Zoo Story

Be sure to read Tom French's series, Zoo Story: Eleven elephants. One plane. Hurtling together across the sky.

The scene sounds like a dream conjured by Dali. And yet here it is, playing out high above the Atlantic.

Inside the belly of a 747, 11 elephants are deep into a flight from South Africa to Florida. These are not circus elephants, accustomed to captivity. All are wild, plucked from game reserves in Swaziland. All are headed for zoos in San Diego and Tampa.

The date is Aug. 21, 2003 - a Thursday morning that stretches on and on. The elephants are confined in 11 metal crates inside the 747's cavernous hold. They have been sedated. They are woozy and not particularly hungry. A few snake their trunks toward a man who moves up and down the line, replenishing their water.

"Calm down," says Mick Reilly, 32. "It's not so bad."

Mick and his family run the game reserves in Swaziland, a small kingdom in the southern tip of Africa. Mick knows the elephants' names and personalities; they recognize his scent and his voice. Watching them now, he wonders what they are thinking. Surely they can hear the thrum of the jet engines, feel the vibrations under their feet. But what can they make of all this?

"You'll be fine," he tells them. "There's lots of food where you're going."

He is tired of the long and bitter debate over this flight - the petitions and the lawsuits and denunciations from people who have never seen for themselves what was happening inside the game reserves. There simply was not enough room for all of the elephants anymore, not without having the trees destroyed, the parks devastated and other species threatened. The only options left were to move some elephants out of the parks or kill them.