---
title: "Oregon Zoo elephant Samudra flattens a 500-pound pumpkin, likely his last before a move to St. Louis"
url: https://badiyaa.com/oregon-zoo-samudra-elephant-pumpkin-squish/
published: 2026-10-20T18:51:00+01:00
modified: 2026-10-20T18:51:00+01:00
section: Pets & Animals
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# Oregon Zoo elephant Samudra flattens a 500-pound pumpkin, likely his last before a move to St. Louis

The 18-year-old Asian elephant had the zoo's 28th Squishing of the Squash to himself, a week after keepers said he will leave Portland for the Saint Louis Zoo in 2027.

Samudra, an 18-year-old Asian elephant at the Oregon Zoo in Portland, got the giant pumpkin all to himself this year. The zoo’s 28th annual Squishing of the Squash, held over the opening weekend of its Howloween event, featured a single 500-pound pumpkin and a single bull elephant, and the zoo’s own clip of the result, titled “Giant Elephant Squishes Giant Pumpkin,” has been climbing through animal feeds this week.

“This year, we decided to give Samudra the spotlight,” said Steve Lefave, who oversees the zoo’s Asian elephant area. “It was one big elephant vs. one big pumpkin. No fuss, but definitely some muss.”

## Why a zoo hands an elephant a pumpkin

The pumpkin is not a prop. Keepers packed this one with lettuce, apples and sweet potatoes, so the elephant has to break the shell to reach the food inside. The Oregon Zoo files the event under animal enrichment, which it describes as improving an animal’s well-being through stimulating, challenging surroundings, objects and activities. A gourd that has to be cracked, rolled and picked apart turns a meal into a problem to solve.

The custom started in 1999, when Hoffman’s Dairy Garden of Canby, Oregon, dropped off an 828-pound prize pumpkin for the elephant family. Growers have kept supplying fruit ever since. This year’s came from Larry Nelson, a member of the Pacific Giant Vegetable Growers Club, and his daughter, Amanda Gilmour.

The size of the squash has changed with the herd. Last October the family worked through pumpkins of around 1,000 pounds each, and the zoo’s then eight-month-old calf, Tula-Tu, who weighed 775 pounds, was given a small one that she pushed around like a soccer ball. Earlier clips also showed younger elephants standing on a pumpkin without managing to burst it. This year the zoo scaled the main event down to one 500-pound fruit and gave Tula-Tu, Samudra’s 20-month-old sister, a smaller pumpkin once he had finished.

For a sense of scale, Badiyaa ran the numbers. Samudra weighs around 10,000 pounds, so he outweighed this pumpkin by about 20 to 1. The current giant pumpkin record, a [3,156-pound fruit grown in Rhode Island](https://badiyaa.com/ron-wallace-3156-lb-pumpkin-record/), would be more than six times heavier than the one he flattened. Samudra himself weighed 286 pounds at birth on August 23, 2008, which means he has grown to roughly 35 times his birth weight.

## Why this squish has an edge to it

The clip lands a week after the zoo announced that Samudra will move to the Saint Louis Zoo in 2027. The move was recommended by the elephant Species Survival Plan, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums program that matches animals between member zoos to keep herds socially stable and the captive population genetically varied. Lefave explained the reasoning in terms of wild behavior: herds are built around related females, and young males drift away in their teens. “Samudra has reached that point, and he needs this opportunity to mingle freely with a different herd,” he said.

No departure date has been set, and the zoo expects him to stay in Portland at least until next spring. That makes this October very likely his last Squishing of the Squash in Oregon. He is also a notable animal on paper: the [first third-generation elephant born in the United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samudra_(elephant)), and the son of Rose-Tu, who was herself born at the zoo in 1994. The Oregon Zoo says its elephant care program has run for more than 60 years.

In St. Louis he will live in the River’s Edge area, which has a shallow splash pad and a pool deep enough for an elephant to submerge and swim. “Knowing how much Samudra loves the water, I think he’s really going to like it there,” Lefave said.

## What the clip shows, and what it leaves out

As a piece of zoo storytelling, the video works. It is short, about a minute and a half, it centers one recognizable animal, and the one-elephant format is easier to follow than the family scrums of past years. The description credits the growers by name and explains the enrichment purpose, which many reposts of zoo clips drop.

It is still the zoo’s own edit, made during a ticketed holiday event, and it frames the moment as an “epic showdown.” That is fun, but the useful part is less dramatic: a bull elephant using his weight and feet to open a food puzzle, the way keepers intended. Viewers who come away thinking pumpkin smashing is a stunt miss the point that the food inside is the reward.

The wider stakes sit outside the frame. The zoo puts the wild Asian elephant population at an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 animals, scattered from India to Borneo, and the species is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Lefave said more than half of the world’s Asian elephants have been lost over the past 80 years, mostly to habitat loss, conflict with people and disease. A pumpkin video will not change those figures, though the zoo argues that close encounters with animals build public support for protecting them in the wild.

Visitors who want to see the next round of pumpkin play can still catch it at Howloween: the zoo has scheduled pumpkin playtimes for its primates at 10:15 a.m. on October 24 and for its rhinos at 10:30 a.m. on October 25.

## Further reading

- [Wikipedia: Samudra (elephant)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samudra_(elephant))

*Image: Cacophony, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*