Puerto Rico lost its only elephant — and cracked open a well of emotions

MAYAGÜEZ, Puerto Rico — Mundi, the Puerto Rico zoo's prized African elephant, was scheduled to board a cargo jet to her new home at a sprawling elephant refuge in southern Georgia. But there was a problem. She was afraid to enter the massive transport crate in which she'd soon be making the trip.

The Georgia refuge's founder, Carol Buckley, had arrived on the island a week earlier to get Mundi comfortable with the cage, and at first had no trouble coaxing her in with her favorite foods. But now, two days before the May 12 flight meant to ferry her to a better life, something had made Mundi skittish. She'd enter the crate for only a minute or two before retreating back into the small fenced yard where she'd been on exhibit for 35 years.

For the team coordinating the 8,000-pound elephant's move, it was one more hurdle to overcome in a mission that had already grown so tense that armed federal agents had been brought in for Mundi's protection. She was just one of the hundreds of animals being evacuated from Puerto Rico's long-deteriorating and now-shuttered zoo. But for decades, Mundi had been its main attraction and a symbol of Puerto Rico's more prosperous past, so her impending evacuation had unleashed a torrent of emotion on the island: joy, but also sadness, anger and — among some people — fierce resistance.

Buckley, a slight 68-year-old with a calm but purposeful demeanor, was well aware of the intense feelings swirling around her arrival on the island to take Mundi away. But for now she really just needed the elephant to feel comfortable in the crate again. She sat on a chair at one end offering chunks of watermelon with an extended hand. Mundi entered