Elephant Care and Feeding Water: 30 to 50 gallons a day Food: 150 to 200 pounds a day of oat hay, complemented by grass, banana plants, apples, carrots, loaves of wheat bread and palm fronds Waste: The 30 elephants generate one ton of manure a day. It’s hauled away weekly in two 30-yard trash bins. Total annual per-elephant cost: $60,000

Osgood, Asian elephant, elephas maximus, is just 8 years old — seven years shy of adulthood — but he’s already as aggressive and unpredictable as older, bigger males. He’s come of age in another way too. “Excellent semen,” notes handler Trudy Williams clinically. “Osgood was producing viable semen at age 5.”

Williams — and Osgood — work at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Center for Elephant Conservation, a 200-acre spread southwest of Orlando that’s home to 30 elephants, the largest herd of Asian elephants in the hemisphere and the most diverse gene pool. With 20 births — a 21st is on the way — the breeding effort is the most successful Asian elephant breeding operation on the continent.

Out past horse stables and farmland near Polk City, down a long, unmarked, unpaved drive, the center is tough to find — by design. It’s closed to the public (except for the occasional education tour), but anyone who gets as far as the fence and locked gate will know quickly that he hasn’t blundered upon your typical central Florida ranch. There, striding across the Florida flatland, are groups of Asian elephants — smaller than their African counterparts and with smaller ears — separated into twos and threes in electric-wired paddocks.

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As an elephant’s muted trumpet call sounds in the distance, Williams and Janice Aria, director of animal stewardship and training, provide details of elephant life and upkeep. The youngest elephant at the center is 18 months old; the oldest is over 61. There’s a reason the females here don’t move in one large herd as in the wild: Hierarchy would be settled the hard way — Mean Girls at about 9,000 pounds apiece. “Since we have them, it’s our responsibility really to give them a better life than they have in the wild,” Williams says.

Each female spends the night tethered next to a compatible female in the hulking barn that dominates the grounds. As in the wild, the five males are solitary. They spend the morning through late afternoon in individual barn enclosures behind steel pipe barriers 10 feet high; at night they’re funneled through gates and chutes to solo paddocks.

Trudy Williams, 43, grew up around elephants. Her family owns them. Her uncle provided the elephants for the film Evan Almighty. [Photo: Jeffrey Camp]

Vienna, Va.-based Feld Entertainment, the owner of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, whose winter quarters is in Tampa, built the center in 1995. Its stated mission is altruistic — conservation, breeding, scientific study and retirement. Numbering 35,000 to 50,000 in the wild and 14,000 to 15,000 domesticated, the Asian elephant is endangered. The elephant’s primary challenge is loss of habitat, but it has other troubles. It’s shot or poisoned as an agricultural pest that sometimes falls in violent conflict with humans. It’s been replaced as labor by mechanization. Poachers kill males for their tusks. Reproduction is slow.

“I could see that if we didn’t do something with regard to conservation and breeding, elephants could become extinct in the wild,” says Ringling Bros. Chairman and CEO Kenneth Feld.

In addition to paying the Ringling center’s $5-million construction tab, the circus takes about 5% of each circus ticket sale to pay the center’s $1.8 million operating budget and to fund conservation efforts in Sri Lanka. Ringling also funded for two years a Smithsonian lab dedicated to studying a herpes strain that’s taking a harsh toll on elephants. “I don’t believe there’s anybody else who can raise Asian elephants as well as we can. It’s just sort of our way of giving back that other entities can’t do,” Feld says.

Ringling’s efforts are well-regarded by zoos, says Mike Keele, deputy director of the Oregon Zoo and head of the animal’s species survival plan for the American Association of Zoos and Aquariums. “Overall, the industry thinks they’re doing good things for elephants.”

Potency

Trudy Williams and Janice Aria spend some time with two of the 30 elephants at the 200-acre Center for Elephant Conservation near Polk City. The center is home to the largest herd of Asian elephants in the hemisphere. [Photo: Jeffrey Camp]

Aside from its stated mission, the center also addresses business problems for the circus. The commitment to conservation may blunt, in the public’s mind, concerns raised in court, outside arenas and on YouTube by groups opposed to Ringling’s inclusion of elephants in its circus.

Ringling also needs a supply of elephants for its shows. Under the 1975 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, it’s become all but impossible to import elephants into the United States. The last import was in 1999 to the Oregon Zoo, and that case involved the special circumstance of a 4-year-old orphan elephant blinded in one eye by a gun blast while foraging in a palm oil plantation.

