SWITZERLAND: An Elephant with Imagination

Eleven years ago, Chang was bundled into the Zurich zoo’s elephant pit, a fat, ludicrous baby only ten months old. He had been bought as the future mate for Mandjullah, an older female. Rapidly he became the zoo’s star attraction and the pride of his keeper, Hans Rietmann. When Mandjullah took the kids for a ride on her back, Chang trundled awkwardly behind, amiably accepting peanuts. Sometimes he would even snuggle his trunk into a pocket to pluck out a piece of candy.

Chang had some elephantine whims. He showered his audience with water and occasionally picked up his empty tub and flung that, too. His keeper and his fans laughed and decided that Chang was an elephant with imagination.

One day, Chang brusquely snatched a doll from the arms of a little girl. For this he was banished to his pit. Then on a stormy November morning three years ago, zoo keepers saw blood on the floor of the pit. In Chang’s straw bed they found a bloodied human hand and toe.

The horrified keepers and police learned the unbelievable truth. Chang had devoured a young woman; he had swallowed her clothes, her hat, and even her large handbag.*

Police identified the woman as Bertha Walt, a pretty young Zurich office worker. The night before she had carried some bread away from the dinner table, and apparently went to the zoo to feed Chang. There was a keeper’s door in the wall at the back of the elephant pit through which she could have entered. To a friend she had said: “I often find animals kinder than people.”

The zoo management wanted to kill Chang, but Keeper Rietmann pleaded for mercy. Chang was spared. Until two weeks ago, he gave no more trouble. Then suddenly he became aggressive, even attacking Mandjullah. Again Hans Rietmann defended the animal. Chang, he said, was entering his bullhood and would be upset for a while. The chains that tied Chang during the night were reinforced; keepers were forbidden to enter the pit alone.

Hans Rietmann had no fear. On Christmas Eve, he entered the pit by himself. When he tried to fasten the chains around the elephant’s hind legs, Chang turned and swept him up in his trunk.

Later that night, the trumpeting din of elephants fighting aroused the sleeping zoo. The zoo director rushed to Chang’s pit, found him attacking Mandjullah. On the floor he found Rietmann’s dead body. This time there was no one to plead for Chang. At dawn the keepers’ rifles cracked four times. Chang, the elephant with imagination, was dead.

* Zoological experts declared that they knew of no other instance of the herbivorous elephant turning carnivorous.