Must & Murder

When his bull elephant grows restless, begins to ooze oily liquid from the porous spot in its forehead, the mahout in the teakwood forests of Upper Burma chains his big beast of burden securely, leaves it strictly alone until the condition is past. This periodic frenzy, probably sexual, is called "must" (from the Hindu mast, meaning ruttish, intoxicated). Because of it. bull elephants are extremely rare in U. S. circuses and zoos. Some months ago Director Edmund Heller of San Francisco's Fleishhacker Zoo decided to try breeding his four cow elephants, began looking for a mate. He wrote to famed Animal Collector Frank ("Bring 'Em Back Alive") Buck, who had supplied three of the cows, and both searched in vain until the Al G. Barnes Circus announced that it would be glad to give San Francisco a bull which had be come a nuisance because of his uncertain temper. He was a 6-ton, 9-ft. high, 25-year-old beast called "Charley Ed," valued at $5,000 minus a tusk which he had lost in a fall from a baggage car. After he ap peared with Wallace Beery in the cinema O'Shaughnessy's Boy he was re-named "Wally." Well-behaved. Wally proved a star attraction at Fleishhacker Zoo.

In the pool inside the big, concrete-barred elephant paddock he splashed and whooshed for two hours one hot morning last week, part of the time with one of the cows. Then Keeper Ed Brown decided to part them, take Wally to a small separate paddock. He asked Keeper Rudolph Bjork to hold back the cows.

"The first thing I knew about the trou ble," said Keeper Bjork afterward, "was when I heard Ed swear--and then I looked over that way. Wally had him on the ground with his left front foot on him and was trumpeting and stamping. He stamped and kicked at Ed and then dug his one tusk deep into Ed's body and jerked his head upward--ripping and slashing. He didn't lift Ed off the ground, but just gored him with a vicious ripping motion."

The cow elephants began to squeal and stamp. Throughout the zoo rose a jungle din of roars, howls, screams, snarls. Rudolph Bjork and another keeper seized an iron rod and an elephant hook, began beating and prodding at the maddened beast through the paddock bars. His little eyes bloodred, Wally flourished his trunk at them, went on stamp'ng and gouging his victim. Guards scurried up, stood with rifles cocked to shoot the female elephants if they should stampede. It was too late to do anything for Ed Brown. His body was in four pieces when the keepers finally drove Wally off.

"Come here, you big lunk!" shouted the head keeper few minutes later. Blood dripping from his single tusk, Wally padded over to the fence, let one hind foot be chained. But when the brave keeper attempted to chain his front feet, Wally swept the man's straw hat into his mouth, crunched, spat out the pieces. The front feet remained unchained.

Few hours later Director Heller and Banker Herbert Fleishhacker, zoo patron and Park Commission president, decided that Wally must die. Ten minutes before the scheduled execution next day a taxicab skidded up to the scene and out leaped a short, chunky man who introduced himself as Alexander Mooslin, "a lover of animals." Zoophilist Mooslin had gone to court, got a one-day restraining order against Wally's execution. "Plaintiff verily believes," he had petitioned, "that no animal of such dignity as this elephant should be destroyed or killed." Furthermore, argued Mr. Mooslin, Wally was a "movie elephant," hence too valuable a city property to be destroyed.

Reprieved, Wally swayed in chains while San Francisco newspapers stirred up a hot controversy over the question of his death. Said the president of the California Federation of Women's Clubs: "Animals are not gifted with our intelligence . . ." Said a sportsman: "He did not ask to leave his forest home in the Malay Peninsula . . ." Said Author Peter B. Kyne: "It was mating season with Wally." Next day the restraining order expired, the Judge refused to renew it, the District Court of Appeals denied Alexander Mooslin a review. Up to the bars of the elephant paddock stepped three crack-shot policemen armed with high-powered rifles. Wally was brought to his knees by chains. Firing in succession, the policemen put three steel-nosed bullets in his brain and the great hulk slumped, lay quivering in the dust.

In Manhattan, sure that Wally had been in must, Frank Buck cried: "It was a useless waste of life. He would soon have been normal again."

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