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Zoo Operates Under Gaps In Oversight
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The keeper notes end with the entry, "Sad day."
"We did everything we could to treat all of Nancy's symptoms," Marie Galloway, the lead elephant keeper, said recently. She began to cry. "When we could no longer say her quality of life was good, we gave her the gift of peace."
The necropsy, performed the day the elephant died by Nichols and Richard J. Montali, the zoo's chief pathologist, contained a surprise. The bone disease was "moderate," the report states. "The most significant finding," the report says, was "an extensive granulomatous pneumonia involving 60 percent" of the lungs -- tuberculosis that developed one to two years earlier.
The results were unsettling. Among vets who work with captive elephants, TB had become one of the most prominent veterinary issues in the past several years. Yet Nancy had not been tested in 22 months, since October 1998.
The lack of testing has never before been made public. If it had, it would have been especially embarrassing for the National Zoo because one of its own, Montali, had been instrumental in developing the test and persuading the USDA in 1997 to require it annually. "Elephants with tuberculosis can transmit the disease to other elephants, other animals and, potentially, to humans," a USDA policy announcement said.
Zoos and circuses that do not perform the tests can be cited for failing to provide adequate care under the Animal Welfare Act.
National Zoo officials said the tests were not done because the veterinarians were busy with a number of "unusual" circumstances, including the deteriorating health of giant panda Hsing Hsing.
"During the winter of 2000, plans were made to do trunk washes, but they were not carried out," zoo officials said in a written response to questions earlier this year. "The veterinary staff's priority at the time was Nancy's critical foot infection as well as the rest of the collection, including the ailing Hsing Hsing."
Hsing Hsing was euthanized in November 1999, nine months before Nancy.
"We were all very, very busy," said Galloway, the elephant keeper.
Specialists in zoo medicine and elephant care said they would have expected the widely regarded National Zoo to be at the forefront of conducting these state-of-the-art TB tests.
"That kind of surprises me," said Mike Keele, chairman of the species survival plan for Asian elephants and deputy director of the Oregon Zoo in Portland.
