The patter of (massive) feet: Melbourne Zoo’s history-making elephant baby boom

This story is part of the October 22 edition of Good Weekend.See all 15 stories.

Lucy Truelson saw her first elephant on a school trip to the Melbourne Zoo. She rounded a corner and there he stood. Bong Su was his name. His tail was kinked. And there was something – probably his majestic heft – that altered her world, filled it with awe and ultimately changed her life. That little girl had no clue that she’d grow up to spend 20 years caring for Bong Su as his keeper; that she’d be with him at his last breath; and then, in 2022, be at the heart of an ambitious plan to give his offspring a more humane life than the one he knew.

The 43-year-old Truelson is talking about Bong Su where she first spotted him: the heritage-listed elephant enclosure. With its small concrete barn and tiny moated yard, the enclosure is a relic from another era, replaced in 2003 by the larger Trail of the Elephants exhibit. But it’s where Bong Su spent 26 years after arriving in 1977, at about age three, a gift from Malaysia’s Sultan of Pahang. A female elephant called Mek Kapah, another present from Malaysia, joined Bong Su in 1978.

This probably seemed sensible then. A male and female paired in a sort of Noah’s Ark symmetry. But now we know so much more. We know that, in the wild, elephants are matriarchal, with herds of related females and immature males hanging out, and the bull elephants living a mostly solitary existence in which they roam and challenge other bulls for the right to visit the females for some elephant nookie (warning: this story contains more talk of elephant nookie).

For highly intelligent animals who often walk five kilometres a day in their natural habitat, Bong Su and Mek Kepah’s old enclosure was shamefully small. And they were locked in at night on concrete floors, something no self-respecting zoo would do now. (Sand is best for elephant joints and feet, and almost every day at Melbourne Zoo, a small earth-moving machine called a skid steer fashions sand mounds for the elephants to sleep on. “Just fluffing up the pillows,” Truelson says, as we pass a skid steer preparing the barn.)

Keeper Lucy Truelson at the world-leading Werribee site spanning 21 hectares – the size of the entire Melbourne Zoo.Credit: Meredith O’Shea

In the 1990s, it was clear Bong Su and Mek Kepah were suffering. Video footage taken in 1999 showed Bong Su walking up to 15 kilometres a night in a tight circle inside his locked-up barn (after seeing the footage, the zoo let the elephants move between the yard and barn at night). Bong Su developed foot problems while Mek Kepah became obese, a common ailment for captive elephants (she lost a mighty 400 kilograms after being put on a diet). Today, Mek Kepah, now 49 and the herd matriarch, sways side to side, the sort of repetitive behaviour the keepers openly admit is a soothing mechanism developed in her less-than-ideal living conditions.

In 2003, when the $15 million Trail of the Elephants opened to great fanfare, the 2.5-hectare exhibit boasted three separate spaces, big wallowing pools, a larger barn and more capacity for “enrichment”, a term that describes ways to physically and mentally occupy and challenge captive elephants, like burying whole vegetables in the sand for the animals to dig out.

When Bong Su, who only had a small pond in his old enclosure, walked into the Trail of the Elephants for the first time, he went straight to the big pool and disappeared. The zoo’s head vet Michael Lynch remembers it well. “There was this moment where he’s underneath the water. And we’re like: ‘Oh no, we’ve drowned the elephant!’ And then he just came up and breathed out and he was just lolling sideways. And it was just so emotional,” he says, on the verge of tears. “This animal, you know, he just needed this better life.”

The zoo has switched to a model of care that means if the elephants don’t want to do something, it isn’t done.

But only five years after opening this blockbuster exhibit, the zoo realised it was still too small. In 2008, Zoos Victoria then-chief executive John Wills said the zoo had reached “a consensus” that Bong Su, Mek Kapah and the three female elephants controversially imported from Thailand in 2006 – Dokkoon, Kulab and Num-Oi – needed to move to its more spacious open-plains zoo at Werribee, on Melbourne’s western fringe.

