HOUSTON -- Officials with the Houston Zoo announced they were forced to put the zoo's baby Asian elephant, Bella, to sleep Friday morning, Local 2 reported.

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Zoo Staff Deals With Loss Of Baby Bella

Bella was recovering from surgery to repair a fractured right femur. Zoo officials said the 552-pound elephant stumbled on the soft ground, fell and fractured her leg Tuesday.

The elephant, whose mother rejected her after birth, underwent 2½ hours of surgery in which doctors used four pins and a rod to repair the broken leg.

However, as of 9:30 a.m. Friday, X-rays showed that the rods and pins implanted during the surgery were not successful in securing the 8-month-old pachyderm's broken femur.

“It was clear from the start that surgery was our best option to repair the fracture and give Bella a fighting chance. We knew this was a high-risk procedure. That’s why we brought in a highly qualified team of surgeons to assist our experienced veterinary team," Zoo Director Rick Barongi said in a news release.

Recovery was expected to take eight to 10 weeks, but the next two weeks were considered the most perilous because of the possibility of infection.

Bella was able to get back up after her fall with nudging from another elephant and encouragement from zoo workers. She appeared to be in pain after walking back to the barn. An X-ray revealed the fracture.

Nine men lifted the elephant onto a gurney and took her to the hospital in a 15-passenger van.

According to the news release, staff members that helped raise Bella since her August birth were given a chance to say goodbye to her Friday before officials transported her body to Texas A&M, where a necropsy will be performed.

“Euthanization was a very difficult decision,” Barongi said in the news release. “But we had to be realistic. We had already asked a lot of Bella with the initial surgery. The entire animal care team agreed that to ask her to endure another surgery would have been asking too much,” Barongi said in the news released.

The elephant was born Aug. 17 and got its name in a public naming contest. Bella means "creeping time" in Nepali and "beautiful" in Italian.

The zoo has three other Asian elephants in the zoo's herd, including a male, Bella's mother and another female.