So I was reading the brochure on M99, which I told you was kind of bogus and stuff, but that was all we had. There was a few people with a little bit of experience with M99 in elephants, Clint Gray, my mentor, was one of the first persons I believe to have anesthetized an elephant in the wild, and got ’em back up. So I was kind of looking around, and the dose for elephants was six to 10 milligrams total dose for an elephant, Asian elephant we’re talking about. So I said, “Well, Jonathan, I don’t know, let’s try to not, you know, sedate him with some M99, kinda like we did with the gorilla, you know, before we moved that, let’s try it, let’s don’t wait until we’re gonna move it and do it.” So we sat down there one night after the zoo closed, and we sat in the elephant house, and so we loaded up the capture pistol, and I put a milligram of M99 in it, and darted the one we wanted, and just kind of, you know, upset her of course, and there was a little bit of trumpeting and going around, and so we’re sitting there, just waiting, you know, that’s hardest thing to do in anesthetizing an animal is waiting to see what happens. And so we were sitting there and waiting, and we got on and on, and we’re just looking at it and I said, “I don’t think it’s gonna have any effect, one milligram.” So we’re going, and idle conversation, just, I said, “Well John, what happens if that elephant goes down in there, and we have to go in and give the reversal?” At the time the reversal was 285, it wasn’t M 50-50 and he said, “I’ll walk in there and give it, you know.” I said, “Okay, well that’s fine John.” So we’re sitting there watching, and just about ready to leave, I mean it’s over an hour and nothing happened, and all of a sudden I’m looking directly at the animal. The trunk didn’t relax, nothing but it hit the ground, just dropped like it had been headshot. I’ve seen an elephant’s headshot in Kruger, and it dropped exactly like that, just as if I’d have blinked it, I missed him. And of course the other elephants went crazy.
