Why Did Psychiatrists Shoot A Zoo Elephant With LSD In 1962? The Strange Case Of Tusko Gets Even Stranger The Closer You Look

The scientists apparently wanted to examine a strange behavior that occurs in male elephants where they become extremely aggressive for a short period of time. To replicate this natural state, they decided to shoot a 14-year-old Indian elephant called Tusko with unprecedented quantities of LSD in front of zoo onlookers. The result was a tragedy, which cast a shadow over the careers of the researchers who carried it out.

Today, the story of Tusko the elephant is told as one of those unpleasant examples of scientific cruelty from yesteryear. Although the experiment was a disaster, becoming little more than a humorous anecdote for the scientists involved, the case is largely treated retrospectively as a dark curiosity. But not all is as it seems. A closer look at this strange story actually shows that there was more going on behind the scenes than many people realize. In fact, the psychologist who led the experiment may have been funded by the CIA to carry it out.

What purpose could this odd experiment have served the US intelligence services and why were scientists so keen to dose up an elephant? To understand what led to Tusko’s untimely death, we have to dive into the weird paranoia of the Cold War, a time when scientific judgment, institutional norms, and ethical boundaries – especially related to drugs and animals – were deeply different to what they are today.

The elephant on LSD

“Because of his remarkable intelligence, his extended life span, his capacity for highly organized group relationships, and his extraordinary psychobiology in general, the elephant is an animal of great interest to the zoologist and the comparative psychologist.”

So opens the Science article written by Drs Louis Jolyon West, Chester M. Pierce, and Warren D Thomas that presents Tusko’s tragic demise in a seemingly innocuous way. The team note that “one of the strangest things about elephants is the phenomenon” of going into “musth”. This is a natural, periodic state in both African and Asian elephants that is characterized by heightened aggression and erratic behavior. For the scientists, this was a “form of madness” which is unique to these animals and turns a typically docile pachyderm into a raging menace.

“Normally cooperative and tamable, the elephant now runs berserk for a period of about 2 weeks, during which time he may attack or attempt to destroy anything in his path”, they explained.

But before the creature undergoes this Jekyll and Hyde transformation, they note, bull elephants start to excrete a strange brown, sticky fluid from the sides of their heads. What was this fluid? Is it a cause or a byproduct of their temporary mania and does it contain any clues as to what happens to their minds during this time? These were the questions that apparently preoccupied West and Pierce. They wanted to see if they could artificially induce a musth-like state in an elephant to explore them.

On the day of the experiment, Tusko was shot with around 297 milligrams of LSD via a pressurized CO₂ dart gun. West and Pierce chose this substance because, as they said, it has a “well-known personality-disrupting effect upon humans and other animals”.

“Should Tusko's reaction to an injection of LSD resemble going on musth, we wanted to see whether there would occur simultaneously an excretion of the temporal glands and, if possible, to collect some of the fluid,” they explained.

Anyone who thinks this is spurious reasoning would not be wrong. The psychiatrists provide no additional explanation for why they thought this substance could induce this very specific behavioral state in an elephant. If anything, their assumption suggests they regarded someone having an LSD trip as having an analogous experience to an elephant on musth. It is important to remember that, in 1962, the understanding of LSD and the effects of other psychedelics was extremely limited, but this nevertheless appears like guesswork at best.

And the guesswork doesn’t end there. The amount of LSD administered to the elephant was staggering; according to The Guardian, it was 30 times more than would be administered to a 3-ton human. The reason for this was based on anecdotal experience.

“If the elephant's sensitivity were of the order of that of a human being, this would represent a considerable overdose,” they explained. “However, if the elephant's dose requirements in milligrams per kilogram were similar to those of other animals (including primates and cats), such a dose would at best be of borderline effectiveness.”

Apparently, Thomas, the zoo director, believed the animals would be resistant to the LSD because they were difficult to “destroy in the field” using chemicals. There were no attempts to test this assumption before proceeding with the supposed main aim of the experiment.

Soon after being administered the drug, Tusko began trumpeting loudly and running around his pen. Although this was not dissimilar to his reactions the previous day when shot by a placebo, Tusko’s behavior deteriorated from here. Within a few minutes, his restlessness gave way to a more sluggish and uncoordinated state. He began to sway and seemed to lose control of his hind legs. After five minutes, the elephant lost the ability to stay upright and collapsed to the floor, where he defecated and started having seizures.

