Letter From Dallas
Don’t Forget Jenny
What happens when a lonely elephant, unsuspecting city officials, and a group of vocal activists collide? My hometown turns into a zoo.
pj says: The best thing you can do for Jenny is to just keep calling Mayor Leppert and the Dallas City Council. Go to concernedcitizensforjenny.net. You can also join Jenny's myspace page at myspace.com/songforjenny --- For updates on events for Jenny join the Yahoo group - Concerned Citizens for Jenny. yahoogroups.com The bottom line is that a zoo is a business and Zoo Director Gregory Hudson wants to be president of the Assoc. of Zoos and Aquariums someday so he doesn't want to send Jenny outside of another AZA facility. This isn't about Jenny to him, it's about his position. Funny how he was ready to throw her to Mexico a few months ago and sign the papers for anything to happen to her, and now he and his zoo employees are acting as if she's their fragile babydoll. It's all an act folks! As for Margaret Morin, she is a sincere animal advocate. I've known her for years. She looks at what is best for the animals. That is her heart. I stand with her in this effort. pj (October 28th, 2008 at 11:27am)
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Although Gregg Hudson, the executive director of the Dallas Zoo, was flabbergasted that a woman who knew nothing about elephants had whipped up such a controversy, he could not deny that he had his own concerns about Jenny. When he first came to Texas, in September 2006, from the Cincinnati Zoo, he’d been dismayed to find her housed in an exhibit that had been built in the fifties. After Keke died he worried that Jenny’s mental state could worsen if she lived alone for a long period of time. When he had trouble finding another elephant to share Jenny’s home, he told his staff that the time had come to move her. But he believed the Tennessee sanctuary provided inferior care compared with the work of the Dallas Zoo’s elephant handlers and veterinarians. He decided that Jenny should go to the Africam Safari park, in Puebla, Mexico, a 617-acre drive-through zoo that contains a 4.9-acre area for elephants. Unlike the Tennessee sanctuary, Africam has been accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), the umbrella organization for zoos in North America, which requires what Hudson told me was “the same kind of care that animals like Jenny get in Dallas.”
Needless to say, Hudson’s decision infuriated Morin and her fellow Tennessee supporters. “This is Jennygate!” Morin told me one day over the phone, in between her nursing assignments. She accused Hudson of pandering to AZA executives who allegedly don’t want AZA animals going to nonaccredited institutions. By July, a couple of Dallas City Council members announced that they too wanted Jenny moved to Tennessee. One council member, Angela Hunt, visited both the Mexican safari and the Tennessee sanctuary and returned to Dallas to proclaim the virtues of the one in Tennessee. Thirteen elephant experts from around the world signed a letter to Dallas mayor Tom Leppert describing the sanctuary in Tennessee as a “quiet, therapeutic environment” and denouncing the Mexican safari as distressful, claiming the sound of the cars and trucks passing by would upset Jenny and cause her delicate condition to decline.
So in late August, Hudson changed his mind: He announced that he was keeping Jenny in Dallas because he didn’t want to expose her to the stress of being loaded into a crate and moved a thousand miles away. The zoo, he said, would speed up plans to build a $10 million, four-acre elephant habitat to house Jenny and at least two other elephants, and he promised that the project, which originally was supposed to be built by 2011 as part of a new African savanna exhibit, would be completed a year earlier. He added that negotiations were already under way to get a second African elephant “very soon” from a private donor to share Jenny’s exhibit.
The announcement, predictably, led to even greater outrage. More residents joined the fight to move Jenny to Tennessee. They put “Save Jenny” signs on the sides of their cars and posted sentimental comments on a MySpace page in Jenny’s name. One woman with the screen name “earthchick” wrote, “Jenny’s in my heart and prayers!” Another woman, whose MySpace photograph showed her posing in a bathing suit, wrote to Jenny, “We love you!” Actress Lily Tomlin also got involved, filming two television commercials urging Dallas City Hall to send Jenny to Tennessee—“Her one chance to live in peace,” Tomlin intoned in a serious voice (not her “one ringy-dingy” voice).
Beverly Perry, the organizer of Concerned Professionals for Jenny, even wrote and recorded a song honoring Jenny, which she titled “Jenny’s Song.” “So leave your troubled life in Texas and find your healing in Tennessee,” wailed Perry, who was a member of a Christian band in Oklahoma in the late seventies. Jody Dean, a popular Dallas disc jockey for KLUV radio, played the song on the air and then made the fatal mistake of making fun of it, calling it “Butterfly Kisses” for a pachyderm. “I have to tell you,” he informed his listeners, “if Jenny is forced to listen to this song too many times, I think she might commit suicide.”
The station’s phone lines immediately lit up, with people referring to him as Satan, among other things. “I had female callers telling me they couldn’t put on their makeup because they were crying so hard over the beauty of the song,” Dean said. “One woman said she was crying so much she had to pull her car over on the side of the road so she wouldn’t have a wreck. I thought, ‘Uh-oh, we’ve got a bona fide elephant revolution on our hands.’”
Councilwoman Hunt is convinced that the zoo will not get the new elephant habitat built by the spring of 2010. “The one thing I’ve learned in my three years in city government is that most city construction projects get delayed for one reason or another, often for years,” she told me. “The idea that the city is going to design and build such a huge habitat in eighteen months is naively unrealistic at best and purposely misleading at worst.” Morin, who has seen Jenny in the flesh only once (she stood outside her exhibit for a few minutes and wept), says she cannot visit her again without “dissolving into tears.” She believes Jenny will not live long enough to see the new exhibit. “We’ve got to get her out,” she said. “And I will not rest until we do.”
I mentioned to Hudson that there would be hell to pay if Jenny died before she got a chance to walk into her new home. “People would never forgive you,” I said. He nodded and said quietly, “But we have four handlers working with her every day, and you would not believe how dedicated they are to her.” When I walked over to the elephant exhibit, right around closing time, two of the handlers were indeed in the concrete barn with Jenny. It was time for her “art session.” One of the handlers held a white canvas in her hands while another dipped two brushes into a can of blue paint. Behind her barred door, Jenny’s ears flapped and her eyes widened and she slapped her trunk excitedly on the pavement. She then grabbed the two brushes with her trunk and ran them back and forth over the canvas. Just as I had for the 22 years I’d been going to the zoo, I shook my head, marveling at the great Jenny while at the same time feeling sorry for her. “She’s going to be just fine,” said Karen Gibson, the head elephant trainer, handing Jenny two more paintbrushes. “I promise you, she’s going to be just fine.”
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