The daily routine of the elephants in Cabarcino Park is very similar to the experience of living in freedom. They eat up to two hundred kilograms of grass per day, take mud baths, reproduce naturally and sleep standing up. They are most vulnerable while lying down because they require many maneuvers to get up. They maintain their customs even though they live in a 25-hectare stadium – the exact size of the Madrid Zoo – with a thousand-metre-long stable and a swimming pool with five million liters of water.
Every night, when they retire to rest, they enter a covered area in succession, respecting the hierarchy of the group. Until a few days ago, Gomez was the first to arrive. Now his heir, Jumah, does so. Father and son vied for leadership of the group in a fight to the death. Park caretakers found Gomez seriously injured in the meadow. only.
The first difficulty was moving the seven-ton elephant to safety. It took four hours and they had to resort to the largest boom crane in all of northern Spain. Already in the stable yard, veterinarians and zoo employees tried to save his life for six hours, but the result was fatal. Gumm died at the age of fifty. But neither predators nor vultures will benefit from its remains. He will be buried in the cemetery area of the park. It is common practice to preserve animal remains for possible future research.
Gomez, the British elephant who arrived in Cantabria
Gomez was one of the largest and longest-lived elephants in Europe. A migrant with a British passport arrived in Cantabria in 2015 when Caparcino and Holletts Park Zoo in Bickisbourne (England) decided to exchange two male African elephants to avoid inbreeding problems in both colonies, the most numerous of the specimens living outside Africa. The English carer visited him every year.
And so this old man – then 39 years old with ten children – arrived ready to play the role of seducer. Given his size and seniority, the other three younger males naturally accepted him.
But Gomez already had some ties to the herd: his son Jomar, whom he hadn’t seen in 16 years. Their first meeting showed that they were able to express their feelings. The father approached the fence and called his offspring with his trunk. They both got to know each other. This gesture confirmed that.
Elephants learn, love and travel. Gomez had no problems communicating when he arrived from the English Zoo. Like their entire group, they do it in two ways. Using the language of low-frequency infrasound, inaudible to people, they recognize and pronounce up to thirty different sounds that can be heard more than ten kilometers away. Elephants make sounds with their trunk, a type of hand so versatile that they can suck up to 16 liters of water to bathe with, pick up a small grain of earth, or lift up to a ton of weight.
The second way to communicate is through common behavioral patterns. The cliché of Elephant Memory is just that. They only really learn what they experience and what works for them. If a child learns that a plant is poisonous, he or she will never forget it.
When Gomez arrived in Cabarcino a decade ago, the first woman Gomez contacted was Cristina, who had a complex psychiatric history and adjustment problems. For a long time she thought her group were the humans who raised her on bottles—twelve bottles a day, at first—because her mother, Kira, disowned her because she couldn’t stand it. A hip injury, sustained during childbirth, made not only his mother turn her back on him but the entire herd. Elephants give birth standing: they release the fetus and the calf, which weighs about ninety kilograms, falls to the ground. Because of her disability, Christina took eight years to integrate. She herself did not know that it was an elephant.
He weighed only fifteen hundred kilograms when he met Gomez. Next to him, he looked small. But this meeting was crucial because she was behaving like an elephant without learning how to do it. Instinctively I showed him his ass as a sign of respect. He passed his box to her, she returned the caress and they said goodbye. He followed protocol even though he didn’t learn it.
The park contains the largest number of elephants born in captivity
Cabárceno is the park with the largest population of captive-born African elephants in the world. The African elephants were created on February 24, since mother Penny gave birth to her first baby in Spain in 1995. The last was born in the spring of 2023. African elephants, the largest land mammals on the planet, have lived in the park since its inception. Today they are a large family of 18 people.
Baby was the first elephant to be bottle-fed. He was four years old when, on St. Joseph’s Eve, he was afflicted with what seemed like digestive colic, which is common in these animals. He died the next day. An autopsy revealed that he had swallowed a plastic bag with hard handles, destroying his intestines. Someone had left it lying in the garden.
The Government of Cantabria considers the Cabarcino Natural Park “a world reference in the conservation and reproduction of the African elephant.” The fact is that it hosts the largest community of this type found in the world outside its original continent. A group of elephants behaves similarly to how they would in their natural habitat.
21 children
The unlucky Jums was also one of the most valuable breeding males of the species in European zoos, is of great value as a farm animal, and has left four descendants at Cabárceno and 17 at Howletts Park. He arrived in Cantabria with this mission because the natural logic is that the leader of the group covers all the females of the herd, even though he needs the courtship and permission of the elephant. If she is not receptive, intercourse does not occur. In fact, it is the privilege of the dominant male to choose first.
Otherwise the group functions as a matriarchy. The head of the family directs the herd to the place where there is food or to the place where they will rest. When a calf is born – after a gestation period of 22 months – the females organize themselves to care for it together, while the mother rests to produce milk. Usually one of them plays the role of aunt. However, males live separately because they leave the female group at the age of ten or eleven.
In Cabárceno, for a decade, Jums was first in the hierarchy, and was respected by the younger members of the group. Until a few days ago, Gomar Jr. killed his father. In a kind of Greek tragedy from a human point of view. In the laws of nature it is a common behavior.
The day after Gomez’s death, the Cantabrian government announced that a program of Christmas displays and educational activities in the park would begin. Life goes on in Cabarcino, without duels.