Shocked by this unexpected result, the scientists quickly administered another exceptionally large dose of promazine hydrochloride, a first-generation antipsychotic drug, to combat the LSD. Although it seemed to lessen the animal’s distress, he continued to suffer. Finally, in a “last-minute effort to save the animal”, the doctors injected him with pentobarbital sodium, a barbiturate, but Tusko died soon after. 

To say the psychiatrists were surprised by this outcome would be an understatement and is summed up by this conclusion:

“It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD – a finding which may prove to be valuable in elephant-control work in Africa.”

But in their explanation, they also betray something more of the original intent of their study. While discussing the elephant’s response to the drug, the authors discuss the possibility that the animal suffered anaphylactic shock from its administration. However, they deemed this unlikely given its dying symptoms. This led them to speculate that perhaps Tusko died from “autosensitization” – the idea that repeated exposure to a substance can lead to an increase in its effects, rather than the reverse. Here, they posit that perhaps musth does indeed have a biochemical source similar to LSD and, if so, then perhaps Tusko was automatically more sensitive to this drug.

“[S]ince Tusko's former owner reported one instance of his having gone on musth, autosensitization cannot be completely ruled out. This would imply, of course, a close biochemical similarity between LSD and the unknown but perhaps potent intoxicant in the musth secretion. Sensitization on any other basis seems highly improbable.”

After considering other factors, the authors end the piece by discussing more human contexts. They state that the elephant’s death indicates that LSD poses a danger to humans.

“Despite efforts by its manufacturer to prevent misuse of the drug, LSD has been increasingly and sometimes irresponsibly administered to humans as a putative adjunct to psychotherapy.”

The irony of the psychiatrists' lamenting the irresponsible use of the drug by other doctors is laughable today, but their closing paragraph demonstrates just how naïve their understanding of LSD was at the time.

Covert operations or scientific folly?

What do we make of Tusko’s tragic story? On the one hand, it could be a tale about two “mad scientists” experimenting with an increasingly controversial substance. This is certainly true, to an extent. Dr Louis Jolyon West, or “Jolly” as he was often known, was an eccentric character, but he was also deeply connected to the US government’s ongoing research into mind control and the power of drugs to change behaviors. And this is where the story may start to make a little more sense (though only mildly).

The story of Tusko sits within the same dodgy historical moment as the now infamous Operation MKUltra, for which West was an active participant. This shadowy CIA program emerged from a mix of postwar anxieties and focused on methods of interrogation and behavior modification. During the Korean War, some American prisoners of war confessed to war crimes and seemed to advocate for Communism while refusing repatriation. This raised fears that the Soviets, Chinese, and other parties had access to secret methods to “brainwash” people.

Responding to this paranoia, the CIA expanded its existing research to consider how narcotics, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation could be used to replicate and ultimately counter this type of “control”. What ensued was a covert program that experimented on human subjects without their consent.

The unethical activities carried out in this operation have been extensively examined by scholars using declassified documents. But what’s important for this case is that Louis West was part of this research into drugs and brainwashing. In fact, he was regarded as something of an expert on the subject and was even involved in efforts to exonerate the US airmen who had been forced to confess during the Korean War.

According to the investigative journalist Tom O’Neill, after West left his position at the University of Oklahoma in January 1969, his successor found files that suggested the Tusko case had been funded by the CIA using a cover known as the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc. Although this was a legitimate private psychiatric research foundation, first established in 1953, it has also been identified as one of multiple institutions used by the CIA to fund activities related to MKUltra. This same group would go on to fund West’s later work in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, where he recruited patients from the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic to study LSD and drug use among hippies.

Of course, there is a lot of room for speculation here. Although West, Pierce, and Thomas published their paper in Science, we do not have access to any other supplementary material concerning their motivations or justifications. There are no internal memos, raw notes, grant documents, or administrative records related to the failed experiment either. Does this absence of evidence mean it was part of the covert operations taking place within the US intelligence agencies at the time? We may never know for sure, which is a shame, because it would at least be nice to think Tusko’s death was more than an act of scientific recklessness.