By Sandi Doughton
A 4-year-old elephant (click here) at the Oklahoma City Zoo, where Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo moved its two female elephants this spring, died suddenly Thursday.
Zoo officials say they will perform a necropsy to determine what killed Malee, the first elephant born at the zoo. Staff had treated her for a type of herpes infection particularly deadly to young elephants.
A 6-year-old elephant called Hansa died at the Seattle zoo in 2007 from a related type of herpes infection. Animal-welfare activists who opposed the transfer of Seattle’s two adult females — Chai and Bamboo — to Oklahoma warned they might pass the virus to Malee and her 9-month-old sister, Achara....
