Our one-year old baby elephant, Malti didn’t survive getting elephant herpesvirus. Damn. She was thriving, too. This is the second baby elephant we’ve lost - the first one died shortly after birth. Sad for us, and sad for the breeding program for endangered animals that the Calgary Zoo is part of.
Sure it is sad, but now you can experiance the wonderful flavor of baby elephant with a lot less guilt that most people.
That’s a rather poor joke. Or did you forget to put a smiley in there?
featherlou, that’s too bad about the elephant calf.
Elephants are one of my favourite animals; they are very intelligent. Let’s hope they learn something from this.
I was sorry to read about it on Elephant News. Apparently the herpes virus is not specific for Asian and African, but the same one.
That’s not very funny; this has consequences for the potential breeding of endangered elephants in captivity, plus, we’ve been going to see this baby elephant for 15 months (we’re zoo members and go many times every year) - it is a sad thing for us that this has happened.
They said this elephant’s mom shunned her–was this the same elephant that was mentioned in another elephant thread?
ETA: Nevermind–that elephant was from the Oregon zoo. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHxYbKImrQg
The first elephant baby that died here died because her mother shunned her. This is the second baby for that mother, and we thought it was going much better this time (the death of the first one was like a punch in the gut).
It was very sad to see the news on Friday that Malti had the virus. Worse today when we went to the Zoo and saw the notice of her death on the door to the Elephant Crossing exhibit. 
The building in which our elephants live was built by the company I work for and I was directly involved with that project, so I got to know the elephants and the trainers. Maharani (Rani, for short), Malti’s mother, is the youngest of our three females. She rejected her first born a couple years back and it died shortly thereafter, but she was doing much better with Malti. The trainers told me that she really didn’t take to motherhood as well as the other two females had, but that she was getting the hang of it. Over the past year, we saw little Malti on several occasions and she was always so dang cute and full of energy.
The last pic I took of Malti with her mom, Rani, and aunt, Swarna, from May of this year.
R.I.P. Malti.
Ok, I apologize. That’s pure threadshit if you aren’t in the joking mood and I’m sorry.
Oh what awful news.
Cincinnati Zoo’s last baby elephant, Ganesh, is now 10 years old!!
http://www.billybear4kids.com/animal/zoo/ele-cc.htm
I’m torn between Ganesh and our Sumatran rhino, Suci, for cutest baby.
That’s a great name for an elephant.
I really, really hoped she’d pull through. The supersticious part of me thinks that building is cursed - no offence Jimbo
This paragraph is very poorly written.
What is the connection with the elephants, stingrays and gorilla?
My guess is a crappy reporter who not only spelled Malti’s mom’s name wrong but is just trying to make a story where there is none. Maybe he was mad at being assigned to cover the baby elephant death story (which is kind of a big deal here).
As for the building being cursed, I don’t know how they’ll have more baby elephants there knowing that our particular elephants carry the herpes virus.
ETA: Fortunately Alberta has excellent medical research going on here - maybe they can do something to figure out how to detect and eliminate this virus.
Featherlou - I wish Edmonton would relent it’s stubborn position on it’s elephant Lucy. Lucy should be with other Elephants in Calgary, or someplace warmer.
This link from your links describes Lucy as an Asian elephant and has a picture of an African. If the picture isn’t of Lucy, it seems misleading and if that is indeed Lucy that the folks who wrote the article might be mistaken about other things as well.
There is no connection - other than a string of really bad luck for the zoo.
The first baby was indeed rejected by Rani, and was found to have an intestinal disorder that would certainly have killed her in the wild, only much faster.
With Malti, Rani was a little slow to warm up to her - but was doing alright.
They still haven’t discovered what happened with the stingrays - something got into the water in their tank that killed nearly all of them. The police were investigating at the time, and I don’t know what came of it.
The gorillas basically died of old-age.
We lost a tiger to old-age recently as well.
Unfortunately, the list makes for good ammo for those who believe that animals shouldn’t be kept in zoos - through no fault of anyone at the zoo.
Poor pachyderm. 
I’m curious about how they treat this, if they’ve tried antiviral drugs, such as valacyclovir, or if they tried lysine supplements to suppress the herpes virus?