Maggie, the Pachyderm Heads South
Sometimes Alaska ends up in the news for the craziest reasons. Today, Maggie, our only elephant, completed a long journey that began yesterday afternoon at the Alaska Zoo on O’Malley road here in Anchorage and ended with her arrival at the Performing Animal Welfare Society in central California.
This excellent graphic from the Daily News charts the trip
Maggie is doing quite well at PAWS and evidently is “purring”.
Getting an elephant safely and happily from O’Malley Road to California in less than 24 hours is quite the logistical undertaking. A huge, heated steel crate, a gigantic Airforce C-17 Globemaster, elephant training, etc. But it seems to have gone off without a hitch. Maggie gave out one last trumpet as the crate was lifted into the plane.
These pictures from the Daily News are great. You never actually get to see Maggie. She was loaded into the crate out of sight of the media. But you can get a sense of the size of the crate and of the C-17 - the Airforce’s largest cargo plane.
KTVA, Anchorage’s local CBS affiliate, has a quite a good story on the Maggie trip. You even get to hear her trumpet. The story is on KTVA’s video site. Definitely worth watching.
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