Now, 14 years later, Truelson and her colleagues are executing that plan after the Victorian Labor government recently committed $88 million for Werribee’s expansion. The first step, however, is to add another round of babies to the herd, to better mimic the multigenerational nature of wild elephant social structures.

After years of relying on artificial insemination – which produced five babies at Melbourne – early last year the zoo achieved its first natural pregnancies thanks to Luk Chai, a 12-year-old bull brought in from Taronga’s Western Plains Zoo, and is now expecting three calves in quick succession, the first due next month, the next two in December and January.

Once the calves are big enough, about 18 months old, they will be trucked with their mums and the other four elephants down to Werribee. But this will only happen, insists the zoo, if the animals voluntarily enter their specially built transport crates, because the zoo has switched to a model of care that means if the elephants don’t want to do something, it isn’t done (more on that later).

After a tour of some of the world’s best elephant facilities, Truelson is helping design a world-leading, 21-hectare habitat at Werribee the size of the entire Melbourne Zoo. The plan is even cautiously welcomed by elephant welfare advocate Peter Stroud, an independent zoo consultant who was, as a former senior curator at Melbourne Zoo, in charge of the elephants between 1998 and 2003. He no longer believes elephants should be held in urban zoos, but applauds the move to Werribee. “It’s a very progressive development. I am still sceptical, but the fact that the zoo is conscious of all of the issues is a good thing.”

The Werribee plan took form in 2017, the same year the decision was made to euthanise the 42-year-old Bong Su because nothing more could be done to lessen his worsening arthritic pain. On that day, Truelson – whom Bong Su had inspired to become a zookeeper – asked the 5000-kilogram animal to lie down for his injection. He did. “I get emotional because he was my favourite, he still is,” says Truelson. “I said: ‘We will take the herd to Werribee for you, mate. It’s a shame you don’t get to experience it. But we’re taking the herd out, [including] your daughter Mali.’ It was a promise.”

Hearing Truelson’s love for Bong Su, and watching her tears flow as she speaks of the sadness and beauty of his death, I realise it’s not just the elephants who need this move to Werribee. It’s the humans, too.

An artist’s render of the new elephant enclosure at Werribee. Credit: Zoos Victoria

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It’s late May and Dokkoon, 29, stands in the heated elephant barn, separated by metal bars from a line of humans: the vet, four keepers, myself, a photographer and two members of the zoo’s PR team. Dokkoon has placed a pink speckled ear between the bars so that head vet Lynch, 59, can fill a syringe with her blood and test her pregnancy hormone levels. If she decides to withdraw her ear, the test doesn’t happen. This is because in January 2014 the zoo moved to a system of care called “protected contact”, a radical departure from the previous approach of “free contact”.

Under the old method, Australian keepers, like others around the world, took their cue from the dominating approach of the mahouts, the keepers from the elephants’ home nations such as India, Malaysia and Thailand. (A picture from The Age archives – below – shows Mek Kepah’s arrival in 1978 with her mahout, Aruchunan Bin Karpan, yanking on her ear, his back bent with the effort, like he’s pulling out a stubborn turnip.)

Mek Kapah’s mahout trying to move her when she arrived at Melbourne Zoo in 1978.Credit: The Age Archives

The old approach meant keepers were in the same space as the female elephants for several hours a day, off and on (males were always handled mostly in protective contact). To offset this sometimes fatal risk, they occasionally had to control the elephants and, like the mahouts, were armed with an ankus, a short rod with a metal spike and hook. (In May 2007, a frustrated male keeper who was trying to control Dokkoon stabbed her with an ankus more than a dozen times in an incident that outraged the RSPCA and was labelled “inappropriate and excessive” by another keeper.)

The dangers of free contact came into sharp focus in 2012, when Taronga Zoo keeper Lucy Melo nearly died after the elephant calf Pathi Harn, also known as Mr Shuffles, pinned her against a bollard. Not long after, Taronga and Melbourne zoos decided to move away from free contact, although both say this was unrelated to any incident and simply part of a global trend.

