Friday, October 10, 2008

By STEVE WIEGAND

last updated: April 15, 2008 08:27:35 AM

Winky is dead, and I digress today from the usual politics-and-government nonsense in this space to recount her life, mourn her passing and offer her a belated apology.

Winky was an Asian elephant. She was euthanized early April 7 at the Ark 2000 animal sanctuary operated by the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) in the rolling foothills near San Andreas.

She was 56, which is old for an elephant in captivity, and an age that made her one of the oldest elephants in the United States. For years, she suffered from arthritis and foot problems, the result of spending much of her life standing on concrete.

Winky had been at the PAWS sanctuary since April 2005. Despite her health problems and advanced age, the last three years had to be the happiest of her life.

She had 35 acres to roam around, elephant-sized toys such as tractor tires, other elephants to socialize with and abundant treats.

Even her very expensive arthritis medicine was disguised in loaves of French bread.

All that was in sharp contrast to Winky's first 53 years. She was brought to the Sacramento Zoo in 1955 from her native Thailand. For the next 36 years, she lived in a cramped, bare dirt compound with a barn so small she had to duck to get in the door. She was often chained by one foot.

For the first 34 years in Sacto, Winky lived with an older elephant named Sue. When Sue died in April 1989, zoo officials began looking for a new home for Winky. Elephants are social animals and aren't psychologically designed to live alone. Plus there was no money to build a new impoundment for her.

It took nearly three years to find Winky a new home, and it wasn't exactly a pachyderm paradise. True, the Detroit Zoo had what at the time was considered a spiffy new enclosure, along with an amiable resident elephant with which Winky could socialize.

But it was still Detroit, where winter weather hardly resembles Thailand's, or even Sacramento's.

In mid-2004, the Detroit Zoo decided it was time to close its elephant exhibit. And Winky and her companion Wanda were shipped off in April 2005 to the PAWS sanctuary to live happily ever after.

So, what we have here is an elephant that spent three years in a nice place and 53 years in hell.

If you think I'm anthropomorphizing, think about forcing your dog to spend virtually its entire life in the backyard: no trips to the park, no car rides, no walkies. Think about how happy that would make Sparky.

There are 284 elephants in 79 accredited U.S. zoos, according to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. While some zoos Detroit, San Francisco and Anchorage come to mind have closed their elephant exhibits, others are still clinging to their pachyderms.

The most common justifications are that zoo elephant exhibits help educate people to the plight of the animals in the wild, and that zoo breeding programs can help propagate the species.

But while zoos once upon a time performed an educational function, that's long since been obviated by information available on websites and in the mass media.

And elephant breeding programs have been largely unsuccessful, quite possibly because they are not allowed to live in the larger social groups they do in the wild.

Besides, if the best argument once can put forward for keeping elephants in zoos is to save them from us, that's a pretty damning indictment of the human race.

So I'm sorry we didn't do better by you, Winky.

And if they're looking for an epitaph for you, they might want to consider a line from Mark Twain: "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."

Write Wiegand at swiegand@sacbee.com.

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