These boots are made for stomping

A few years back, there was an Asian Elephant named Calle.  Poor Calle was a zoo elephant, and before that, she was rented out to those in need of performing elephants, such as circuses, and Las Vegas sideshows.  As you can imagine, she had a pretty shitty life.  You see, in zoos and circuses, elephants are cash cows.  It pays to keep them alive.  As you’re probably aware, elephants are also quite large.  Real estate is expensive, and it’s hard to be a cash cow when you require that much expensive real estate to move around in.  So, zoos don’t really concern themselves with making elephants happy. They try to relieve the pain so the animal can continue to perform its job as a zoo animal.  Here’s a picture of Calle, on the left, and her BFF, Tinkerbell on the right.

Being unable to move around the way they need to, the joints deteriorate in their legs.  The zookeepers treat the pain with opiates, and anti-inflammatories  Often, the elephants are completely *blotto* on opiates, just to allow them to cope with the pain that is a direct consequence of their confinement.  Elephants in pain get bitchy, just like we do, and an elephant with an attitude problem is not really something you wanna hang with.  Fortunately, the drugs have the “accidental” benefit of making them placid too.  So, next time you see one standin’ there kinda glassy-eyed, one lip hangin’ off to the side, wavering back and forth, lookin’ like she doesn’t know wtf is going on, it’s probably true.

Bottom view of Calle's femur

Top view of Calle's femur

Click on the pictures for the closeups if you want to see the detail.  Yeah, that’s a little bit of dried muscle/tendon/flesh left on the bones.  Often you’ll see elephant bones get bleached, and get all the little bits of tendon and cartilage, and stuff off the bone, because people want that bright, clean, white look.  I’d rather keep it closer to its natural state.  I kinda like having the little bits of tendon and whatnot.

Calle had that typical degenerative joint disease.  I ended up with one of her femurs, I believe the left femur.  Back in her mexican circus days, she injured this leg in a trailer accident.  It bothered her for the rest of her life.  I don’t know the details of the accident though, and I”m not sure if the consequences of it are visible in the bone.  You can see the degenerative damage inside the knee joint, along the right side, where the working surfaces have been destroyed, exposing the rough, porous bone underneath.  The exposed porous bone on the left side is post-mortem, the cut-marks are pretty obvious.  Someone cut into that portion to see if the bone would be suitable for making knifehandles.  As if her joint problems weren’t bad enough, she had tuberculosis too.  It’s pretty common in zoo elephants, but they can treat the symptoms, and she’ll keep being alive the next morning, so that’s what they do.  One day, she wigged out and stomped a trainer in Los Angeles.  She broke 3 of his ribs (some conflicting info says they were just bruised, I dunno which is true,) and his collarbone, that mean ol’ elephant.  It was in the news and everything.    You know what?  Fuck that.  You go, girl.  You stomp that motherfucking trainer.  You stomp him good.  I’m sorry, but when I see one of those When Animals Attack videos showing an elephant rampaging through some city, you can put me firmly on Team Elephant, wavin’ my foam finger around enthusiastically.  The sad part of those segments isn’t where the people get maimed.  It’s where they finally shoot the elephant.

Asian Elephant Femur, next to a pair of human legs for scale.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love zookeepers and all.  It’s not their “fault” per se.  They all love animals WAY more than is strictly speaking, “normal”, and yet they managed to do something with their passion that doesn’t involve antagonizing children at McDonalds, like PETA nutjobs.   Good on them, etc.   As a result of those zoo animal’s sacrifice, we all learn more about animals and value them more, I get it and all.  Still, not cool.  Elephants are different.  There are a handful of animals out there that are just different from everything else, things like dolphins/orcas, elephants, and a few primates.  Put cute, stupid, and/or easily entertained animals in zoos.  Elephants don’t belong there.

After the “incident”, they sent her off to the San Francisco Zoo.  She was really sick though, her joint problems kept her in a lot of pain.  In 2004, her BFF Tinkerbell pushed her, and knocked her down.  She was in pretty bad shape to begin with, but the zoo decided it was time to euthanize her.  It was probably for the best at that point.  She was 38.   Tinkerbell was inconsolable, and died shortly afterwards.   I got a kick out of this article, where the zookeepers try to blame animal activists for irritating Tinkerbell, causing her to knock Calle over, exacerbating her old leg injury, requiring massive doses of Demerol that just weren’t enough, so they had to put her down.  Yeah, stick with that story.  I’m sure the lifetime of abuse and exploitation had nothing to do with it.

So, the left femur, the one you can’t see in the picture above?  That’s mine.   It’s not the stompin’ leg though, she probably would have used her trunk to knock the guy down, then either a front leg (which doesn’t have a femur, it has a humerus) or her mouth to gore him. If you’ve ever seen an elephant attack video, you probably know what I mean.   I’m told it’s not pleasant.  In fact, she could easily have broken the dude’s ribs with her trunk, when she knocked him down.  It’s probably a lot like getting hit with a prehensile tree.  The guy got off light, all things considered.  If she had wanted to kill him, he’d have been dead.

I know where to go if I wanted her other bones, but I don’t really have anywhere to put an elephant.  I can’t really afford one either.  I’ll stick with one giant-ass femur. Ok, maybe just one giant-ass elephant femur.  I’d still love to get m’self a mastodon/mammoth femur.  You might be surprised to learn that they’re very similar in size.  Mammoths for the most part weren’t really all that much bigger than elephants.  They’ve just been inflated in our minds by the movies, and by the exception, the Imperial Mammoth, who was pretty hefty, but still only about a third larger.