Now that elephants are retired from ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’, are their lives better?
A new life in retirement
THE rail-car door was open just a crack. Just enough for a pinkspeckled grey trunk to feel its way out. Its single fingertip felt along the rail car’s lower edge, explored the crisp outside air. The mile-long (1.6kilometre-long) Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus train was parked in the sunshine along the Anacostia River in Washington, DC. The trunk withdrew inside. Two months from now, the circus’ elephants would give their last performance and transition to a Ringling facility in Florida, out of the public eye. As I followed the five elephants aboard this train through their final weeks on the road, Ringling called the transition the bittersweet end of a 145-yearold family-friendly tradition.
Animal rights activists hailed it as a win against an inherently abusive form of entertainment.
Americans have long viewed elephants as fellow travellers. We see ourselves in their intelligence and emotional depth. I wondered: Now that elephants are departing from the circus that calls itself “The Greatest Show on Earth”, after so many years of making them perform for us, what have we learned about them? And what have we learned about ourselves?
The rail-car doors had been opened. At one of them, an enormous, wrinkled grey head was emerging. Her name was Asia. At 7,900 pounds (3,583 kilograms), she was so big and so textured, and the rail car so sleek and small in comparison, she looked like an alien stepping through a portal from another world.
Handlers surrounded the ramp like spotters. “Easy, Asia,” said one. She used her trunk to sweep the ramp the way a visually impaired human would use a cane, feeling for the way ahead. Asia was born wild somewhere on the continent for which she was named in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. The first record of her in this country was in 1971, when she was bought by an old elephant hand in the Catskills. That was two years before Congress banned the importation of endangered species like Asian elephants. Still a baby, she was among the last wildborn Asian elephants brought to this country. In 1988 she was sold to a powerboat-racing restaurateur who’d decided to have a go at the performingelephant business. Ringling acquired her in 1991.
The long years of Asia’s life were visible in the profusion of pink speckling on her face, trunk and ears. All her handlers agreed: Not much seemed to surprise Asia. She had seen cities, audiences and handlers come and go. She’d been quarantined and treated for tuberculosis. She was the alleged victim in a courtroom drama after a Humane Society inspector saw her get hit with a bull hook. Yet she’d still move towards humans whenever they came near.
Asia’s four travelling companions also got off the circus train. The biggest was Tonka at 11,000 pounds (4,989 kilograms), then Luna at 8,200 (3,719 kilograms). Though they were in their early 30s and technically adults, Tonka and Luna were more like teenage besties, following each other around, sleeping side by side, standoffish towards outsiders. The other two elephants, 10year-old Mable and 6-year-old April, were less than half their size and twice as energetic. All four were born in captivity.
The circus was on the road 48 weeks of every year, travelling 16,000 miles (25,749 kilometres) to 45 towns. Among the accommodations, fairgrounds were the roomiest, with dirt underfoot. In other locales, paddocks were set up in parking lots. But Ringling’s Red Unit circus had just come from two weeks in a cramped venue in Baltimore. For the next five days they’d be living in the dimly lit concrete bowels of Washington’s Verizon Center. On the road, it took 14 people to care for five elephants. The head and assistant elephant managers lived where the elephants lived, their RVs parked alongside the elephant paddock even in the tight quarters of an arena basement.
The head elephant manager, Terry Frisco, is unimposing but intense; like Tonka and Luna, he was wary of strangers even on a good day. During the many hours I spent with the elephant crew over the next two months, he and I would never exchange a single word. However, his assistant and other members of the circus family were eager to talk. So were animal rights activists, who showered me with information, though some of their claims were demonstrably untrue.
Elephants have been the stars of American circuses since circuses began. Why the elephants? Why not the equally odd-looking camels or just-asbeautiful horses? What was it about elephants that drew humans to them? They’re smart, but so are primates. They’re big and long-lived, but so are whales. They live in close-knit families, but so do wolves. None of those other mammals has become such a part of our culture. We’ve got pink elephants, white elephants, the GOP mascot and the elephant in the room, while the name of the 19th century’s beloved Jumbo came to signify all things large. In the 20th century we grew up with Horton, Babar and Dumbo, Disney’s 1941 cartoon whose dark caricatures, without meaning to, managed to perfectly capture the disturbing contradictions of our elephant love.
If we love elephants so much, why have we caused them so much suffering?
Horror shows
In 1796, 11,000 years after the first North American humans helped kill off the mastodons, one of their distant relatives arrived in New York City from Calcutta, India: a 2-year-old female Asian elephant. Evolved like humans to be cared for by her family, she would instead grow up alone, a one-elephant freak show in the raw, new United States of America.
Sixteen years later, a trick rider tied a wooden platform onto the elephant’s back, acrobats climbed up and performed, and the American circus was born, according to Ronald Tobias, author of Behemoth: The History of the Elephant in America. By the late 1800s, PT Barnum’s circus was touring with as many as 40 elephants.
Asian elephants have been working for us for millennia. Not their African cousins, though, who are bigger and more rambunctious. Asian elephants, being relatively more manageable.
