A Tribute to Winkie
A six-month old infant Asian elephant arrived
at Henry Vilas Zoo in
1965. She was so small that two men were able to lift
her onto a table, allowing
the zoo vet to get a closer look. The zoo named the
infant Winkie.
The facts surrounding her separation from her family
are unknown but some educated guesses can be made. During
the mid-sixties, much of the wilderness of South East Asia
was brought under
cultivation for tea and teak plantations. When land was cleared,
elephant herds were decimated and the babies sold to circuses and
zoos. Winkie likely saw her family, including her mother from
whom she had likely never ventured more than a few yards,
killed. She was likely hustled onto a truck and moved
to a camp where an international animal dealer bought her. After traveling
by freighter to the United States, she likely made her way to Madison
by train.
She lived in Madison for thirty-five years—through blizzards,
ice storms, and sweltering summer heat. As a ten-year-old,
she was moved from an aging exhibit to a "state of the art" cement
barn; her space was about the size of a two-car garage.
She was joined in 1982 by an African elephant calf who
had survived the cull of her family in Zimbabwe. The zoo named her
Penny. They were chained in place for 16 hours out of
every 24. Depending on the severity of the winter, they were confined
to their cement barn for months on end.
Their outside space was a flat, grit-packed yard, surrounded
on three sides by a steep-sided moat and on the fourth by a solid cement
wall. It was approximately one-quarter acre in size, with two
logs chained down near a shallow cement wading pool. The exhibit
had no browse, no slopes, no dust wallows, no mud wallows, no bathing
pool, no stumps, no grass, no bushes and no trees.
Winkie was not happy. Over the years, she attacked her keepers.
A few days before Christmas 1999, she lashed out at two
vets examining her sore front left foot. She took them down and knocked two
keepers down as well. One keeper was taken to the hospital
by ambulance.
This incident galvanized authorities and strong public
support in favor of moving Winkie to The Elephant Sanctuary,
relocating Penny to a more appropriate setting and closing Henry Vilas Zoo's
elephant exhibit forever.
After much wrangling, both in public and in private,
Winkie's big day came in September 2000 when she stepped into
the Sanctuary's trailer and headed south. She arrived with a hard shell
and a small heart. Frankly, she arrived with a reputation for
being a hardened, calloused individual, slow to trust and quick
to to resort to violence.
And
yet...I visited Winkie on my lunch hour almost every
day from the summer of 1999 until the early summer of
2000. Sometimes, I would call to her and ask her to "chug." She
would amble over and rest her trunk along a cement gate
while I talked to her, offering encouragement and reports
of progress with local officials. She would stay as long
as I stood there. One day, she leaned over, picked up
a small pebble from her enclosure and gently tossed it
next to me. I picked it up, thrilled at her effort to
make contact and told her so. Over the next many months,
she tossed four more stones, always careful to toss them
slowly and to my side. Today, they sit in a small arrangement
of succulents I keep on my desk at work. I call it Winkie's
Rock Garden.
Winkie and Sissy at the Sanctuary
More than five years have passed since Winkie's departure
from Madison. Over these five years in the lush hills
of Tennessee she has found the courage to shed her carapace
and allow her heart to grow. She loves her human caregivers
and has found a true and tender friend in Sissy.
So, Happy Valentine's Day, Winkie, from one who loves every
bit of you--the frightened warrior who battled every way she knew
to escape Madison, the shy creature who reached
out to a stranger like me, the stubborn orphan who insisted
on keeping her hope alive.
Love from Lisa Kane,
February 2006
