By MATTHEW D. LaPLANTE
The Salt Lake Tribune

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — She was born 27 years ago in the wilds of Africa.

By the time she was a year old, she had been ripped from her family.

Penned, chained and shipped to a noisy new world, her California keepers allowed her to roam only a few paces this way and a few paces that.

She was bullied and dominated. She lost a baby. She was poked, prodded, cut and left in pain.

Misha the elephant died Sept. 9 on the concrete floor of a cinderblock building in a lot behind her most recent home at Utah's Hogle Zoo, some 10,000 miles from where she was born.

No one is certain yet what caused her death, at what could be described as middle age for an elephant. But one of Misha's former trainers has a strong suspicion: "She lost her will."

Out of Africa. It was the early 1980s in South Africa. Apartheid was law. Nelson Mandela was in prison. And the nation's population of elephants, which had fallen to less than 200 earlier in the century, had steadily climbed to more than 8,000, pushing...