The 280 or so Asian elephants in North America today are found mostly in zoos and circuses. To control circus elephants, handlers use the bull hook, a 2,500-year-old tool developed by mahouts in Asia. Used properly, it guides elephants through touch in combination with verbal cues and rewards. But with a pointed metal tip and hook, the bull hook is better known for being misused to stab and beat elephants. In the 19th century, Barnum’s head trainer relied on pain to compel elephants to do what he wanted. But the handler of Barnum’s most famous elephant, Jumbo, used the techniques of an elephant whisperer. “There have always been talented individuals, even in the 1800s, with skill levels that surpassed other handlers. They understood the animals and their behaviour,” says Tony Barthel, curator for elephants at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo.
But even a cursory look back over the past 200 years turns up a horror show of documented accounts involving a variety of American circuses: elephants immobilised in chains for months, beaten, starved, hung, poisoned, machine-gunned and electrocuted. In 1999, veterinary technician Bryan Mo- nell, then an undercover PETA investigator, video-recorded a beating at a smaller circus. “I was told you have to randomly beat down an elephant and make them fear you,” he recalls.
In the century before the Great Depression, abused circus elephants that killed their tormentors were sometimes viewed as criminals and executed. But more often, an elephant that broke its chains and left a swath of destruction through an American town was cheered on by crowds of average folks living hardscrabble lives. For them, the elephant’s rampage was probably the cathartic fulfillment of their own frustrated fantasies.
Starting in 1969, the legendary Ringling animal trainer Gunther Gebel-Williams pioneered a way of presenting wild animals in shows: as friendly partners rather than as dangerous beasts to be dominated by brave men. “That change seemed at first almost like a nuance,” says Janice Aria, who has worked with elephants and bears during a long career with Ringling. “But I saw that really had an amazing trickle-down effect into the way all of us approached this. You know, wait a minute, maybe it isn’t always the loudest voice, it isn’t the strongest person. It’s the person that can most intuitively connect with these animals that’s going to get the most consistent result from them.”
Since the 1970s, Aria has watched elephant handling go from an all-male community with a cowboy attitude to women making up about half of Ringling’s handlers today, including the top two people in charge of animal stewardship: Aria, the director, and her deputy. The way Aria sees it, “Women have an inherent nurturing that many guys don’t have, and I think elephants respond really well to that.”
It’s true: They never forget
The Red Unit train pulled into Wilkes-Barre the last week in April. Since Washington, it’d been to Fairfax, Virginia, and Charleston, West Virginia. In each city the routine was the same: a couple of “dark days” for travel and rest, then two shows a day, occasionally three, each with a preshow. The animals and handlers also did PR events: visits with children fighting cancer, a training demo for congressional staffers, television interviews, Animal Open Houses.
When the gates opened for the open house that final weekend, Sonia Foster was one of the first inside. Earlier that morning she’d driven two and a half hours up from York, Pennsylvania, to the animal compound in the parking lot of Mohegan Sun Arena. The next day was the elephants’ last show, but Foster didn’t just want to see the show; she wanted to see the elephants up close at the open house. Back when she was growing up in California, she went to the circus every year to see the elephants.
“I hate that PETA’s getting rid of the circus elephants,” Foster said to the family with an awestruck child next to her at the paddock. She had already taken her grandchildren to an earlier show. When I asked why she liked elephants so much, she didn’t really have an answer. Maybe it’s like the differ- ence between looking at pictures of trees and taking a walk in a forest. Like all animals, we experience the world through our senses. When all our senses are engaged, we learn and feel on a level beyond words.
Elephants learn without words. So it’s impossible to know for sure what they’re learning from their contact with us. But a wild-born elephant like Asia may have suffered the typical miseries of capture and breaking, losing her family followed by days of beatings. She may have endured old-school circus training techniques. If so, she surely hasn’t forgotten any of it, nor that humans were responsible. Studies of elephant behaviour and brains, with their bigger pyramidal neurons built for more connections than ours, have proved it really is true that elephants never forget. Yet Asia seemed as drawn to humans as they were to her.
Psychologist GA Bradshaw, author of Elephants on the Edge, describes how elephants have demonstrated they’re capable of distinguishing between humans who hurt them and humans who don’t. In Africa, young elephants who witnessed the slaughter of their families by one group of humans were rescued by other humans. Later, out in the bush, those still-wild elephants protected their human rescuers from dangers that included their fellow wild elephants.
In this country, animal rights activists and circus people have been demonising each other in a long-running war of protests and legal battles over the fate of America’s performing elephants. Meanwhile, the ones who’ve set the best example of forgiveness might just be the elephants.
‘Beautiful divas’
In a spartan RV parked by the elephant paddock, Ryan Henning shrugged into his black tuxedo jacket. The last few nights he’d been lying awake. His routine would no longer be dictated by the elephants’ daily needs: 200 pounds (90 kilograms) each of hay, fruit, vegetables and grains; 50 gallons (189 litres) of water; shovels and 55-gallon drums to keep ahead of the resulting mountains of manure and lakes of urine. No more foot care baths and mounds of sand for naps