Monday, September 25, 2006

Colombo Zoo in Sri Lanka


This is the classic African Forest Elephant. I am told they are more intelligent than the Bush Elephant that we are more familiar with but this one looks right out of Star Wars.
The drag chain might be needed simply to chain him to a tree so he can graze.

Posted by Buckles at 9/25/2006 05:54:00 AM

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Richard Reynolds says - -

Bibi is indeed the classic African forest elephant. When I was kid (around 1945) my best buddy got a 16mm Castle Film about the catching and training of these elephants in the Belgian Congo. It was terrific and we watched it over and over.

Where is the zoo to which “ndlovu8" refers as having kept Bibi?

There has not been a forest elephant here in USA for some years. I think the Columbus, OH zoo had the last one. Moreover there has never been a forest elephant bred and born in captivity in the West as far as I know.

When Hagenbeck and others had their collecting operations in full swing in Ethiopia (Abyssinia) and Sudan in the mid-19th century there were a lot of African bush elephants coming on the zoo and circus markets. [Examples: Jumbo and all those Sells Bros. got]

The Mahdi uprising put an end to those collecting operations, and the importation of bush elephants virtually dried up. Then we started getting forest elephants out of the Belgian Congo elephant operation. That, in turn was replaced by the more modern collecting operations of those working out of Kenya and Tanganyika (Tanzania). This got into full swing in the 1950s. The director of Basel Zoo, E. Lang, wrote a fine paper about this that was published in the Journal of the Elephant Managers Association. He brought to Basel the first bush elephants to arrive in Europe after W.W.II.

25 September, 2006 12:20

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