Learning from Dogs

(I’ve been shuffling through some old draft posts that didn’t make it live on to the Blog.  Found this one and thought that it would appeal to many Learning from Dog readers, hence the fact that this is rather old news, so to speak.)

A baby elephant is back from the dead, big time!

Mr Shuffles as he was known then was born on the 10th March this year.  The magical aspect of that was the fact that, well let the journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald take up the story.

WRITTEN off for dead just five days ago, Taronga Zoo‘s teak-tough elephant calf has emerged from intensive care to perform his first routine on the public stage.

Sticking close to the protective belly of his mother Porntip, the calf, dubbed Mr Shuffles, gingerly explored the confines of one of the world’s more unlikely elephant breeding grounds on the harbour’s rocky edge on the fringe of Mosman.

Venturing close to the waters of his yard’s little pond, his trunk danced like a conductor’s baton as he sampled smells and textures of his world, tasting the palm trunk that was his mother’s breakfast. He sniffed sawdust and almost teetered over as he struggled up a tiny mound of earth, a first lesson on just how high an elephant’s centre of gravity really is.

But the young elephant did survive and now has been renamed to something more appropriate for an Tibetan elephant – Pathi Harn, meaning miracle in Tibetan.

Here’s a video of the young lad.

Back to the Sydney Morning Herald story:

Apart from his bloodshot eyes, which are a normal feature of birth, he appears remarkably healthy. Although, the zoo’s experts are still struggling to comprehend how quickly the 116-kilogram infant has recovered from a week-long labour, including three motionless days in a coma with no hint of a heartbeat.

”As far as we were concerned, he’d been dead for three days,” said Gary Miller, the zoo’s elephant supervisor. Since the calf proved the experts wrong on Wednesday morning, Mr Miller has hardly left his side, struggling to get him through those early days. ”He needed help. His left legs were not working real well … his left side was not really functional.”

He and his staff spent days massaging him, encouraging blood into his right side, getting him up, walking him around and moving his joints to get them functioning.

Wonderful.

Magic moment … Taronga Zoo's baby Asian elephant, nicknamed Mr Shuffles, has made his first teetering steps in public, never straying far from his mother's side. Photo: Kate Geraghty

By Paul Handover