One morning out walking an elephant crosses my path

Freelance writer PETER CALDER encounters Burma, one of Auckland Zoo's elephants who escaped in Western Springs yesterday.


Burma - a trim 2.6 tonnes - is just a little elephant. And though elephants at large are always said to be running amok, she was really only ambling when she decided she'd had enough of shifting from foot to leathery foot in the yard at the edge of Auckland Zoo.

But when she stepped slowly out into the children's playground and headed for the open expanses of Western Springs Park, I had little hesitation in standing aside.

My wife and I, on a morning constitutional round the lakeside, had been alerted by a passing jogger as we entered the park that an elephant was "trying to get out".

That turned out to be something of an understatement. When we reached her, Burma was standing in a small area behind a zoo service building gazing through an open gateway. The gate, already removed from its hinges by the forceful application of elephant flank, leaned drunkenly. The gap looked as wide as the Grand Canyon.

We had a bit of fun talking to her for a while, soothingly urging her to remain calm, which she must have thought a huge joke since, as I later learned, she responds to instructions only from one of the zoo's four elephant keepers which are issued in a mix of German, Maori and Sri Lankan languages.

Certainly, as she stepped out into the park, our admonitions, issued in the voice one uses to a mischievous puppy, were starting to sound comically ineffectual even to us.

The zoo staff we could glimpse through the fence seemed remarkably untroubled. We spoke to the jogger at 7.24am, met Burma at 7.26 and she went walkabout at 7.42. During that period, I suggested in entirely undiplomatic terms that it was time somebody did something and was told, in tones suggesting I was being unnecessarily troublesome, that they were "onto it, mate".

Burma reached the path and broke into an ear-flapping trot with us in futile pursuit. We had separate, chilling visions of a peripatetic pachyderm in rush-hour traffic but Burma made a sharp left and sought shelter on the bush-clad slopes on the park's eastern side.

By this time, the place was swarming with zookeepers, one armed with a powerful rifle. The words "Code Red" were being bellowed into walkie-talkies.

My wife glimpsed Burma in the bush, although the keepers, who looked and saw nothing, seemed for an alarmingly long time to think she was mistaken.

It was another 10 minutes before staff finally located Burma and moved in to control her.

Zoo director Glenn Holland said that his staff were alerted before the gate was even breached that Burma was up against the fenceline and the elephant staff were mobilised.

"No other staff are allowed to try and approach or control an elephant," he said.

"In terms of timing I'm actually pretty happy with the way it was dealt with."

He said the electric fence around Burma's enclosure would be replaced with "an elephant-proof fence", a move whose wisdom is hard to dispute.

But I can't help wondering: Shouldn't the elephant have been behind an elephant-proof fence?

And what if the playground had been full of kids? And what if Burma had been a lion?