“It’s about really respecting each as an individual. They get the ultimate choice and control in their lives.”

Protected contact means there’s now always a barrier between the human and the animal. To get the elephants to do what they need, the keepers must rely on training, backed by the positive reinforcement of treats such as bananas and lucerne cubes. Every morning, each elephant comes to the barn to rehearse a set of tasks that are mostly to do with making their medical care possible. This might be raising their feet for inspection or holding still for an injection or dental check (this involves getting used to a fake camera on the end of a pole in their mouth, so they don’t swallow the real camera).

The animals are so well trained and intelligent they generally respond simply to voice cues. “I look at what our elephants do,” says Lynch, “and I think, ‘I can’t even get my dog at home to do that.’ ” There’s a deeper philosophical question about the free will of a potentially bored captive elephant, but animal welfare scientists welcome this move and, at least in Melbourne Zoo’s case, a University of Melbourne study found the shift to have had some beneficial welfare outcomes.

Protected contact marked such a huge psychological shift in elephant care that some of the old methods now seem almost crazy. When Trail of the Elephants opened in 2003, the keepers walked Mek Kepah around the zoo. Having chased runaway toddlers along the zoo’s pathways, I find it astonishing this used to happen. So does Truelson. “I used to work with the elephants in free contact, pregnant with my two children, walking along beside them. I would never do that now,” she says.

Mali, one of the pregnant elephants at Melbourne Zoo, opens wide for the vets to work on her teeth. Credit: Meredith O’Shea

For decades it was completely normal to have elephants giving kids rides around the zoo, too. The zoo’s most famous elephant, Queenie, spent 40 years loping around with children on her back before she turned on her keeper Wilfred Lawson and killed him in 1944.

For Truelson, protected contact is not only safer for humans, it’s better for the elephants. And instead of looking to the keepers for socialisation, they look to each other and their environment. “It’s about really respecting each as an individual. They get the ultimate choice and control in their lives.”

Speaking of which, Dokkoon holds her ear straight out and still as Lynch draws three millilitres of blood. She’s responding mostly to the word “ear”, spoken by her long-term trainers Chris and Vinnie. Then they blow a whistle, which signals she’s about to get a reward of lucerne cubes. There’s nothing locking her in; she could leave at any time. But she is, after all, an old hand at this business: this is her third pregnancy.

Mali, 12, is the youngest of the expecting mothers. Credit: Meredith O’Shea

Her daughter, Mali, 12, is also pregnant (by the same bull, Luk Chai, which probably isn’t as odd in the elephant world as it would be in the human world). Num-Oi, 21, is the other pregnant female. Elephant manager Erin Gardiner, 38, says there’s a deep desire to see Num-Oi be a mother again after the double tragedy of losing her first calf, Sanook, at 11 months after his head got stuck in a suspended tyre in 2013, and her six-week-old calf Willow, who was born with congenital carpal flexure and was unable to stand and feed, in 2016. “I think all of us will probably shed a little tear when we see Num-Oi with a calf and just feel really happy. She’s a brilliant mother.”

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On a quiet August day at the zoo, Truelson and I are watching the female elephants. During their 22-month pregnancy, the longest of any mammal, the elephants don’t show much, they just look a little wider. They develop more pronounced mammary glands, which I see Mali has. We’re discussing how elephants talk to each other using low-frequency infrasound, a big chunk of which humans can’t hear.

On the day in 2006 when the three imported Thai elephants arrived, Truelson says Mek Kepah could hear them coming before she saw them. “She just stopped in her tracks, like she was really listening.” Truelson can’t hear some of the infrasonic chit-chat, but when their foreheads pulsate she knows they’re talking to each other.

After some reticence, Mek Kapah welcomed her new friends. Outside the zoo, the elephants’ importation was unwelcome in many quarters. A consortium of zoos, including Melbourne and Taronga, eventually imported eight animals from elephant tourist camps in Thailand, but their arrival was delayed for years by legal action and protests, with the RSPCA and animal welfare groups arguing that elephants suffer in zoos with obesity and foot problems, are hard to breed and were exploited to make money.

