Extremely Huge Voluntary Insemination Devices

It's late, and this has to be more cursory than maybe I'd like it to be. I have to teach in the morning, my 8am class depends on me to be awake and energetic because it's hard for them to be, most of them. Poor things (cf. Sontag: if you're in the class, you'll get the joke.)

Anyway, the long and short of it is this: Chuck and I went to Busch Gardens for his birthday. We don't do roller coasters, only the zoo and gardens part. Chuck takes endless pictures and dreams of a time when he can turn everything into a neat tropical paradise with naturalized orchids and neat beds of coleus and heliconia (my God, the plant has its own website). He also studies the water features, dreaming of the day when he can stop slaving for McKesson and get on with his real work: pushing water around the yard.

After two abortive attempts to get on the Stanleyville Express and head out to the faux-Serengeti (this is the real one), we decided to confine ourselves to the faux-Nairobi (ditto) and environs, and just watch the animals we like best. I beelined for the elephants, who are in a new habitat as part of the Rhino Rally ride.

We got there at feeding time, which was excellent, because that meant there were keepers there I could grill. The keeper closest to me was leaning on the fence, trying to trample down some dork from Long Island (note the messed up design of the official site: I'm just saying) asking things about whether zoo goers try to worship the elephants because in some countries you know they worship rats, yessirree, rats. He saw it on television.

And Christ knows she's thinking, save me from the idiots, at least the elephants are smarter than this bozo, when up trundles Idiot Girl with her questions about carnivorous elephants (don't know if you can follow this link. If not, I'll post the whole exchange somehow).

After Bozo and Idiot Girl, I figure I must have been a dream, because at least I knew what elephants ate and wasn't rasping off her eardrums with my accent.

So when I could wedge my way into the conversation, I wondered, in conversation-stopping detail, about what happened to the dead elephants. I wondered, out loud and specificially, if they were fed to the tigers. Or if the dead gazelles were. What about, say, the rabbits or equally prolific animals at the zoo? Was there culling?

Come to find out they get Aramark just like the rest of us. Only the animal kind.

My questions led the keeper to opine about Mim the elephant who died recently, then to tell me in detail which elephants were dominant in the herd, then to opine that there were no bull elephants at Busch Gardens (this with a description of early elephant musth, caused by the culling of older males in wild populations). Then she told me they were doing a breeding program there trying to inseminate four of the elephants.

So of course I asked how, I mean if you're a zoo, do you just get everyone naked, set out a barrel of zoo-juice (hay saturated with grain alcohol) and wait for the magic?

I knew that most cows are artificially inseminated these days because cattle mating can be dangerous (thank you to my long years at UWW and Clemson for this information). I wondered if elephants were equally -- challenged.

Apparently, they can be.

The keeper then described the process and apparatus.

Yes, she said, the handlers (and I presume the elephants themselves) preferred actual mating. But they had a -- tool -- which allowed

(graphic content follows)

doctors to do both a vaginal and a rectal exam simultaneously, while inseminating the animal.

She said, I'm nearly quoting here, "we don't use harnesses or chains or straps or anything to restrain the animal. She can go ahead and mount or not. It's totally voluntary."

Which made me wonder about a lot of stuff, and I'm sure you're wondering too. But I didn't know how to ask, short of saying, "um, can I WATCH?" which is really what I wanted to do, just so I could get everything straight in my head -- the mechanics of it and all -- and see the Tool itself. It must look like something out of Elephant Adam and Eve.

So then I got to wondering how many D batteries it took. Or if it needed a car battery. Or if the insemination room had TVs with pay-per-view, or if elephants were at all visual in their lusts --

Can you imagine?

Me too.