Not long ago, during this slower season on the vegetable farm, I visited the zoo in Syracuse with my sisters. The three of us grew up on a family dairy farm in New York State, and we are pretty familiar with cows.
So when we came into the zoo, and caught our first glimpse of a furry black animal, and my middle sister said excitedly: “Look! There’s a … cow,” we all had a big laugh. It was a nice little black cow, and had alpaca, sheep, and goat companions.
We also saw some beautiful birds, from flamingoes to blue cranes. We visited the penguins, the primates, the red pandas, the tiger, the snow leopard. The gray wolves and the red wolves were holed up for the day, but we saw camels and mountain goats, tiny deer and great big lizards. We admired each one, and worried a little too – zoos certainly bring on mixed feelings about our relationships with animals, even as we admire them.
The reason we had ventured to the zoo at all, despite our worries, was because of my middle sister’s love for elephants. She has read many elephant books, and watched many elephant documentaries, and dreams of working at the elephant sanctuary in Tennessee.
The Syracuse zoo has a small herd of Asian elephants, which my sister had visited before, but the big news was that a mama elephant had just delivered twins, which only happens in less than 1% of elephant births. It is also rare that both elephant calves survive. Much to the delighted surprise of the zookeepers, the two brothers are thriving, at a month old.
The public is allowed two viewing times during the day, a half hour in the morning and afternoon. First we watched three big elephants come out of the barn, going straight to their hay. Two started munching, and the third picked up a whole pile of the hay in her trunk, and moved it a good distance away. Apparently she wanted to lunch alone.
It was too cold and wet for the little ones to be outside, so they came into the barn’s viewing area instead. There was the mama, and the grandma, and there were the two tiny elephants! Of course, they might not have seemed tiny if we were standing right next to them, as they each weighed over 200 pounds at birth (and the placentas together weighed 90 pounds). But they sure looked little next to the adults.
The mama and grandma spent the half hour reaching up their trunks to pull out hay from an overhead feeder, and then cleverly sweeping up the bits on the floor with their trunks into little piles, and eating them too.
One little calf amused himself by peeking out from under the mama’s back leg. Once he tried to catch the mama’s tail in his trunk. The other calf was a little bolder, and would periodically dash away from his mother, run a circle, play in the sand, and dash back. It was funny to see how much his trunk flopped around in his dashes. Trunk skills come gradually, and we were impressed when he wrapped his tiny trunk around his mama’s big one.
It was wonderful to see the elephants, and the zoo is well-maintained and helping with larger animal and habitat conservation projects, which is heartening. It made me think about animals everywhere, wild and domestic, in zoos and on farms, in forests and on plains, and about my hope that we can more fully recognize and respect our kinship.
Then, when I got home, ready to recognize and respect my kinship with our draft horses, they seemed more interested in their fresh piles of hay than in me, just like the elephants. But maybe that’s the point: it’s not all about me, but all about all of us, human and more-than-human.
Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Dec 14 - Dec 2o, 2022