In hindsight, it was a crossing-the-Rubicon decision for Australian zoos. They could have heeded these calls and left the older generation of elephants – beneficently gifted by distant sultans – to graze on an open range and eventually die out. But once the imported elephants were here and breeding, it put extra pressure on the available space and raised a whole new set of welfare questions about how you manage their fission-fusion social structure, with the herd variously coming together and pulling apart (adult bulls also go through a hard-to-handle periodic phase called “musth”, in which testosterone spikes and they can be aggressive).

Elephant breeding was a tricky business at first. Bong Su was dubbed “the world’s most fertile Asian elephant” due to his high sperm count – almost double that of a regular elephant – but because he was raised with no male peers, he didn’t know how to do the, uh, elephant-nookie bit. “He was a very polite guy,” says Lynch. “There’s a certain assertive nature to some of this elephant breeding, where it’s about not being put off too easily.”

In the end, the zoos embarked on an artificial insemination program, which involved Lynch flying to Canada to learn how to massage the prostate of bull elephants (best not contemplate that too much). The program involved ferrying elephant semen from bulls elsewhere in Australia with precision timing, and flying in a team of specialists from Germany to perform the insemination. Melbourne Zoo produced five baby elephants this way, until the baby miracle-worker Luk Chai arrived in December 2020.

Luk Chai, a male bull elephant, has impregnated three females at the Melbourne Zoo. Credit: Meredith O’Shea

The first calf born in Australia under the elephant-artificial insemination project, Luk Chai was raised within a relatively normal social structure at Taronga Western Plains Zoo at Dubbo. I assumed he’d naturally impregnated the three females at Melbourne Zoo in the middle of lockdown, away from the human gaze. But no; Luk Chai did most of his baby-making in full view of the public. “He doesn’t really notice people,” says Gardiner, correcting this anthropocentric thinking. Some parents used it as an opportunity to talk about reproduction; others gently guided little Grace and Jack on to the orangutans.

Within a few months of Luk Chai’s arrival, the zoo had three knocked-up elephants. At least for now, they could say goodbye to awkward elephant prostate massages and long-haul flights for German mega-fauna reproductive experts.

I assumed he’d impregnated the three females away from the human gaze. But no; Luk Chai did most of his baby-making in full view of the public.

Backstage at the zoo, just outside the elephant-keeper office, Truelson shows me a video on her phone. It’s footage of a herd birth at Dublin Zoo. An elephant has just pushed out her baby. The other females, about six or so, nudge the new mum temporarily out of the way because she’s in pain and might accidentally trample the calf. One misstep could kill the calf, but the elephants gently use their feet and trunks to peel away the amniotic sac that clings to the grey bundle on the sandy floor like a white plastic bag.

The sound is prehistoric: like a horde of screeching dinosaurs, punctuated by loud squeaks, like air from a puckered balloon. Another young calf, knee-high to its aunties, is swept up in this elephant eddy and within three minutes the newborn finds its feet and mum floods it with infrasonic sound.

The Melbourne Zoo team would love to see this sort of herd birth, but having all the females present requires a bigger barn, like the one they’ll build for Werribee. Still, Mali will witness her own mother, Dokkoon, give birth. Then Mali’s first birth will have Dokkoon and Mali’s new sibling present, plus Mek Kepah, making it the biggest herd birth for an Australian zoo (each female is paired with elephant birthing partners she’s closest to). This will be a significant departure from most of the zoo’s previous births, which have been in free contact, with the mother separated from the herd and a keeper in the space. Taronga Western Plains Zoo has had two protected-contact births, one in 2018 with three elephants present.

Inside the office, Erin Gardiner, a keeper for 16 years before she became the manager, explains the logistics of preparing for three consecutive births. The husbandry birth plan is nearly 40 pages long, and Gardiner is across every contingency. “I will definitely be biting my nails a little bit because, you know, I desperately want to make sure everything goes well,” she says, as another keeper walks by with half a watermelon. “I care about these little babies. They’re not even born, but I already feel connected to them and I feel like we’re setting them up for success by having the herd birthing units.”

