During the 1980s, the death of a zoo elephant named Twinkles and newspaper reports about the way Twinkles died were a catalyst for remaking Atlanta’s zoo from a troubled facility into a world-class facility for animals and their habitats.
The work of reporter Ron Taylor and his colleagues at The Atlanta Journal was recounted in his 2012 obituary and an accompanying family-placed article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Credit: 1996 AJC file
Credit: 1996 AJC file
“During his days as a reporter, he wrote, and contributed to, articles that exposed unhealthy and cruel conditions at the Atlanta Zoo,” the AJC article reported.
A family-placed obituary offered more detail about the reporting on the death of the elephant, whose name was Twinkles.
“Perhaps the most dramatic reform stemming from his work began when Taylor reported in 1984 that the Atlanta Zoo had sold a sickly, 12-year-old elephant named Twinkles to a traveling circus, where she soon died,” the obituary said. “Officials had claimed they sent Twinkles to a farm in Alpharetta, but the circus had buried her in a hole in North Carolina, according to Taylor's story.
“Soon Taylor and then-coworker Susan Faludi were reporting other zoo animals sold to fly-by-night menageries and turning up dead, while rabbits from the children's zoo wound up as rabbit stew for zoo personnel. Taylor and Faludi reported on filthy, inhumane conditions, too.
“Embarrassed city leaders mounted an effort to transform what had been rated one of the nation's worst zoos into Zoo Atlanta, considered one of the best. Taylor ‘had an innate sense for human interest, honesty, and humor,’ said his co-author Leonard Ray Teel, former Journal reporter who teaches at Georgia State University. ‘He had grown up interested in people's stories. As a journalist he listened to not just two sides, but many, and then pieced together the full story, with style.’ “
