Sunday, January 29, 2012

Thank You Readers For The Incredible Education You Have Given Me.

Ringling Bros. Boston Year unknown

The Circus "NO SPIN ZONE": Loxodonta cyclotis--African Forest Elephant

The Circus "NO SPIN ZONE": It is hard to learn something when there is censoring

The Circus "NO SPIN ZONE": Addendum to the letter in the following post.

The Circus "NO SPIN ZONE": African Elephant Domestication Centre at Garamba National Park near Gangala Na Bodio--1972

The Circus "NO SPIN ZONE": Update--Sept. 14 ,2008 Okapi Thread

The Circus "NO SPIN ZONE": Cyclotis elephants--The Congo 1948

5 comments:

Bob Cline said...

Richard Reynolds can give much more detail than I, but this photo was taken in either 1936 or 1937. Congo died in early 1937, although I don't have an exact date of death.

Bob

Richard Reynolds said...

This is 1936

Anonymous said...

Wade: The forest elephants in the Ringling Circus in 1936 were billed as "Pygmy elephants", http://bucklesw.blogspot.ca/search?q=Pygmy+elephants It says 1936 Pygmy elephants, but it also says "The damn things grew up." However there were supposed to have been Pygmy elephants in the Kanshasa Zoo in Congo-Zaire and in the private presidential zoo in Liberia as recently as the 1970s which stayed small, and did not "grow up". There's also an interesting item posted with the stuff on Pygmy elephants about hippos in Budapest Zoo posted by Richard Reynolds. There was a theory about subpopulations, that Pygmy elephants may not be a separate subspecies from the forest elephant, but that there are subpopulations of forest elephants which only grow to about 6.5 feet as adults. Sincerely Paul

Anonymous said...

Wade: I went back to Buckles and saw that these three elephants were Puqua (female), Sudan (female), and Congo (male). Only Sudan is listed in the African elephant studbook as 311 1934, unless the others had different names. I have to run. I'm really busy today. Sincerely Paul

Anonymous said...

Wade: I went back and looked through the African Elephant Studbook and I found listings for two more elephants, which could be two of the forest elephants in your photograph. I know from all that research into white tiger genealogy which I did, how animals names can change, or how they may have an official name and a nickname etc. There are two others listed as females. They are Zombie 8 1934 and Zombini 10 1936. It's kind of a funny co-incidence that one of these elephants had the same name as the okapi above, Congo, and another was named Sudan, and that I believe is also the name of the last male Northern white rhino left alive on earth. Did you see the newspaper article? He lives in a reserve in Kenya where they have over a hundred black rhino and 20 or 30 (I forget) Southern white rhino, and I assume they also have the other four remaining Northern white rhinos, the females. I don't know whether they can come back from that. I know there is a species of black robins in New Zealand whose numbers dropped to one female and four males, so they transplanted the entire population to a remote island, and today there are hundreds. For a while they were captive bred. Then there's the Arabian oryx which came back after all of the survivors were sent to a zoo in Arizona. I think there were maybe six left. One was sent from Saudi Arabia. They've been reintroduced to the wild including Israel. Did you see the video of the gorilla breaking the glass at the Henry Doorly Zoo? It seems that they also have a bachelor group like Detroit Zoo, as though zoos have become victims of their own breeding success and now have to warehouse all these surplus males, which I guess they wouldn't dare destroy for fear of bad publicity. I remember when the SSP told the Cincinnati Zoo to stop breeding gorillas, and Ed Maruska said that there were zoos in Australia and Asia which wanted gorillas, and that it didn't really make sense for them to stop. I assume the first white rhinos in Europe, which Gerald Iles told me about, were at Antwerp Zoo, and were Northern white rhinos from Congo-Zaire. Last night I saw Loren Coleman on TV, on Secrets of the Museum. He has a website and co-authored the book on cryptozoology I've been talking about. The story was in connection with "skunk apes", which are supposed chimpanzee-like apes living wild in Florida, and I think elsewhere in the South. They said there were a lot of reports and sightings in the 1970s, and that "skunk apes" eat cats. There's a chapter on them in the book also. I'm not too sure that I believe they exist. Sincerely Paul