The elephants, which live for about 50 to 70 years in captivity, each had one ultrasound confirming the pregnancy at about six months. (This involves first putting your hand up their bottom and evacuating the poo. “You don’t shake people’s hands after that!” says Truelson.) Since then, it has been a matter of blood tests and keeping the pregnant elephants fit. Closer to their due dates they will have more frequent blood tests to check when their progesterone hits near-zero, a sign that birth is two or three days away. Then two keepers will stay overnight at the zoo, with Gardiner and Lynch logging on from home to check the enclosure cameras.

They might also do another ultrasound to see if stage one labour has started; Lynch says that can be “a little cryptic” and take up to three days. In this stage the elephant has contractions that lift the calf – which can be up to 150 kilograms – off the bottom of its abdomen and into the birth canal. Behind Gardiner, a keeper watches a live video stream of Man Jai, the eight-year-old bull who, having left the matriarchal herd, now hangs mostly with Luk Chai.

Man Jai is pushing against some old pool filter cells the keepers have tied up in a tree. The keepers think a lot about this sort of “enrichment”. They even put the bedding from the tiger exhibit into the enclosure, the scent of which provokes a predator alert and prompts them to move towards each other. “We want to elicit positive herd cohesion,” says Gardiner. “[Because] when you’re in the same environment every day, that can become monotonous.”

“The really cool thing is that, as these calves are born, you’re going to have a grandmother, mother, aunties, cousins … and hopefully a daughter.”

Gardiner loves the matriarchal herd and all their allomothering. “I think it’s because I’m from a big family, I see the similarities in that hustle and bustle.” She’s supposed to be keeping neutral about the whole gender thing but secretly hopes the new calves will be girls, so they can stay in the herd and make it truly multigenerational. “The really cool thing about this herd is that, as these calves are born, you’re going to have a grandmother, mother, aunties, cousins … and hopefully a daughter,” she says. “It will be incredible to knit together a herd of related animals, as they are in the wild.”

Michael Lynch and I are walking along a curving path to see the elephants, bamboo forest cracking above our heads. Lynch has been at every one of Melbourne’s five elephant births and done some things that sound truly terrifying, like – back in the free-contact days – sitting underneath the elephants on a small stool during artificial insemination training. He travelled to Thailand to perform health checks on the elephants chosen to come to Australia. He lived on the Cocos Islands for five months in 2006 with the elephants during their quarantine period and, in 2001, went to Thailand and Laos as a volunteer because he wanted to see the issues facing the zoo animals he cared for in their range states. There, he treated bears from bile farms, displaced gibbons and macaques, elephants in tourist camps and dozens of stray dogs.

He’s a contained man, thoughtful and pragmatic. “An important part is: should we keep elephants? Why do we have them? And these particular animals, is their life better here? Or are they better in Thai tourist camps where they were not living in normal family groups? And yeah, you’ve got to be a sort of pragmatist to work in the zoo because we all think – everyone believes – that the natural place for a wild animal is the wild.”

His question, as much to himself, it seems, is: would the world be a better place if the zoo didn’t exist? The answer for him is no. “As pragmatists, we believe we can give these animals a good quality life. We’re not pretending it’s like the life of a wild animal. But by … putting that money into supporting programs and education, we can make a positive difference in the world.”

Female elephants at the Melbourne Zoo. Credit: Meredith O’Shea

Since the Trail of the Elephants opening in 2003, the zoo has contributed $326,000 to programs supporting wild Asian elephants, whose numbers are now dwindling to as low as 30,000 by some estimates. This includes, since 2019, $178,000 on a Fauna and Flora International wildlife protection program in Pu Mat National Park in central-west Vietnam. Lam Van Hoang, FFI’s Vietnam program director, tells Good Weekend it appears that only nine elephants are left in the park, and the fact they exist at all – despite habitat fragmentation, elephant poaching and human-elephant conflict – is “remarkable”.

