lost and found
By Doug Moe
Winkie the elephant: Despite a tragic past, this former Henry Vilas Zoo resident appears to have found peace
One of the best-known living ex-Madisonians now lives in Tennessee. She celebrated her eighth anniversary in that state in September, and did it in style by having her traditional daily meal: 130 pounds of hay, 20 pounds of whole grains and 20 pounds of fruits and vegetables.
When you weigh 7,600 pounds, it isn’t easy to keep your weight up.
Winkie — an Asian elephant that was born in Burma and spent a turbulent three decades in Madison at the Henry Vilas Zoo — now resides at the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tenn.
“She is doing exceptionally well,” Carol Buckley, the sanctuary’s co-founder and executive director, told me in September.
Life has been anything but easy for Winkie, but according to Buckley, she appears to have finally found peace. With more than 2,700 acres, the Elephant Sanctuary is the nation’s largest natural habitat refuge specifically for endangered elephants. In addition to beautiful surroundings, Buckley said she also has a special elephant friend, Sissy, who arrived at the sanctuary shortly before Winkie.
“Sissy adores Winkie,” Buckley said. “She took Winkie under her wing.”
Winkie was born in Burma in 1966, captured there in the wild and sold into what is called the exotic animal trade. Soon after her capture, there was an opening for an elephant at the zoo in Madison. That opening came from tragedy, involving an elephant that had been at the Vilas Zoo since 1950. This elephant was also named Winkie, after the recently retired longtime zoo director, Fred Winkelman.
The first Winkie lived at the Vilas Zoo until 1966. On June 28 of that year, a group of young children were feeding Winkie marshmallows and popcorn through the bars when the elephant grabbed 3-year-old Ruth Ellen Freedman with her trunk, pulled her through the bars and stomped her to death.
Shortly after that tragedy, Winkie was sent to an elephant breeding farm outside of Portland, Ore. Her replacement, which arrived in Madison in November 1966, was named Winkie Too, although that was soon shortened to Winkie.
The second Winkie spent 34 years in Madison. It would be nice to report that they were idyllic, or at least reasonably pleasant, but the unhappy truth is that conditions at the zoo for Winkie, and a second, younger African elephant named Penny, were not good, which was the case at many zoos around the country.
The physical conditions of the elephants’ captivity were brutally restrictive — much of their time was spent chained in a concrete barn. In addition the elephants were managed by a technique called trainer dominance, which Buckley says can produce hostility in elephants.
Once in 1977, and again in 1999, Winkie attacked humans working at the zoo; the first episode was serious enough to send the person to the hospital with chest and abdominal injuries. The second incident also resulted in the hospitalization of a keeper, as well as increasingly vocal condemnation of the elephants’ living conditions by animal rights activists and led to the decision in 2000 to move Winkie and Penny out of Madison.
Penny was sent to a zoo in Columbus, Ohio and later on to Columbia, S.C. Winkie, to her good fortune, went to the Elephant Sanctuary, which began development in 1995 and has since earned a reputation that led Phil Snyder, regional director emeritus of the Humane Society of the United States, to say: “The Elephant Sanctuary represents the future of enlightened captive elephant management.”
The sanctuary is not meant to provide entertainment for humans, and is closed to the general public, though significant donors are able to tour the facility. Buckley told me about one such donor, a man named Gary Fink, who has taken a special interest in Winkie. He pledged to contribute $10,000 to Winkie’s endowment every year she remained alive, helping secure her place at the sanctuary. The sanctuary attempts to establish an endowment of $185,000 for each elephant; Winkie’s is currently near $100,000 and growing.
When Winkie arrived at the sanctuary on September 12, 2000, she was shy and distrustful, but she soon made enormous progress. Then, in July 2006, tragedy struck once again. One of Winkie’s caretakers, Joanna Burke, was hosing her off and had walked around the elephant when Winkie spun and struck her across the chest and face. She fell to the ground and Winkie stepped on Burke, killing her.
An investigation ruled the death an accident. Burke’s family supported the decision not to euthanize Winkie.
In our conversation, Buckley said they now believe Winkie suffered a kind of post traumatic stress syndrome response. A handler who was on the scene at the time recalled Winkie shaking her head, as if to say, “What happened?”
In the aftermath, Buckley said, Winkie was seriously depressed. “You could see the pain in her eyes,” Buckley remembers. “She wasn’t eating well.”
Now it’s been more than two years, and Winkie is better. “Sometimes she starts to get sad,” Buckley said, but everything considered, she’s doing well.
To truly understand Winkie’s journey, visit the sanctuary’s Web site (www.elephants.com), which includes an extraordinary tribute to Winkie by a Madison woman named Lisa Kane, who writes about having visited Winkie at the Henry Vilas Zoo on her lunch hour almost every day from the summer of 1999 until the early summer of 2000. As she wrote one February: “Happy Valentine’s Day, Winkie, from one who loves every bit of you — the frightened warrior who battled every way she knew how to escape Madison, the shy creature who reached out to a stranger like me, the stubborn orphan who insisted on keeping her hope alive.”
Hard to say it much better than that.
Doug Moe is a regular columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal.
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