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.