Truelson points out that if Asian elephants become extinct in their native countries, the world’s zoos and sanctuaries might be the only place left to see one. “And not everyone can afford to travel to see wild elephants.” The zoo team sees the elephants as species “ambassadors” which, they hope, will inspire visitors to help the fate of those in the wild. The research on whether zoos influence conservation action is mixed: some studies show conservation knowledge does not translate into action, others suggest up-close encounters with animals do.

“The ultimate question is if we really should keep elephants in captivity, where they are still seen by most people as a source of entertainment.”

In particular, the zoo asks visitors to take action on palm oil which, when farmed unsustainably, leads to habitat destruction for elephants, orangutans and tigers, among other species. In a 13-year campaign, it has encouraged 474,000 people to write to politicians urging them to mandate the labelling of palm oil in common supermarket products such as rice crackers, biscuits and chocolate.

The responsible ministers have done nothing, even after a ministerial-appointed, expert panel recommended labelling palm oil in a 2011 review. The zoo is still hopeful the ministers will act, but in the meantime encourages visitors to use only palm oil certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, and uses palm-oil free or certified products in its own catering.

Regardless of how zoos try to help wild elephants, animal welfare advocates continue to insist that they not be kept in captivity. University of Melbourne animal welfare scientist Ellen Jongman says zoos have got better at keeping elephants, with a focus on their mental health and social structures. And she welcomes Melbourne Zoo moving the elephants to Werribee, seeing it as a “natural progression” out of urban environments and into open-range zoos and wildlife parks.

Indeed, you can see signs of this trend here and around the world. Some of the world’s urban zoos, including Detroit and San Francisco, have given up their elephants on ethical grounds, while Taronga plans to move its two Sydney-based elephants, who live on just half a hectare, to Dubbo, which has seven elephants on four hectares. The zoo states it will create “a centre of excellence for elephant care, conservation and guest experience” at Dubbo, but can’t say when this will happen or if it will be bigger.

Jongman says that while Melbourne is one of the world’s top zoos for animal welfare and the use of the latest scientific knowledge, “the ultimate question is if we really should keep elephants in captivity, where they are still seen by most people as a source of entertainment.”

We walk back to the zoo’s front gate and Lynch returns to the ethical question of elephants in zoos. “That whole argument about whether zoos should exist or not, they are conversations worth having. I’m totally respectful of all the opinions,” he says. But he feels this next step – creating a multigenerational herd in Werribee – will be wonderful for the elephants. “For those animals to be raised in a cohort is tremendously enriching, and to have those mothers and aunties there, too. Mek Kepah and Kulab won’t have babies, but they’ll be part of it.”

It’s a gumboot kind of day at Werribee Open Range Zoo and, with Truelson and other zoo staff, we’re battling the wind whipping across a motley bunch of weedy old paddocks. As we pass a neglected bus, a disused animal shelter and a partially built elephant-proof fence of recycled railway tracks, it takes a leap of imagination to see what this place will become.

Instead of three small, gated spaces at Melbourne Zoo, the elephants will have six huge and interconnected habitats to roam across. A 1.6-kilometre, 30-metre-high gondola will ferry up to 1000 visitors an hour over the zoo’s open plains to a cafe that looks on to the elephants’ swimming pools. Then they can walk within an enclosed path, which the elephants will be free to traverse via overpasses.

“The idea is that we do not interrupt their day,” says Truelson. “So they have the ultimate choice.” Truelson recognises Melbourne Zoo visitors will be sad to see the elephants go, and also that not all zoos have the money and blank slate of land to do what Zoos Victoria is planning at Werribee. “But we’re passionate about not waiting for others to say: ‘You should be doing this.’ We want to be the ones that write the model that goes beyond expectations.”

With a fondness for bull elephants, Truelson looks across the paddocks and notes that Werribee will make managing the males much easier, with their own bachelor pad away from the herd. A place, no doubt, Bong Su would have loved.

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