So as Ringling’s performing elephants age, the circus has to turn to replacements born in captivity, which brings us back to the potency of Osgood’s semen. While tigers, for example, reproduce well in captivity, elephants don’t. Some zoos have tried artificial insemination with little success. Gathering elephant sperm from a male and inserting it in a female poses challenges given the scale of the anatomy. And because no one has figured out how to freeze elephant sperm while retaining its viability, as is done in cattle, elephant sperm has to be rushed to a breeding-age female and deposited quickly. Keele says there have been just two births from artificial insemination at U.S. zoos.

That leaves old-fashioned coupling, but only a few zoos have active breeding programs for Asian elephants. Bull elephants usually need to be kept in areas apart from females and from each other. They require lots of space, are tough to handle and are hard on facilities, explains Michael Fouraker, executive director of the Fort Worth Zoo, to which Ringling has loaned a bull elephant for breeding. Fouraker is envious of the Ringling center’s birth rate and speculates that exercise and diet might be the reason. “Honestly, they’re a model for zoos. We’re looking to them for answers,” he says.

Janice Aria likes to say she ran away from college to join the circus. She joined Ringling’s clown college in 1972 and later worked at the now-defunct Circus World attraction near Haines City. There, 30 years ago, she met Charlie, a captive-born male, who grew up to be a father of 11. “I’m like a grandmother — ‘Oh my! Grandkids!’” the 57-year-old says. [Photo: Jeffrey Camp]

The center, meanwhile, looks to a bull elephant named Charlie for answers. To facilitate successful impregnation, the center checks female elephants’ progesterone levels weekly at an Ocala lab to get the timing of the female’s four-month cycle. Charlie, however, is nearly as accurate as the lab. “If they’re close to cycling or are cycling, he won’t let them out of his sight,” Williams says, stopping at his barn and flinging Charlie a treat, which Charlie snatches up with his trunk. “We can shift him and the female together, but he’s not going to let you separate him. He keeps them usually for three days and then says, ‘OK, I’m done.’ He’s almost more reliable than the science is, which is helping improve the science.”

Baby elephants are born 22 months after conception, usually weighing 250 to 300 pounds. Even when elephants successfully breed, the infant mortality rate is 35% to 40%, Keele says. Ringling beats the standard with a 10% mortality rate. “Ringling has a great record,” Keele says. “Ringling’s animals are in pretty good shape.”

As the elephants mature, Aria, Williams and staff watch to see which animals have a future as performers. A covered area with music and a barrel toy — the only visible reminders of the circus at the center aside from an old circus rail car that serves as an office — helps determine which young elephants will perform in the arena. As early as age 3, some elephants go off to one of Ringling’s show units to see how they take to the road. Males, once out of the “cute” years, are too unmanageable for the show and go back to the center permanently — a multimillion-dollar lifetime expense, Aria notes.

“Only a third of the elephants that we have, even the young ones that are born, actually end up being performers,” she says. “They’re like people. They don’t all take to it.”

Of Ringling’s 53 elephants, only 17 are in the circus’s two performing units. The center houses most of the others; six are at a retirement facility in Williston in Levy County. Williams says a new barn is planned for the center so those six can be with the others.

Pachygerms

Lately, though, no one’s been going on the road from the center. Last year, routine testing found Osgood and another elephant had carried tuberculosis, and the state put a quarantine on both them and 25 elephants exposed to them. Another five elephants at Williston are under quarantine. Quarantines last usually for more than a year, until a treatment regimen is completed for those infected and until exposed animals test negative for a period of time.

The TB incident provides fodder for groups opposed to circus animal acts such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “We think it’s ludicrous for Ringling to attempt to put a conservation spin on its elephant-breeding program,” says RaeLeann Smith, PETA’s circus specialist. “Every move is dictated and manipulated,” Smith says. “They’re stressed; they’re bored; they’re abused. Everything that is natural to them has been taken away.”

Williams says that those who oppose keeping elephants in captivity don’t care how well the center may treat the animals. “If they’re anywhere but in Asia, they’re not happy with it.”

Feld also is undeterred. “I will tell you that I’m more proud of what we’re doing at the Center for Elephant Conservation than anything else,” he says. “We have the largest gene pool of Asian elephants in the Western Hemisphere. We’re the leader in Asian elephant conservation. We are making a difference.”

“Only a third of the elephants that we have ... end up being performers. They’re like people. They don’t all take to it,” says Janice Aria, director of animal stewardship and training. [Photo: Jeffrey Camp]