Ruby was a 4.5 ton Asian elephant

Elephant

Elephants are large land mammals in two extant genera of the family Elephantidae: Elephas and Loxodonta, with the third genus Mammuthus extinct...

 that lived at the Phoenix Zoo

Phoenix Zoo

The Phoenix Zoo opened in 1962 and is the largest non-profit zoo in the United States. Located in Phoenix, Arizona, the zoo was founded by Robert Maytag, a member of the Maytag family, and operates on of land in the Papago Park area of Phoenix. It has been designated as a Phoenix Point of...

 and was famous for creating paintings. The most expensive of her paintings sold for $25,000.

Early life

Ruby was born in Thailand

Thailand

Thailand , officially the Kingdom of Thailand , formerly known as Siam , is a country located at the centre of the Indochina peninsula and Southeast Asia. It is bordered to the north by Burma and Laos, to the east by Laos and Cambodia, to the south by the Gulf of Thailand and Malaysia, and to the...

, probably in the summer of 1973, and was shipped to the Phoenix Zoo in February of 1974. Her painting

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

 career began when her keepers saw her scratching in the dirt of her enclosure with a stick, and offered her a brush and paints.

In time, she was moved into the main enclosure with the zoo's two other elephants, both African

African Bush Elephant

The African Bush Elephant or African Savanna Elephant is the larger of the two species of African elephant. Both it and the African Forest Elephant have usually been classified as a single species, known simply as the African Elephant...

. African and Asian Elephant

Asian Elephant

The Asian or Asiatic elephant is the only living species of the genus Elephas and distributed in Southeast Asia from India in the west to Borneo in the east. Three subspecies are recognized — Elephas maximus maximus from Sri Lanka, the Indian elephant or E. m. indicus from mainland Asia, and E. m....

s are of different species, and Ruby did not get along with the other two. Zoo officials decided to breed her, to provide her with companionship.

Pregnancy

In 1996, when she was 22, Ruby was shipped to the Tulsa Zoo to mate with a male elephant named Sneezy (who still lives in Tulsa) and lived in Tulsa for about a year. When she became pregnant in 1997, she was returned to Phoenix. Another female Asian elephant, Indu, was loaned from the Houston Zoo to be Ruby's birthing companion. Indu still lives at the Phoenix Zoo.

Death

At the end of October 1998, Ruby began to show signs of labor, but the birth didn't start. On Halloween, the zoo's veterinarians determined that her calf had died in her womb, and the decision was made to perform a Caesarean operation

Caesarean section

A Caesarean section, is a surgical procedure in which one or more incisions are made through a mother's abdomen and uterus to deliver one or more babies, or, rarely, to remove a dead fetus...

. When surgery began on November 6, it was discovered that her uterus had ripped and a massive infection had spread through her abdominal cavity. Her male fetal calf weighed 320 pounds, twice the size of a normal newborn elephant.

Ruby was euthanized immediately and her death triggered an outpouring of grief throughout the Phoenix area. When the Phoenix Zoo announced a free-admission day in honor Ruby's memory, 43,000 people attended, nearly triple a normal day's attendance.