Zachary Keller, Helen Krushinski, and Ella Huestis in Water for Elephants. Photo by Matthew Murphy for MurphyMade.

The musical Water for Elephants is bringing the circus to Denver this February. In preparation for the titular pachyderm’s arrival, I spoke with Maura Davis, curator of large mammals at Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance, to learn more about Denver Zoo’s six Asian elephants: Groucho, Bodhi, Billy, Jake, Baylor, and Duncan. Our following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I have noticed that regardless of their age, all elephants are wrinkly, including young elephants. That has not been my experience with human beings. I was wondering if you could comment on that.

Yes, they are quite wrinkly. But it is for their overall skin health. It helps keep mud trapped against their skin, which helps cool them down. They don’t sweat like humans do, and they don’t pant like a dog, so for their body temperature control they rely heavily on the environment. Having very wrinkly skin and lots of hair — they have little tiny hairs all over their body to help keep dirt and mud as a skin protector.

Since Water for Elephants is coming to Denver, I wanted to ask: how much water do elephants need?

Our largest, he can probably put a full four gallons in his trunk, four to five gallons for each drink of water when they’re really thirsty. We have automatic refilling drinkers, and they go through a lot of water in the summer. I don’t even know if I could put a number on it.

Every once in a while, we’ll give them some Gatorade for enrichment, just try to flavor water different ways for something fun. We’ll put it in a five-gallon bucket and they’ll empty the bucket pretty easily.

I did not know that elephants enjoy Gatorade.

They like the blue one.

Blue’s their favorite flavor?

 At least so far. I haven’t done an in-depth research project on it.

That covers water and Gatorade. Moving on to food: I’ve heard it said that elephants eat a lot of peanuts.

You know, they don’t actually. Now, they enjoy peanut butter occasionally as part of their enrichment program, but the main diet for these guys is hay. I think historically they were fed a lot of peanut hay and peanuts because it was inexpensive and had a lot of protein. It was easy to feed them, they liked it, and it filled them up. But we try to replicate, as close to as possible, what they would be experiencing in Asia.

We give them a lot of grasses. We use produce for training sessions. And then they get a lot of what we call browse, which is just different limbs and leafy material. A lot of it is sourced on grounds here, but we have an entire nutritionist team, including a browse specialist who goes out and sources all sorts of things for the elephants to eat that come from trees.

So that’s their main diet here. But it is in large quantity, that’s for sure. The elephant who eats the most right now, he’s our 21-year-old, and he eats 200 pounds of hay a day, plus whatever browse items were given, and then probably about 20 pounds of produce a day. So he gets probably upwards of 250 pounds of food per day.

Groucho the Elephant

Is it true that elephants never forget?

They do forget some stuff, but they tend to have significant long-term memory. I have a really fun story for you, actually.

So we had our 55-year-old, Groucho, he moved here from Fort Worth, Texas, but before that he lived at the Bronx Zoo, from the age of 2 to about 16. And while he was there, from like 1971 to ’85 or ’86, he had one primary trainer. His name was Bob. And from the second Groucho met him, he was the person that Groucho worked with every single day. They built a very significant relationship. And then Bob transported him to Fort Worth back in ’86, and then Bob didn’t see Groucho from that point on.

Right after Covid, through the world of social media, Bob’s wife reached out asking if anybody had any updates on Groucho, the elephant at Denver Zoo. So I reached out and started chatting with her, and we ended up setting up a Zoom call on my computer, so that the team could ask a whole bunch of questions about Groucho as a youngster. We ended up bringing my laptop out to the yard, where Groucho was, and we held it straight up to Groucho’s face and told Bob just to start talking to him the way that he used to talk to Grouch.

The second Groucho heard Bob’s voice, his ears started flapping back and forth and he turned head-on to face the computer. There was absolute recognition of Bob’s voice, even after 30-plus years of not hearing him or seeing him. It was pretty amazing. It was a goosebump moment.

Elephant photos courtesy of Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance.