Tusko’s Trip

August 3rd, 1962, a group of researchers from the University of Oklahoma arrived at Tusko the elephant’s enclosure. His keeper, Warren Thomas, had volunteered Tusko, a three-ton male Indian elephant, for a particularly bizarre experiment. Tusko, 14-years old, had lived at the Oklahoma City’s Lincoln Park Zoo for a while. But now he was going on a trip.

At 8am, Dr. Louis West took aim and fired a dart into Tusko’s buttock. The dart was filled with 297 mg of a then-experimental drug known as lysergic acid diethylamide, a.k.a. LSD. Today LSD is famous for its hallucinatory powers but in the 1960’s it was still a relatively unknown chemical with unknown effects. The exact motives behind this particular elephantine experiment are cloudy, but it seems that West was acting on funding from the CIA’s infamous Project MKULTRA, one of the great early proponents of LSD. They believed it could be useful in interrogating Soviet spies. West, however, simply wanted to see whether they could induce musth (an aggressive hypersexual state) in Tusko. However, this is not what happened.

“Five minutes after the injection he trumpeted, collapsed, fell heavily onto his right side, defecated, and went into status epilepticus. The limbs on the left side were hyperextended and held stiffly out from the body; the limbs on the right side were drawn up in partial flexion; there were tremors throughout… The picture was that of a tonic left-sided seizure in which, mild clonic movements were present.”
— West LJ, Pierce CM, Thomas WD. Science, 1962, 1100-1103.

297 mg is over one thousand times greater than a recreational dose of LSD. At the time West believed that elephants were naturally resistant to the effects of LSD and so upped the dose.

West tried to counteract the seizure by administrating anti-psychotic barbituates: 2800 milligrams of thorazine followed by pentobarbital sodium, but within an hour and a half of the first injection, Tusko had died of breathing complications. Which drug, or combination thereof, was ultimately responsible is somewhat unclear, although the experiment was repeated (remarkably) in the 1980’s sans barbituates (this time the elephants survived). West published his results amid great backlash.

He concludes his paper with the somewhat macabre understatement: “It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD.”

Indeed, Dr. West. Indeed.

Sources: Brainwash by Dominic Streatfeild, guardian.co.uk (2), dailymail.co.uk, erowid.org, West and Pierce (1962), photograph: Medical Tribune 9/3/62 via elephant-news.com

 

Cold Wars and Cyborg Cats: Project Acoustic Kitty

Information is the most important resource of any government. Overhearing an enemy conversation can reveal plans of attack or hidden weaknesses, potentially saving thousands of lives. Today we have sophisticated satellites and remote drones. During the Cold War, America had to be a little more creative. Enter Project Acoustic Kitty.

Human operatives needed years of training to appear inconspicuous. Microphone bugs needed someone to install them. Both had their weaknesses. But during the 1960’s the CIA wasn’t the supertech spy agency commonly depicted in Hollywood movies. In fact it more resembled The Men Who Stare at Goats more than James Bond. Operatives were experimenting with LSD (Project MKULTRA), psychic powers (the First Earth Battalion), and other outlandish ideas. And someone, somewhere along the line, hit upon the idea to solve the eavesdropping problem with cats.

The idea was to surgically alter the cat, adding microphones to its ear canals. Nobody would suspect a cat of eavesdropping on them. A cat can look at a king, right? Anyways, as Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Director of the CIA said:

“they slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that.”

The cat was also rigorously trained to follow operative instructions, like where to go and when to leave. It didn’t exactly go as planned since the cat would often ignore orders if it was distracted. Implants were added to the brain to suppress appetite and sexual desire during missions. After five years and $20,000,000, the CIA felt reasonable comfortable sending the cat out for a test run. They chose a grey and white female, pointed her towards the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC and, as, Marchetti continues:

“Finally, they’re ready. They took it out to a park bench and said “Listen to those two guys. Don’t listen to anything else – not the birds, no cat or dog – just those two guys!” … They put him out of the van, and a taxi comes and runs him over. There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead!”

The project ignominiously closed almost immediately afterwards. A final memorandum, released online in 2001, thanks the researchers for their efforts and the discovery that cats could be “trained to move short distances”, but concludes that the entire project simply was not practical enough to work. This was seemingly the end of the US using cats as spies.

(Although, this isn’t to say that other plans haven’t been considered for animal-based espionage. Notably, the British agency MI5 had a plan in the 70’s to use gerbils to catch spies and terrorists by sniffing them out as they exited planes. These kind of experiments seem to be a reoccurring idea.)

Sources: The Telegraph (Cats), The Telegraph (Gerbils), GWU.edu (document 27), dvice.com, The Guardian, toptenz,  and, of course, Wikipedia