Comment from Richard Reynolds

Here is a comment from Richard about the Pigmy elephant post on 1/02/06. John and Buckles - - First off , the 1936 photo is one of Roland Butler's frauds - -a very good one at that. I'll bet he used a genuine photo of natives sitting on forest elephants. He blew it up and took the "enlarged" natives and pasted them back onto the backs of the elephants in the smaller pic. Remember, he did much the same with rhino Mary and Theol Nelson in 1935. Below are excerpts from Wayne Jackson's and Erik Block's comprehensive and detailed paper about forest elephants, the so called pigmy elephants, Loxodonta cyclotis, now held to be a separate species - -not just a forest version of the bigger bush elephants. Erik Block of Antwerp zoo sent it to me. The paper represents a ton of research. It details all cyclotis known to have been exhibited around the world from the time of the Romans. Most of what he says about the RBBB animals he got from stuff I have put together over the years. I have added a few parenthetical comments here and there. I do not know where he got the idea that Sudan was picked up along the way from Gangala-na-Bodio, Belgian Congo to Juba, Sudan- -the long march. I figure she came out of Gangala with the others. I do not think there is any doubt that Sudan was a common bush elephant (or perhaps a hybrid). The differences from Puqua were quite noticeable when you saw them together - -alive or in photos. Puqua was the very first African elephant of any kind that I can recall seeing. That was on RBBB, here in Atlanta, on Sunday afternoon, November 3, 1940 - - - a beautiful warm sunny autumn day. My Dad and I went to the showgrounds to watch the set up in progress. [I can still recall that while the big top that year was "new" blue with red sidewalls, the menagerie was still plain canvas that year - khaki colored by the time it got here.] The elephants had already been installed in the menagerie but were brought outside in small groups one after the other to water at big drums set up for the purpose. A big crowd gathered to see that. Lo and behold here came one, smaller that the others, but with huge ears and long impressive white tusks. I did not recall seeing that before, and it sort of spooked me (I was 6 years old). I got up pretty close to her. My Dad said it was a pigmy elephant from Africa. When we went to the matinee the next afternoon, I vividly recall looking for her. She came into the big top for the elephant act but only stood to the side while others went through their paces. I know I must have seen Puqua and Sudan here in '37, '38' and '39 but I do not recall them from those years. Puqua's mate Sudan was not here with the show in 1940. She had been sent back to quarters from the Garden at the start of the season. [She had gotten sick.] So I only saw Puqua in '40. The next year (1941) she was dead from the poisoning before I could get to the second day's matinee. I can recall as if it were yesterday my Dad's reading aloud from the paper that "my" Puqua was one of the first to die from the poison. I recall seeing Sudan in 1942, '43 and '45. I did not see her in '41 because the elephant part of the menagerie was roped off as the vets and elephant men struggled to administer antidotes to the herd. I could look down the picket line and saw a lot of men and equipment all along the way in front of the elephants. But you could not walk through there. In '45 one of the elephant guys in the menagerie took me up to Sudan after I had surprised him by specifically asking about her and recalling that Puqua had died here. I guess not many towners seemed as knowledgeable, particularly a 12-year old. Until I saw Buckles' comments I had not known that Congo died from a parasitical infection. He was a really beautiful example of cyclotis - best I've seen in America in person or in photos. You may want to put this on the blog. Richard And in the Blog it is.