The New Rambler

March 1990, Cincinnati, a keeper tried to hand-feed
A grape to a polar bear named Icee.
He must have thought “DESSERT!”
Because he bit her arm off.
It could not be reattached because he ate it.

May 19, 1987, after dark: three boys in Brooklyn snuck into the zoo,
To go swimming in the polar bear exhibit.
This proved to be a very bad idea indeed.

By the time the police arrived,
One of the bears had ripped open a boy’s ribcage like an eager child at Christmas.
They shot six times with service revolvers
And more than twenty with 12-gauge shotguns,
Killing the red and white omnivore as well as the other bear on display
That by all accounts was simply an innocent bystander.

Two tigers teamed to kill a keeper in the Bronx, July 1985,
But the most dangerous by far are the elephants.

It’s estimated that in America, one elephant handler per 600
Will be killed every year (worse odds of any other profession, even law enforcement).
Fortunately, there aren’t a whole lot of professional elephant handlers in the U.S. of A.
By contrast, India loses between 250 to 1,500 to elephants every 365 days.
(I wish I could be more precise but reports wildly vary.)

Periodically male elephants go through a condition called musth (Sanskrit for “drunk”)
Where they experience perpetual erections, testosterone levels 60 times normal, violent mood swings:
Irrational, dangerous, and unpredictable–
The male equivalent of PMS.

Quote Charles Darwin, “No animal in the world is so dangerous as an elephant in musth.”
Indian Mahouts often calm the bulls by feeding them opium and hashish,
But American law disallows such progressive measures.
Musth seems to have made the entire species quirky, and hard to judge
Just when one will decide to squash your skull for no apparent reason.

1993: zoo and circus elephants kill at least three Americans.

One, an Asian elephant named Tillie, in Tampa
Killed her keeper CharLee Torre, age 25.
After a stomping,
CharLee tried to crawl away but Tillie weighed four tons.

The next year, a 21-year old African elephant named Tyke
Was shot in the streets of Honolulu
After killing her handler and running away from the circus.
Police had no elephant guns on hand
So they shot her 87 times with standard issue
Before she dropped.

An elephant named Ruby at the Phoenix zoo
Was taught to paint with her trunk
In part to relieve the unnatural stress
Of being confined in so alien an environment.
But in the days before she was given a paint brush,
She would use her proboscis to scoop up grain,
Scatter it outside her cage and wait until a duck or goose came to peck.
Only then she would bring down her foot.

In 1906, the New York Zoological Society
Put an African Pygmy (Homo sapiens) on display among other species of primates.
Black religious leaders began to fret and the pygmy,
23-year old Ota Benga was released to the wilds of NYC.
Ten years later he fatally shot himself in the head.

The connection to the zoo is not properly understood.