An Elephant Reunion and Other Pachyderm Concerns

Lest We Forget

I’ve got elephants on the mind these days. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like the elephant in the room (or in this case, the cage, the big tent, the destroyed habitat) is finally commanding some of the attention she deserves. As my fellow Torontonians and others well know, there is growing pressure on zoos to discontinue their elephant exhibits. Ordinary citizens, like these residents of Middletown, Connecticut, are beginning to mount organized opposition towards the use of elephants in circuses. Earlier this month U.S. President Obama pledged more federal money to help combat wildlife trafficking in Africa and Asia—an initiative largely aimed at protecting endangered elephant populations—and just yesterday the First Lady of Kenya, Margaret Kenyatta, launched the elephant conservation campaign “Hands Off Our Elephants.”

It is widely known now that elephants are highly intelligent, social, and emotionally complex animals with remarkable memories; the latter, as it turns out, is likely the result of a very large and convoluted hippocampus. In the wild, elephants live in close-knit matriarchal communities where the females help one another in raising the young. When an elephant dies, the family members who survive him/her display all the same signs of grieving that humans do, including burying the deceased (with dirt and foliage), holding vigil around the dead body, crying (elephants shed tears), and visiting the bones for years afterwards. Moreover, in the past few years a number of elephants have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), either from violence experienced during human-elephant conflicts in the wild, or from psychological and physical mistreatment endured in captivity.

Facts like the ones I cited above are undoubtedly interesting, but sometimes facts alone cannot give us a strong enough sense of the complexity of a culture. With that in mind, I would like to share just one story among countless others that demonstrates the depth of elephants’ emotional lives and their capacity for compassion. The story is about two elephants, Jenny and Shirley, who were reunited at a sanctuary after spending over two decades apart. Jenny and Shirley met as performers in a circus, when Jenny was very young and Shirley in her early twenties. Both had been captured, independently, from Sumatra. After a few years of living and performing together in the circus, Shirley was sold to a zoo and Jenny continued to be used as a performer, despite multiple attempts on her part to run away. In 1996, ill and malnourished, Jenny was adopted by The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. Three years later Shirley arrived, having spent the past 22 years as the sole elephant in a Louisiana zoo.

When they encountered one another at the sanctuary, they were so desperate to be close that they bent the bars of the gate that divided them. Soon the barrier was removed. Though Shirley had been happy to greet the other elephants who preceded Jenny into the barn, the exchanges she had with them were nothing compared to the emotional display she exhibited with Jenny. For the next seven years until Jenny’s death, furthermore, the two friends were inseparable, spending their days walking side by side, bathing one another, and so on. Their reunion and other aspects of their life at the sanctuary were recorded by filmmaker Allison Argo in her documentary The Urban Elephant, which was produced for PBS and National Geographic in 2000. To obtain a true understanding of the intensity of Shirley and Jenny’s relationship, it is worthwhile to watch Argo’s footage of Shirley’s arrival and the subsequent reunion, shown in this video excerpt.

The story of Shirley and Jenny is touching on so many levels, the most obvious being that it demonstrates the elephants’ capacity to love despite all the hardships and cruelty they endured throughout most of their lives. I won’t go into detail about those hardships in this space, but suffice it to say that any animal who performs in a circus or zoo has been “broken” into submission. That is the actual term that is used, incidentally. Another aspect of the story I find touching concerns the zookeeper who had been looking after Shirley during her years at the Louisiana zoo. “I don’t know who was the first to put a chain on her,” he says to the camera, “but I’m glad to know that I’ll be the last to take it off.” Ever since I was a child I have been opposed to zoos, and have really never understood how people could defend them, let alone work for one. Yet in fact most people who work for zoos, as with those who visit zoos, do so because they profess to like animals. I have little doubt that the zookeeper’s affection for Shirley was genuine. This is why his desire to set her free gives me hope that a turning point can happen, that as a society we can change the nature of our “love” for animals. People often defend zoos by citing how much joy they bring to children. Children are generally brought up to like animals, to love them; many of the books we read to children are populated by animal characters, and we encourage them to cuddle up with a menagerie of stuffed bears, ducks, pigs, penguins, and so on. Our love for animals becomes misguided when we frequent places of captivity like zoos and aquariums.

In the city of Toronto where I live, plans to have the three remaining elephants at the zoo transferred to the PAWS sanctuary have been in the works for several years now, and are continually stalled for various reasons. The most recent update on the ongoing saga is that they can no longer send them by plane, but will have to drive them the fifty hours to California. No doubt this will cause more back and forth debate on City Council. A fourth elephant, just outside the city in the Bowmanville Zoo, lives alone and is still made to perform in circus shows. I raise these examples because they are the elephants in my room. Elephants are being killed and their habitats destroyed in parts of Asia and Africa, and without a doubt we should work to protect them and conserve their land. But while this violence occurs in other parts of the world, individual elephants are also suffering in captivity in our own backyards, and their welfare has somehow landed in our hands. The irony, of course, is that elephants are too big for human hands. They do not deserve to be kept in rooms, and the sooner we can break down the walls, the better.

Vanessa Robinson

Photo credit: David Madden

For more information about captive elephants in Canada, you can visit the Zoocheck website.

For a fascinating read on elephant psychology, I recommend G. A. Bradshaw’s Elephants On the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity (Yale University Press, 2009).