Erowid LSD Vault : LSD Related Death of Elephant in 1962
Los Angeles Times Obituaries
March 28, 2001
Warren D. Thomas, the controversial director of the Los Angeles Zoo who, over 16 years, built one of the greatest animal collections in the country and worked to save endangered species but resigned abruptly amid charges of mishandling animals and city money, has died. He was 70.
Thomas, director of the city-owned Griffith Park facility from 1974 to 1990, died March 17 of a sudden illness during a trip to Brunei, said his wife, Marilyn. He had spent the last decade consulting with zoos and lecturing on cruise ships on "Gorillas I Have Known and Loved."
When Thomas came to Los Angeles more than a quarter-century ago, he had a far better established reputation than the Los Angeles Zoo, which was then a decade old. With a bachelor's degree in zoology and doctorate in veterinary medicine from Ohio State University, Thomas had worked as a keeper at the Columbus Zoo, delivering the first gorilla born outside the wild and garnering coverage of the feat in Life magazine. He had also served as director of zoos in Oklahoma City, Omaha and Brownsville, Texas, designing and stocking them with animals.
At the time of his appointment by the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department, Thomas was hailed by his predecessor as "one of the most outstanding young professionals in the country." Mayor Tom Bradley, announcing Thomas' selection from a field of 20 candidates worldwide, said the city was very lucky to have him.
Thomas built the Los Angeles Zoo into an important family and tourist attraction with more than 500 species of mammals, birds and reptiles. When Australia gave the zoo six koalas in 1982, Thomas oversaw construction of a privately funded "Koala Hilton" to house them and personally accompanied the little marsupials on their flight from Melbourne to Los Angeles.
Widely respected for his animal conservation and breeding programs, Thomas involved the zoo in a cooperative breeding program to conserve the California condor and return birds born in protective captivity to the wild. He also helped establish the Sumatran Rhinoceros Trust by bringing together officials of four U.S. zoos and Indonesian authorities.
Gregarious, even charismatic, Thomas was well-liked and respected by most of his zookeepers but seen by critics as arrogant and overly eager to skirt government rules.
LA TIMES April 20, 1992
As a supporter of the Los Angeles Zoo for more than 20 years, I write in reference to your editorial, "The Horror of Hannibal's Death" (March 24), which questions the way L.A. Zoo Director Mark Goldstein tried to move the elephant, and mentions that Goldstein was brought here from Boston "in the hopes he could clean up the mess left by a predecessor, Warren Thomas, whose tenure was marked by allegations of mismanagement, financial irregularities and mistreatment of animals."
The fact is that Dr. Thomas was a superb zoo director whose reputation was world-class. He had managed other zoos before coming to Los Angeles in 1974, and was an international leader in the movement to preserve endangered species. Under his outstanding leadership the L.A. Zoo was significantly elevated from its previous condition.
Thomas instituted many excellent training programs in animal care and management, upgraded the zoo's public educational functions, added many rare animals such as the woolly monkey and the giant eland, promoted a number of programs to save vanishing species such as the California condor and the Sumatran rhinoceros, and he also delivered by Cesarean section two baby gorillas, so rarely bred in a zoo.
The allegations about Dr. Thomas were not truly related to any inadequacy on his part, but rather to the crazy way our zoo is governed. It operates under controls exercised both by the voluntary Greater Los Angeles Zoo Assn. (GLAZA) and by city employees responsible to the mayor and the commission. Caught between those two frequently conflicted entities (further complicated by power struggles within each of them) even a distinguished leader like Dr. Thomas was eventually immobilized and tragically scapegoated.
If we are to prevent this two-headed dragon from devouring our excellent new director, and also to avoid superficial judgments (such as were expressed in The Times) about highly technical problems in animal management, we might do better to look at the world's other great zoos, especially those with exceptional records of good management, and then consider how better to administer ours. We might start by ensuring that the zoo director's authority is made commensurate with his responsibility, and that his hands are not tied or slapped by amateurs.
LOUIS JOLYON WEST, Los Angeles
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2 comments:
Goes to show how cheap the life of an elephant was in the 1960's, when they cost about the same as some pure bred dogs today. I couldn't imagine such a potentially dangerous experiment being done on an elephant today.
The experiment was to see if they could induce musth. Pretty ridiculous considering the animal was 10 years old and most likely hadn't had his first natural musth anyway.
Although that era was rife with radical experiments on human beings (mostly mentally handicapped ones), so this seems par for the course in that nutty, random, anything goes, school of scientific discovery.
Ian
Ian,
I disagree about the cheapness or cost of an animal, in fact there is a reference to that fact that the cost of replacing one in another experiment was of concern. I think it was about doing something without much prior research and study, and the assumption, that still holds true today, that they are the same as humans, and thus should react the same way and be afforded the same "rights" as a human, which has been the basis of the animal rights movements, instead of the more valid "welfare" argument of the animal "welfare" movement.
Wade
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