The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

Through reasons emanating in his own savage brain, Gunda took strong dislikes to several of our park people. He hated Dick Richards,--the keeper of Alice. He hated a certain messenger boy, a certain laborer, a painter and Mr. Ditmars. Toward me he was tolerant, and never rushed at me to kill me, as he always did to his pet aversions. He stood in open fear of his own keeper, Walter Thuman, until he had studied out a plan to catch him off his guard and "get him." Then he launched his long-contemplated attack, and Thuman was almost killed. Our present (1921) male African elephant, Kartoum, is not so hostile toward people, but his insatiable desire is to break and to smash all of his environment that can be bent or broken. His ingenuity in finding ways to damage doors and gates, and to bend or to break steel beams, is amazing. His greatest feat consisted in breaking squarely in two, by pushing with his head, a 90-pound steel railroad iron used as the top bar of his fence. He knows the mechanism of the latch of the ponderous steel door between his two box stalls, and nothing but a small pin that only human fingers can manipulate suffices to thwart his efforts to control the latch. Kartoum has gone over every inch of surface of his two apartments, his doors, gates and fences, to find something that he can break or damage. The steel linings of his apartment walls, originally five feet high, we have been compelled to extend upward to a height of nine feet, to save the brick walls from being battered and disfigured. He has searched his steel fences throughout, in order to find their weakest points, and concentrate his attacks upon them. If the sharp-pointed iron spikes three inches long that are set all over his doors are perfectly solid, he respects them, but if one is the least bit loose in its socket, he works at it until he finally breaks it off.