Good Luck, Chuck: Denver Zoo Swaps Elephants With Houston for Mating Purposes

Zookeepers will help teach an Asian bull elephant named Chuck the 'cues and routines' of natural breeding before he leaves.

Chuck the"playful and highly social" elephant is leaving the Denver Zoo to start his own family in Houston and help save his species.The Denver Zoo is sending its fifteen-year-old bull elephant Chuck to Houston in hopes of seeing him start a family and help his endangered species of Asian elephants.

Chuck will be traveling to Houston in a crate, though the Denver Zoo has yet to specify more about his travel plans and how exactly he'll get there. Houston is about a fifteen-hour drive from Denver but a two-hour flight, if they can find a big enough plane or teach Chuck to fly with his ears. The Denver Zoo is a hub for elephant semen. It ships that semen to AZA zoos and researchers for study and artificial insemination of female elephants, known as cows. Inseminating female elephants is difficult because they have large, eight-foot vaginal vestibules that are hard to navigate with semen-tipped catheters, and it only occasionally leads to a successful pregnancy.

The elephant care team at the Denver Zoo — the same group that massages their prostates — are preparing Chuck for"future reproductive success" and teaching him the"cues and routines" of making babies so he performs adequately, according to the zoo's press release. According to the Houston Zoo, Baylor will leave to Denver at the end of April. The Denver Zoo has yet to say whether he will be trained to provide semen for the zoo, but Baylor's brother, Duncan, is the only elephant in the bachelor herd who doesn't participate in the program, partly because he's still young but also because he chooses not to do it, according to zookeepers.

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