangerous Jobs

At Woodland Park Zoo, an elephant named Sri delicately balanced her 8,000-pound body on a thin log, to the delight of an audience that had no idea her handler has one of the most dangerous careers in the nation.

Although elephants don't look menacing, they can be unpredictable and even homicidal. Last year, three elephant keepers were killed, out of an estimated 600 in the U.S. and Canada. According to Department of Labor statistics, elephant handlers have some of the riskiest jobs in the country, ahead of firefighters, police and miners.

Whatever happened to Dumbo?

Ken Morgan would smile at the question. He has been an elephant handler at the Seattle zoo 10 years. He has fiery white hair, wears black Converse tennis shoes, and has more stories about elephants than the fistfuls of carrots he feeds them each day. He first encountered elephants in a German circus, where cultural and personality barriers prompted some misunderstandings. For instance, he was told never to look an elephant in the eye but to watch its feet instead.

It was, he now knows, utterly preposterous and perhaps intentional advice. He was, after all, taking a job from some German native.

Anyway, he did what he was told. "I was raking the ground and watching his (an elephant's) feet and found my head in his mouth," Morgan recalls matter-of-factly. "I concluded I would die."

Not so matter-of-factly, Morgan panicked. "I shouted its name into its throat from inside its mouth. I could not see. I could not breathe. It was sticky. And my eyes stung."

The elephant responded by relaxing its mouth, rather like a yawn. It was wide enough for Morgan to pull out his head, uninjured. He had survived that encounter, but the elephant continued to test him.

"I would command her to lower her head and she would raise it. So, I decided to try reverse psychology. I told her to raise her head. She raised it higher."

It's known that elephants are smarter than dogs and horses, but are they smarter than their handlers?

That's the subject of some debate in the elite circle of elephant keepers. The risks make them the Top Guns of animal handlers, with the possible exception of keepers who work with the great apes. The higher primates, as they are called, are acknowledged to be smarter than elephants but in a way that makes them less interesting to some elephant handlers.

"Primates are almost like us," says Woodland Park's senior elephant keeper, Larry Zolton. "Elephants are not like us at all. It's like meeting an alien and working out a relationship. For the light to go on between two species is a thrill you don't get on this Earth unless you're an elephant handler."

Or, as Morgan puts it: "It's no surprise to me that some cultures worship the elephant."

At first, Morgan hated them. After Zirkus Williams in Germany, he vowed never to work with pachyderms again. But after coming to Woodland Park Zoo in 1978, he slowly changed his mind. It was hard to ignore the elephants, particularly one called Wide Awake.

It seems she got annoyed with a Metro bus whose driver insisted on honking the horn every day at a stop next to the zoo on Phinney Avenue. In response, Wide Awake hurled rocks at the bus with her trunk. She broke its windows. Metro moved the bus stop.

By 1984 Morgan was drafted to handle elephants, working up from monkeys and birds. It was not an overnight switch, however. Elephants are skeptical of humans. New handlers have to be sized up and challenged before they are accepted into the herd. It can takes years, and it can be trying.

"Generally speaking, most people working with elephants don't last a year; they are so totally traumatized they run screaming from the barn," Morgan says. "If they do last a year, they never want to leave."

The burden of proof falls on the human. If an elephant does not like a handler, then that handler can never be left alone with it. Zolton learned the hard way. Bamboo, one of Woodland Park's four elephants, knocked him down several times when he first joined the keeper team. Eight years later, she still refuses to accept him. He can handle the other elephants, but Bamboo is off-limits.

Chemistry is essential between elephants and handlers. While Bamboo turns her trunk up at Zolton, she absolutely adores another handler named Chuck Harke. "She'll act like a puppy around him," says Zolton. "She just gets this expression on her face and in her eyes. She'll pucker her cheeks and her ears will flap, like tail-wagging in a dog."

Three of the elephants at Woodland Park Zoo are Asian. One is African, with the larger Dumbo-like ears. All are female. Males are too aggressive to handle, particularly when their testosterone levels surge during a phenomenon called musth. About once a year, for weeks to months, the testosterone can jump by 100 or more times the average rate. The bull elephants get wild and mean and sometimes kill people.

In 1979, a Seattle animal dealer and elephant trainer named H. Morgan Berry was trampled to death by a teenage elephant on his 80-acre ranch south of Woodland, Cowlitz County.

In the 15 years since that death, an average of one elephant handler has died a year in the United States. The danger has prompted some zoos to take the radical step of forbidding close contact between handlers and elephants. It's called "protected contact" and relies on barriers, steel gates and pens. Any clipping of toenails is done behind bars.

Zolton says protected contact is being considered at Woodland Park Zoo, but only in small ways and not immediately. "We don't think we're at high risk," he says.

Morgan agrees, although he has a different spin on the issue. He thinks the public will demand protective contact - not to protect handlers from elephants, but to protect elephants from handlers.

He tells this story.

About a year ago he was picking up elephant dung during a public demonstration with an elephant named Chai. "She approached me and stood next to the wheelbarrow and wrapped her trunk around it. I said, `Chai, leave it.' She tipped the wheelbarrow over, which left me absolutely astounded because she hasn't done that in eight or nine years."

Morgan set it upright. "She did it again. So I struck her. The crowd was horrified. They thought it has been very funny that the elephant was tipping over the wheelbarrow."

Morgan didn't see the humor, fearing instead that Chai would develop a bad habit if he didn't punish her immediately - even if it was a bad PR move.

"Fifteen people saw Chai tip over my wheelbarrow," he says. "Fifteen people saw me smack her, which means 15 people were horrified. That means protective contact."

Zolton acknowledges elephants are sometimes struck, saying it is both necessary and harmless. He compares it to hitting a dog with a rolled up newspaper.

Still, the public finds little harm in tipping over a wheelbarrow, and protective contact might become the norm at zoos in the future.

In the meantime, elephants and their keepers will continue to coexist at Woodland Park Zoo, and the handlers will continue their risky work. Morgan, for one, wouldn't have it any other way.

He was, after all, trained by none other than Smokey Jones.

"Who is Smokey Jones?" he asks. "Probably the foremost elephant trainer in the U.S. He started at the bottom of the dung heap and worked his way up. . . ."