A luxury home for tortured elephant Anne — thanks to YOU
The mercury is beginning to rise, a patch of blue’s appeared in the sky and there’s one grey resident of Wiltshire who is extremely happy to have the sun on her face at last. Anne the elephant — believed to be europe’s oldest Asian elephant — lumbers out of her brand new £1.2 million luxury home into her outdoor enclosure at Longleat Safari Park and takes a trunk-full of fresh air.
For the past eight weeks, Anne — who is believed to be in her early 60s — had been confined indoors while her private outdoor area was being completed.
Now, thanks to the generosity of Daily Mail readers who raised an amazing £410,000, her new private estate is finished and she is finally free to roam as she pleases.
This spacious outdoor enclosure, featuring a grassy paddock, rocks, log piles, a sandpit and plunge pool, is the final stage in what has been an incredible journey for Anne.
Not that long ago, she spent her life performing in a travelling circus and being regularly beaten by her groom.
Thankfully, she was rescued four years ago when footage was released of her being abused. She moved to Longleat Safari park soon after.
her new 1.2 acre private garden is the icing on the elephant-size cake after Anne moved into her new palatial pad in February.
With 994 square metres of heated indoor space to roam in temperatures which today are set at a comfortable 18 degrees, Anne can enjoy deep sand floors which support her legs, natural skylight panels, an automated feeding system, drinking canisters which refill themselves and a specialist treatment area for any of her umpteen health practitioners to treat her.
All her favourite toys have been brought to the enclosure, including her boomer ball (a large plastic ball on a rope), a scratching rack and even Ker-trunk, a game devised by her keepers involving a large draining tube and poles — similar to the popular family game Kerplunk — in which she can retrieve food if she moves the correct pole.
In the corner, the radio is tuned to her favourite pop music station, heart FM, although sometimes she prefers the more soothing melodies on Classic FM.
On hand to see to her every whim are three full-time handlers. She has world-class experts on call including vets and osteopaths. In the past, she’s even had acupuncturists and an holistic medicine practitioner to help with her elderly aches and pains. Yep, this is one very pampered pachyderm.
But so she should be. For Anne’s old life was heartbreakingly bleak.
Brought over from Sri Lanka as a calf, she performed for most of her life in Bobby Roberts Super Circus. At a time when it was fashionable for animals to entertain paying customers, she travelled europe with her masters, on one occasion even visiting the top of the eiffel Tower (via the lift, not the stairs).
But when footage emerged in 2011 of Anne being horrifically mistreated by her Romanian groom, there was a public outcry. Circus boss Bobby Roberts was later found guilty of animal cruelty after it was revealed he kept her chained up and failed to prevent the abuse. The cruel groom ran away and was never found.
Anne was rescued in an operation involving the RSPCA, Yorkshire Wildlife Park, Woburn Safari Park, The Born Free foundation, Specialist Wildlife Services and even the Ministry of Transport.
Given a police escort to Longleat that April, she was housed temporarily in a rhino house where conditions were much improved but still not suitable long-term for an animal of Anne’s size.
But now, thanks to ‘Anne’s haven’, as her new enclosure is called, she seems one very content creature. But it’s taken time to bring her back to health.
Being chained up nearly all her life in small enclosures had left her physically scarred.
‘her trunk didn’t work as well as it should have because her previous owners had always placed her food on the floor, so she’d lost the ability to lift her trunk up — as elephants normally would to eat leaves and branches from trees,’ says vet Jon Cracknell, Longleat’s Director of Animal Operations.
‘By gradually putting her food in higher places — it is now hanging in bags from the ceiling — we’ve helped her learn how to use her trunk again, which encourages her to explore and forage as she wants.
‘It’s great to see her rehabilitated in this simple way and regaining her normal, natural ability. When she came to us, her skin was rough and in clumps in places, but we implemented a programme for her with physical scratching posts and daily skin management including scrubbing with skin creams. Within days it was looking great.
‘her internal organs seem in good shape — although elephants are too big to use standard diagnostic tools such as radiography, so we’ll never really know.
‘But her back legs are in poor condition. Standing in one place for long periods and some of the elements of the circus act will likely have resulted in the bone structures and spaces in between altering shape, which can’t be reversed.
‘She’ll be supported with pain relief for the rest of her life. She can’t lift her hind legs and drags her back feet — although she’s walking much better now than when she arrived.
‘We were all amazed how she managed to walk the 800m from her old house to the new house in less than an hour on February 5. We’d expected it would take several hours, with a stop half way to let her rest and have a drink, but it was as if she was excited to get her new place — she did it in one go.’
Anne has therapies every four to six weeks where a specialist osteopath stimulates her muscles and skin to help her movement.
