Hogle Zoo to celebrate elephant's 50th birthday

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah's biggest 50-year-old will celebrate her birthday with a party fit for Hogle Zoo's matriarch — a massive, '60s-themed blowout.

African elephant Dari, the oldest of her kind in North America, will enjoy a birthday cake made out of fruit Saturday to ring in her record-setting half-a-century of life.

"We're fairly unique that we have a really old girl," said Doug Tomkinson, lead elephant keeper, who quickly corrected himself. "She doesn't like to be called old. (She's) a young lady."

Tomkinson has been working with Dari for 28 years.

"She has a personality — an elephantality," he said.

Dari came to the zoo in 1967 as a 7-year-old. She was born in Africa in 1960, but that's about all that is known about Dari's early years because few records were kept back then.

Today, Dari weighs in at 8,500 pounds and eats 250 pounds of food a day. Apples, bananas, cantaloupe, watermelon and hay are the herbivore's favorites.

"She's always been the boss of the Africans. She gets the food first," Tomkinson said. "She'll do anything for a treat."

Keeping Dari healthy takes a strict regimen of daily care. The pads of her feet are checked two or three times a day to make sure rocks aren't stuck between her toes, digging into her 1-inch-thick skin and becoming infecting. Blood is drawn and tested from her large ears weekly, and she is visually inspected every day.

Dari's diet is high in nutritional value and not as coarse as what African elephants eat in the wild. This ensures she'll keep her teeth and live longer. Elephants cycle through six sets of teeth, and Dari still has all of her teeth, a rare feat at her age.

Even in her fifth decade of life, Dari is curious and playful. She spent time Wednesday throwing mud on her back and watching roommates Christie and Zuri interact with keepers. She's the only elephant who splashes in the large wading pool, and she seems to love the attention from zoo guests and her four trainers.

The past five years of Dari's life have arguably been the most exciting. A $5.5 million naturalistic habitat opened for the African elephants in June 2005. And in August 2009, baby Zuri was born to Christie, the other adult elephant.