mr shuffles..
WRITTEN off for dead just five days ago, Taronga Zoo's teak-tough elephant calf has emerged from intensive care to perform his first routine on the public stage.
Sticking close to the protective belly of his mother Porntip, the calf, dubbed Mr Shuffles, gingerly explored the confines of one of the world's more unlikely elephant breeding grounds on the harbour's rocky edge on the fringe of Mosman.
Venturing close to the waters of his yard's little pond, his trunk danced like a conductor's baton as he sampled smells and textures of his world, tasting the palm trunk that was his mother's breakfast. He sniffed sawdust and almost teetered over as he struggled up a tiny mound of earth, a first lesson on just how high an elephant's centre of gravity really is.
Apart from his bloodshot eyes, which are a normal feature of birth, he appears remarkably healthy. Although, the zoo's experts are still struggling to comprehend how quickly the 116-kilogram infant has recovered from a week-long labour, including three motionless days in a coma with no hint of a heartbeat.
''As far as we were concerned, he'd been dead for three days,'' said Gary Miller, the zoo's elephant supervisor. Since the calf proved the experts wrong on Wednesday morning, Mr Miller has hardly left his side, struggling to get him through those early days. ''He needed help. His left legs were not working real well … his left side was not really functional.''
He and his staff spent days massaging him, encouraging blood into his right side, getting him up, walking him around and moving his joints to get them functioning.
'It took quite a while for him to get his legs under him. He kept tipping over on his left side, going in circles to the left one side was working and one wasn't.''
Without this help, Mr Miller thought his chance of survival were remote. ''I don't think so, it was a really hard labour … it would have been very difficult for him to survive in the wild.''
With no detectable heartbeat for three days, zoo staff were especially worried about brain damage, but Mr Miller said that fear had evaporated as the calf demonstrated ''amazing recuperative powers'' and was reaching developmental milestones right on time.
''I'd say he's going to be 100 per cent,'' he said.
''Today's milestones says he's strong enough to negotiate uneven ground.''
The zoo's next big challenge is to convince people to stop calling him Mr Shuffles, the name staff gave him in those first perilous days he was upright.
Instead, they'd prefer to give him a Thai name to remind people of the origin of his parents. They have asked the public to vote on a list of seven Thai names on the zoo's website.
http://www.taronga.org.au/
