10 Unbelievably Cruel Studies (Done In The Name Of Science)

9. Elephants On Acid

Tusko is a cute-if-unimaginative name often given to elephants in captivity, including "The Meanest Elephant" who ended up being thrown out of his circus because of his bad temper, as well as another Thai-born pachyderm currently hanging out at the Oregon Zoo in Portland, where he's been since the mid seventies. None of these elephants compare, however, either in notoriety or the horrible stuff they had done to them, to the Indian Tusko who resided at the Oklahoma City Zoo and was the first animal acid casualty of the sixties. Michael Jackson didn't give Bubbles his first dose until the mid-seventies, at the earliest. This particular Tusko was living a perfectly nice, quiet life at the Lincoln Park Zoo until August 3rd, 1962, when the zoo's director Warren Thomas allowed researchers from the local university to conduct an experiment on their prize elephant. The aim of the experiment was to see if they could artificially induce "musth", a state that elephants enter only once a year and sees them increasing in both their sexual excitement and aggression. The experiment in question? Injecting the poor creature with a dose of LSD is over 3000 times larger than the normal amount humans take. He must really have been tripping balls, huh? Well, for five minutes maybe. Then he collapsed and, within the hour, was dead. The researchers took away the important discovery that "It seems that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD." Well worth killing poor old Tusko for!