‘In veterinary medicine, we’ll consider anything that may benefit an animal like Anne,’ says Jon. ‘The osteopathy is definitely helping. In the past we’ve tried acupuncture (the needles are NOT elephantsize, as they need only pierce the first few centimetres of skin) and even crystal healing and reiki...’
Tragically, however, not all Anne’s scars were visible. ‘Vets can easily fix ana elephant physically,’ admits Jon,Jon ‘but mentally, it’s a different matter.mat We believe Anne was possibly suffering the animal equivalent of p post traumatic stress disorder whenwhe she arrived.
‘But‘B because we knew very little aboutabo her history — only what we werewer told by Bobby Roberts, plus a few photographs and a couple of videosvide — it was difficult for us to know what specifically we needed to do to help her.
‘For instance, if she’d been beaten in the past with yellow buckets, we’d never allow yellow buckets in her enclosure. If she’d been hit with pitchforks, we wouldn’t use those either. So we had to tread carefully and learn as we went along.’
Personality wise, she has a reputation as something of a starlet. ‘Oh, she can definitely be a diva,’ smiles Jon. ‘When we moved her into the new enclosure, the first thing she did was to go around the pen checking all the nuts, bolts and padlocks. She even unscrewed a few — just to show us she could.
‘elephants are incredibly dextrous
She’s got a radio that plays her favourite pop songs
with their trunks: they can pick up a grain of rice if they want — it’s like their little finger.’
They’re also show-offs. ‘She loves an audience,’ says Ross Ellis, one of her keepers. ‘She’s very intelligent, too. We’re constantly thinking up new toys to keep her stimulated and active. But it’s a war of minds.
‘We come up with a new device, such as Ke-trunk that we think will take her a couple of days to figure out, and within a few minutes she’s worked it out.’
One of the issues vexing the team — and one they debate constantly with animal welfare experts — is whether Anne should have an elephant companion in the enclosure. ‘Elephants are a social species and we’ve thought long and hard about whether to place another elephant in with her. But our thinking at the moment is that it’s not a good idea,’ says Jon.
‘We believe that when she has mixed with other elephants in the past, she was often bullied by them due to being down in the previous herd’s hierarchy. As a result, she was often on her own.
‘Her ears are all scarred where they have been chewed by other elephants and we have been told that she was often a loner and liked being away from other elephants.
‘We also have to take her physical condition into consideration. Anne is old. Typically, in captivity, they will live to only around 70. We are concerned that, owing to her orthopedic complaints, she wouldn’t be able to stand up to another elephant if there was any hierarchial challenges.’
That’s not to say she is lonely. As well as her human handlers, she has three Anglo-Nubian goats — Costa, Coffee and Sugar — to keep her company.
‘At first we wondered about introducing sheep, but if Anne got cross, she could grab their fleece with her trunk,’ says Jon. ‘While dogs might bite her or become aggressive.
‘Goats on the other hand are inquisitive creatures, so they would provide a level of suitable interaction. They don’t have horns so they can’t do her any damage.
‘They’re already providing some interaction, although they will steal her food if she’s not quick enough. We make sure they’re out of the way when she is having her meals.’
Anne’s day begins with an 8kg breakfast around 8.30am when her keepers feed her with corn mix, cubes of fibre and vitamin and mineral supplements to help with her arthritis.
Hay is also placed in cargo nets in the ceiling and then dropped down at random times throughout the day so she can snack.
After breakfast, she has a warm water ‘power shower’ with a pressure
Circus horror: The 2011 footage of Anne being beaten by her keeper washer and then she’s left to play with her toys or to simply relax and enjoy her new surroundings.
In the past, keepers would enter her enclosure to feed or groom her. Now she is under a programme of ‘protected contact’, keeping interaction with humans inside the enclosure to an absolute minimum.
‘It’s in order to give her more freedom of choice,’ explains Jon. ‘All her life she’s had a strict and structured regime, being told what to do and when. Now, because we stay out of the way, it’s Anne’s choice if she wants to go outside or not, or if she wants to eat or be washed.
‘We offer the opportunity by using a number of targets and whistles to attract her attention, but if she doesn’t want it she can walk away.’
At 3.30pm, it’s tea-time — a bale of hay which she likes to dip in her water. As the light fades and the keepers go home, Anne is left on her own with a nightlight so it’s not entirely pitch black.
She will sleep for around five hours at a single sitting, and since her outdoor enclosure opened, her keepers have noticed that occasionally she even steps outside for a night-time stroll.
‘In a perfect world, it would be good to see her in her natural habitat, but with the physical ailments she carries, she wouldn’t last very long,’ says Jon. ‘We can look after her here. She is a beautiful old lady and we hope that she will have several more years of comfort.’
And now with her enclosure open, she will at last be able to enjoy summer in the autumn of her years.
After breakfast, she has a warm power shower