Well, the best way to learn how to take care of elephants is to work with an elephant man who’s had experience, and we had an old man here, an old trainer, an old, he was an old man, and he’d had some injuries too from elephants, and his name was Harvey Carlisle, he had been with Ziggy, when Ziggy was named after Zig Feld, and Zig Feld had bought that little baby elephant and Harvey Carlisle, was the elephant trainer for that baby elephant, and they went all over the world with Ziggy as a small elephant, when I got here, Harvey Carlisle was all bent over, Kind of punch back. He was all bent over like this and he had to look up this way, and he’d had a bad injury here and there, one time or another with elephants, and we had, so I seeing his condition, he was a very good man with elephants, and he knew them very well indeed, and he knew how much, how to apply pressure with his elephant to stick and do all of these things, and he knew how to trim their toenails, and the bottom of their feet had to have the grasp put on them if they didn’t, if they didn’t wear it down enough, and many, many other little things about elephants, then actually handling them and precautionary things don’t ever let an elephant maneuver your next to a wall, a keeper was just recently almost killed in Omaha, by an elephant that rubbed him out next to a wall, but the elephant sent out a warning signal to this man who was the chief trainer there at the zoo, at those elephants which is breeding male, and he threw water at him with his trunk, and then the elephant next door was in asterisks, and had been breeding and they had separated, and he was trying to get the elephant do the usual things, and he didn’t read the signs, so he almost got killed, and he didn’t fortunately. And it’s when Harvey Carlisle was here, we had Paul. Temble. The Temble, and Paul was selected, he liked elephants, and he had been working with Harvey, because Harvey couldn’t do a lot of heavy lifting, yet Harvey kept holding out information, he wouldn’t tell him everything, he was a circus man, and he had the feeling that if he told Paul all he knew about how to take care of elephants, that Paul would then take over his job that he’d lose out. Well, I read that one, and I finally talked to him about this, and I said, I told him the facts of the situation, that it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to his job, ’cause we’re civil service here, in order to get you out of this zoo, I have to find you doing something wrong and I have to prefer charges against you, and you have the right to speak in defense of yourself, and I can just walk in some day and say, you’re fired, because we’re civil servants in the park district, and it doesn’t work that way, so you’ll never be fired by having somebody take your job away from you, and as long as I’m here you’ll always be in charge of the elephant, but you do need help, and you should think of the elephant, ’cause she may outlive you, and if you don’t have somebody ready to take over, when you have to go then by golly, what’s going to happen to Judy, and this kind of approach to it, so finally we broke him down, I put Leo on the job, and some of the other zoologists, and they all kind of probed him a bit here and there in their own way, and finally, he broke in Paul De Temble, and Paul knew then how to take care of the elephant, but it’s that, it is the best way to learn how to do it, and that’s the way they do it pretty much in India. We filmed a story in the Southern part of India near Maison, at Pocket Okhla forest preserve, they call them, and there they have working elephants, which they catch in the area, and they catch them as adults or as young adults, and they don’t catch the babies, although they do have some babies, but they have, this is in the hills and they have hill tribe people, and those hill tribe people are average of fairly small stature, and have their own language of course, and they are the mahouts for those elephants, and they are, when they catch one, a young man is assigned as a mahout for that particular animal, and he’s the first one that ride, gets on the neck of that animal and rides that animal, and he feeds it and takes care of it, and takes care of the little sores that may occur or the breaks in the skin and all of these things, and they teach them about 50 or 60 words of hill tribe language, and they can do virtually anything just by the words themselves, for example, the word to lie down is ziet, and I learned that the hard way, because we were filming a story about how elephants are captured, and how elephants are trained and then worked, and I was writing a great male elephant, and Tom Allen one of Ross Allen’s sons was with me, and he rode another male, we had two photographers, we set our cameras up on a jungle path, a little trail going through the jungle, and it gravel was there in this spot, and the elephants were positioned right near this, just beyond that path, and we were to walk this little path, and pass by in front of the elephants, and the elephants then would lie down and we would get on their backs, and then we would exit the scene out, down that path, and so when they rolled the cameras and we got the signal, there were cameras were rolling, and leading Tom, ’cause my animal was on the other side, we passed in front of the first animal, and then I went in front of the other one, and at that moment I was about to pass in front of my animal, the mahout gave the order to lie down, and he said Zeit, and the elephant, I was so close to the elephant, that he couldn’t reach forward with his front legs to lie down, so I was in his way, so he did the obvious thing, he reached out with a tusk and flicked me out of his way, I woke up on the ground about eight or 10 feet away, and I landed face first, I just woke up there and my hand that was here holding onto the strap of my binoculars, that hit the ground and my face, my nose was broken, my teeth went through my lips and I had three broken ribs, just from that one little thing like that, that the elephant did to get me out of his way, so you can get injured without even half trying, by not recognizing little things of that nature, I should have gotten off the path, and gone around in front of him, but there were a lot of bushes and stickers and things there, and I thought I could probably get by, that close to the front of the elephant, because he’d been perfectly gentle up to that point, but if they hadn’t been given the order, it would’ve been all right, but when the order to lie down was given, it wasn’t all right. So, these people are awfully good, they can have an elephant go forward, back up, turn right, turn left, trunk up, trunk down, raise your right foot, raise your left foot, raise your right hand foot, raise your left hand foot, swing your head, pick up that log, all these things, they tell them all these things, and they take very good care of them, and they have a special big loaf about the size of an elephant dropping, that is filled with all kinds of vitamins and minerals, that they give them in addition to the green things that they cut for them for fodder.
