Detroit's Elephant Man

Years ago, I knew the Elephant Man.

No, he didn’t have a horrible disfiguring medical condition like John Merrick was portrayed as having in Victorian London in the 1980 Oscar winning film, The Elephant Man.  Instead, he was obsessed with elephants.  Their anatomy.  Their physiology.  And above all, their behavior.

I came to know Jeheskal Shoshani (but everyone called him Hezy) when I worked at Wayne State University’s Science and Engineering Library from 1979-1985.  My main responsibility was document delivery and interlibrary loan—obtaining from other libraries the books and periodical articles that WSU grad students and faculty needed but which were lacking from our own collection.  And this friendly guy with a gray, grizzled beard kept on requesting literature about elephants.  Not just recent stuff, but publications from the early 19^th Century and even earlier.

Over time, I got to know Hezy.  He was an Israeli who had somehow found himself pursuing a PhD. in evolutionary biology in Detroit.  And he wanted to know everything about elephants.  Reputedly, he had grown fascinated with the creatures while employed as an elephant keeper at the Tel Aviv Zoo.  I knew for a fact that he founded and published Elephant, the world’s only periodical devoted entirely to that subject.  And his fame had grown to the point that he was approached as a subject authority in the formulation of answers to two questions for television’s Hollywood Squares quiz program.  The questions were:

1. How much can an elephant can pee in one session; and
2. How high is the elephant’s eye that’s alluded to in the title song of the musical, Oklahoma.

I don't remember the answer to either question.  Nor did Hezy, until he took extensive measurements.

But it wasn’t until after I left WSU in 1985 that Hezy embarked on perhaps his most famous adventure.  After determining that it had been well over a century since the most recent full-scale dissection of an elephant, he decided that it was time to dissect another one.  Surely advances in technology and technique would lead to more knowledge about elephant anatomy.

That posed a problem.  One can’t simply order a preserved elephant corpse from a scientific supply house the way one can a fetal pig or a dozen frogs.  So Hezy turned to the network of contacts he’d built up over the years with elephant keepers at US and Canadian zoos and circuses.  He began closely tracking the health of elderly and/or ailing elephants throughout North America.

Eventually, he got the good news (good for him, not so good for the elephant) that an elephant had passed away at Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey winter quarters in Sarasota, FL.  “Don’t bury the body,” Hezy told them by phone.  “I’ll take it.”

Legend has it that McDonald’s reneged on an earlier promise to loan him a refrigerated truck whenever a dead elephant became available, but that sounds like an urban legend to me..  All I know is that Hezy and a colleague grabbed a plane from Detroit to Sarasota and then caught a cab to a U-Haul franchise.  It turned out that U-Haul didn’t rent out refrigerated trucks, so they rented the biggest truck available and drove to the circus grounds.

Loading the elephant corpse into the back of the truck turned out to be more difficult than they had anticipated.  They ultimately had to remove the head and have the forklift load first the remaining body and then the head into the truck.  (Not having brought his dissection instruments, Hezy had to borrow a chain saw to perform the decapitation.)

Then they made their way to northbound I-75 and put the pedal to the metal.  This was Florida in the summer, and they were carrying a multi-ton load of fresh meat.  They only got pulled over once, when an Alabama state trooper asked them what their rush was.  “We’ve got a dead elephant in the back that we need to get into a refrigerated lab in Detroit ASAP,” Hezy replied.  After the skeptical trooper confirmed the story (yes, that was a dead elephant in the back of the truck), he let them off with a warning to keep to somewhere near the posted speed limit for the remainder of their trip through Alabama.  After that, they would be in someone else’s jurisdiction.

I can’t say how long it took them to drive the 1,232 miles to Detroit, but I’m willing to bet it was less than the 20 hours that Google Maps says the trip should take.  After successfully offloading the elephant's body and head into the refrigerated lab that WSU had reserved for Hezy’s project, it was time to scrub out the rental truck and return it to a local U-Haul franchise. No word on how they explained what must have been a interesting lingering odor.

The dissection went well.  Hezy and his cohorts took their time and did a thorough job.  Among other things, they counted 148,198 fascicles (tiny muscle bundles) that give elephants such precise control over their trunks.

Today, there’s an exhibit in the lobby of the Science Library where I used to work that documents the project.

 

Unfortunately, the Science and Engineering Library was permanently closed in August, 2013.  No word on whether the exhibit will be moved.

After finally earning his Ph.D. at WSU, Hezy settled permanently in the metro Detroit area.  Marrying another elephant enthusiast named Sandra, he joined the faculty of the Biology Department of Oakland Community College in Detroit’s northern suburbs.   When a crew from the Oakland County Road Commission unearthed some large bones in Rochester Hills, Hezy and his students excavated the mastodon remains. 

But there wasn’t much opportunity for fieldwork in Oakland County, especially after the Detroit Zoo decided in 2004 to send their two elephants (Wanda and Winky) to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee so that they could spend their remaining years in more natural conditions.

He was able to spend some of his summers on the faculty of the University of Asmara in Eritrea and performing research funded by the Born Free Foundation in the United Kingdom.  And then he moved on to Addis Ababa University in 2007, teaching and studying the same group of elephants who migrate seasonally between the two countries.

That’s where Hezy was when he met an untimely end on May 20^th, 2008.  He was one of the victims of a public minibus bombing by terrorists in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 



The Elephant Research Foundation that Hezy founded in 1977 survives him, as does the Jeheskel (Hezy) Shoshani Library Endowed Collection that’s housed in the WSU Science Library.  During his career, Hezy published nearly 200 scientific papers and edited one popular book (Elephants: Majestic Creaturesof the Wild [New York:  Checkmark Books, 2000]) and coedited a technical volume (The Proboscidea:  Evolution and Palaeoecology of Elephants andTheir Relatives [London:  Oxford University Press, 1996]).



I’ve learned a little about elephants over the years.  We know that they’re highly intelligent and social creatures.  They’re able to communicate across distances measured in many miles by subsonic vocalizations that are undetectable to the human ear.

I like to think that's how word of Hezy’s demise spread from one elephant to another throughout Africa.

           Hezy’s dead.

           No!  What happened?

           Did something happen to Hezy?

           That’s so sad.  He was such a kind man.

I further like to think that his pachyderm pals arranged a memorial service for him.  Imagine a pre-ordained time when every elephant around the world stopped in his tracks, paused for a moment of silence, and then raised his or her trunk and sounded a mournful trumpet.

Rest in peace, Hezy.  You're not forgotten.