Inseminating elephant takes 2 Germans, an ultrasound and a very long wait: "It is no small feat to artificially impregnate an elephant. "...To begin with, it isn't easy to pin down precisely when Chai is ovulating. She only does this three times a year, and the hormonal signals are complex and not that analogous to the human estrus cycle.
Secondly, there are no male elephants here, so semen had to be collected and flown in fresh from a zoo elephant in Tulsa, Okla., and a donor in Los Angeles -- a bull who works part-time in the film industry.
And all this had to be choreographed to coincide with the arrival from Thailand of the "Berlin Boys" -- two German scientists world-renowned for their innovative methods in overcoming some of the special obstacles to assisted reproduction in elephants....Last night in the elephant house, a scaffold was erected at the business end of Chai so Dr. Thomas Hildebrandt, from the Berlin Institute for Zoo Biology and Wildlife Research, had easy access. Hildebrandt was covered in plastic protective gear and sporting a bike helmet he had equipped with ultrasound imaging goggles. Read the article for further details...and photos....
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Can you imagine what it is like to have to collect the SEMEN used for the artificial insemination??? Actually a friend of mine used to work at the zoo and helped with just such a collection. It involved the workers getting suited up and trying to jack off a 5 foot-long erect bull elephant penis. I don't remember many other details, except that they weren't successful in collection, although they tried for some time. It all sounded very dangerous and tiresome.
For cattle, there are 2 methods of collecting semen. There's the equivalent of the "blow-up doll cow". The target bull is led into a pen where he mounts a fake cow. His penis is assisted into a large hot water bottle vagina and the prize is collected, by a team of workers. Very dangerous, but potentially more humane(?).
The safer method is to put the bull into one of the cages that sqeezes them, so they can't move. They stick a large pencil-shaped probe about 3 inches in diameter and 18 inches long up the bulls rectum. There are some electrical stimulators near the end that stimulate nerves on the other side of the wall of the rectum and cause the bull to ejaculate.
The technology may have likely changed, but that's the way it was all done back in the early 1980s.
Hope you don't have any pictures in your mind that will lead to bad or unsavory dreams.
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