SLIDE 13
(Nancy Pratt)
Okay, thank you, Thomas, and thanks everybody
for hanging in there. I am the last speaker; I promise. Most
of you probably recognize this girl here, this is Shanthi. And
Shanthi is a 19 year old female Asian elephant. As John told
you she came from an orphanage in Sri Lanka originally. Some
of you may wonder why are we doing artificial insemination instead
of another natural breeding with Shanthi, or just in general in
elephants. There are several reasons, one of them is that as
Thomas said, bulls are very difficult to keep. They are very
aggressive, they're not as easy to train, especially in a free
contact system like we have here at the National Zoo. And so
not every zoo can keep males around for breeding purposes. The
other thing is that elephants live in a matrilineal society.
Their society, their culture is run by females, and they live
in female magnet groups, usually headed by one older female and
her offspring. When the male offspring get to a certain age,
they leave the group. This is becoming more and more important
as John mentioned in his talk in elephant management in captivity.
We want to try to start keeping elephants in their natural family
groups, and when Shanthi was bred to Indy in Syracuse, she had
to be sent up there for a year and a half. Now, not only is this
expensive for us, to ship elephants around, and time consuming,
but it's very stressful to the elephants themselves, and it's
disruptive to their social group. So one of the very, very important
things in endangered species research right now is developing
artificial insemination for elephants. People have been trying
to develop these techniques for almost 20 years. No one has produced
an elephant calf. What I'm going to do right now is describe
to you step by step what we did with Shanthi in October in our
artificial insemination attempt. This attempt was different from
all other artificial inseminations in that we were able to verify
exactly where we deposited semen in the reproductive tract. Nobody
else has ever been able to do that.