In case you don't remember from the first 20 minutes of the film, Dumbo's real name is Jumbo, just like the African elephant who came to the London zoo in 1865. According to the BBC program Attenborough and the Giant Elephant, baby Jumbo likely witnessed his mother being killed for her tusks and hide before they shipped him to England. At the zoo he was a famous attraction, and gave rides to children (even Queen Victoria's offspring) all day long. At night, however, he began having outbursts so violent, he broke off his tusks and continually ground them down. Though, at the time, it was thought that this was due to a hormonal state called musth, elephant experts on the Attenborough show theorised that he could have been suffering from extreme pain in his teeth from malnutrition. Studying his bones (which are in storage at the American Museum of Natural History in New York), experts found evidence of extreme stress on his knees, which may have been caused by all those rides he was giving. His confinement and isolation from other elephants also may have caused his awful moods. His lifelong handler, Matthew Scott, wrote that he would calm down Jumbo with alcohol (which is possibly the inspiration for the original drunk elephant scene in the Dumbo cartoon — Burton opted to skip it in 2019).