Toby Styles

From the list of elephant persons Family: Styles

Toby Styles
Toby Styles
Personal details
Country Canada
Locations
Title senior elephant keeper 1973-1999
Location at Toronto Zoo in Canada
Title elephant keeper-1973
Location at Calgary Zoo in Canada
Biography details

Toby Styles , zoo elephant keeper in Canada

Born 1943 in Canada dead 2024-12-27 in Canada .

Affiliation with 1 elephants

1: Tantor (attacked)

Casualties

1 casualties
  1. 1983-06-05: elephant keeper Toby Styles attacked by Tantor. tucked his Trunk under and put his Ears out and charged like a great big truck. Toby Styles Survived. Styles escaped the attack.In most cases what you do is charge them back – it’s just like a big bluff. But he started to come at me and I knew this was the time to get the hell out of there. I didn’t know I could still move that fast.Toby Styles


1974: Born in Mozambique circa 1969, the zoo’s initial trio of elephants spent time in Europe before they travelled via ocean liner from Hamburg to Toronto. During the first week the elephants were in their new home, elephant keeper Toby Styles had to warn visitors not to feed the trio peanuts “unless you want to kill them slowly”

On June 5, 1983, 13-year-old Tantor was making amorous advances toward the younger female members of the Herd, which irritated Herd leader Pat. When she tried to stop Tantor from getting to first base with any of the others, hundreds of onlookers saw how Tantor handled having his romantic quest obstructed. As director of live collections Lawrence Cahill told the Star, “he didn’t like the interference and he flattened Pat.”
Keepers tried to calm Tantor, but unverified reports indicate some handlers had to swim to safety. When the attack occurred, Styles, by then a supervisor, was enjoying a day off:

One weekend I was off and got a call at home that the bull elephant had attacked the Matriarch, got her down by the pool and tried to drown her, or beat her up. I walked about halfway across the paddock, just talking to him. He turned and you could see him listening — and then he just tucked his Trunk under and put his Ears out and charged like a great big truck. In most cases what you do is charge them back – it’s just like a big bluff. But he started to come at me and I knew this was the time to get the hell out of there. I didn’t know I could still move that fast.



When I met him in his Ajax home, just down the highway from the zoo that employed him for 26 years, Styles was getting ready for a road trip. Since retiring in 1999, he and his wife, Suzanne, have travelled a lot. The two spent five years in Africa following elephants in a beat-up Land Rover, driving down unmarked paths in the savannah, observing the animals to which Styles had devoted his life. He is a zoo man from a different era—a gruff, bull-necked lifer who came up through the system at a time when trainers were called “wranglers” and were more likely to have worked their way in through the circus or the farm than through a masters program in zoology. He was raised in Banff and has worked with animals his entire life, from a boyhood gig wrangling weasels for Walt Disney’s “True-Life Adventures”—a series of notoriously not-true-to-life animal documen­taries—to a job with a California company that trained animals for films, to years as a keeper at the Calgary Zoo. In Toronto, he rose from elephant keeper to executive director of marketing and communi­cations, becoming the public face of the insti­tution, the man known as Mr. Zoo in his dozens of TV and radio appearances.




Toby Styles died on December 27, 2024, at the age of 81, in Oshawa, Ontario.
Toby was born in 1943, the second son of Bernard (Bud) and Shirley Styles (McCullagh), in Banff, Alberta.
Toby’s first job as a “weasal wrangler” for Walt Disney Productions led to positions as an animal trainer and keeper for a variety of organizations all over North America.
Toby’s love of animals brought him to Toronto as one of the original Toronto Zoo staff members before the zoo opened in 1974. Toby was involved in many significant events in the first 25 years of the zoo’s history including bringing some of the original animals to Canada from Europe by ocean freighter, welcoming the first African elephant calf born in Canada, accompanying the first pair of giant pandas to call the zoo home from Hong Kong by plane and more. Toby was well-known for representing the zoo on radio and television including appearances on talk shows and children’s programs like the KangaZoo Club and Sharon, Lois & Bram.
Toby retired as Executive Director in January of 2000. He and his wife Suzanne spent several years of their early retirement travelling around Africa and other parts of the world before moving back to Canada.
Toby is survived by his wife, Suzanne (St-Maurice); his daughter, Tara; his older brother, Barry; and younger sisters Jill, Josée and Holly, as well as many sister and brother in-laws, nieces and nephews. He is predeceased by his parents, and his younger brothers, Lance and Bing.



Reference list

References

Koehl, Dan, (2025). elephant keeper Toby Styles in Canada. Elephant Encyclopedia, available online retrieved 26 March 2025 at https://www.elephant.se/person.php?id=3337. (archived at the Wayback machine)

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Categories elephant keeper | zoo | Toronto Zoo | Styles family | Born 1943 | Dead 2024 | People from Canada


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