rogue.
Rogue. It is to despair. We have a long list of abused elephants. In 1962, University of Oklahoma researchers injected Tusko, a male zoo oliphant, with just under 300 mg of LSD, three thousand times the human recreational dose. In five minutes he collapsed, and an hour and forty minutes later he died.
Not to say that elephants are all gentle passive spirits; they may attack handlers, keepers, other animals, and innocent bystanders. Males undergo a months-long hormonal change called musth, when under the influence of sixty times more testosterone than usual, they become aggressive. Enraged zoo and circus elephants have been known to gore people, throw them into the air, deliberately crush them underfoot, and tip cars onto them. Elephants are not our pets and cannot necessarily be expected to live with us on our terms.
Spoiler alert. Some entries in the Table make veiled reference to entries elsewhere. Because some of you tell us you’ve enjoyed discovering these associations on your own, may we suggest holding off reading the rubric items until you’ve spent some time with the Table as a whole? Which, if you can’t spring for the print, you’re welcome to find here.
Rogue
71 | Mary
Mary was hanged by a railroad derrick car at the Clinchfield Railroad yard in Erwin, Tennessee in 1916. The elephant, who toured with the Sparks World Famous Shows circus, had killed her inexperienced keeper the day before during a circus parade in Kingsport, Tennessee. Witnesses said the man struck Mary’s ear or tusk, which may have been sensitive from an infection, when she wandered from the parade line to eat a piece of discarded watermelon.
Rogue
72 | Topsy
Reportedly tortured by a drunken handler whom she killed, and mistreated by members of the public at Coney Island amusement park, (one fed her a lighted cigar), Topsy the Elephant was judged too dangerous to keep. Her electrocution in 1903 before a small crowd was filmed by the Edison Manufacturing movie company and distributed for public viewing in nickel-operated kinetoscopes; it is held to be the first animal death on film.
(Thomas Edison is popularly credited with Topsy’s death as a publicity stunt during the War of the Currents, but he was not involved in her death, which took place a decade after the battle for AC vs. DC domination had ended.)
Rogue
86 | George Orwell’s Elephant
Orwell’s essay Shooting an Elephant tells the story of an English police officer serving in Burma who is asked by locals to dispatch an aggressive elephant. He does so reluctantly and is distressed to watch the animal’s painful, drawn-out death. The story is seen as an allegorical tale regarding British imperialism and Orwell’s notion that the tyranny of the white man would serve to destroy his own soul.
Rogue
87 | Groucho Marx’s Elephant
“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I don’t know. Then we tried to remove the tusks, but they were embedded in so firmly we couldn’t budge them. Of course, in Alabama, the Tusk-a-loosa. But that’s entirely ir-elephant to what I was talking about.”
— Animal Crackers, 1930