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TYKE THE ELEPHANT KILLS TRAINER TRIAL

The only freedom she’d known was when she’d escape – and she’d done so twice before. Like all circus elephants, she’d spent her life chained up, transported in trucks and beaten to perform. She escaped the tent and ran through the city streets for a half hour before police officers brought her down in a hail of 86 bullets.

In 1994, for example, a female African elephant named Tyke crushed her trainer to death in front of a circus audience in Honolulu.

Can they remember abuse and pain? Could some elephants even be described as traumatised? There have certainly been episodes that would seem to indicate this. So what are the implications of this? Besides their own particular form of consciousness, elephants have spectacularly good memories. In Indonesia, activists have photographed an elephant in a zoo that lives alone with its feet tied together by a chain. When I ask ecologist and author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, Carl Safina, if he believes elephants are intelligent and conscious, he says that there is “zero” evidence that such animals are not conscious, while there is multiple lines of evidence – both physically and behaviourally – that they are.

TYKE THE ELEPHANT KILLS TRAINER TRIAL

A video still from a report that was shown during the trial of circus trainer Mary Chipperfield, who was convicted in 1999 on 12 counts of animal cruelty.Įlephants are still gussied up to decorate weddings in India in Sri Lanka they are locked in religious sites as living (but suffering) embodiments of a god in Africa tourists ride trained elephants to see wild ones in south-east Asia elephants are used to log the very forests they once called home and worldwide elephants are still forced to perform silly tricks in circuses and zoos, tricks they are trained to do by brutalising methods, often using a bullhook, a large, sharp, medieval-looking instrument used to create pain in an elephant’s sensitive spots.

Today tens of thousands live shackled in prisons of our making. We have ridden them, dressed them up in ridiculous attire, beaten them, starved them, and slaughtered them en masse. We even know now that what makes captive elephants happy is not the size of their pen, but whether they live with other elephants, thanks to a landmark collection of papers in the scientific journal PLOS ONE last yearīut our desire to be close to these incredible creatures has led us down some ugly paths. They can have an “aha” moment to solve a puzzle, showed researchers in 2011, by witnessing a young elephant in the National zoo in Washington DC who would move a block wherever she needed it to reach food. They can recognise themselves in a mirror, found scientists in 2006, one of only a few species that do this. Some extraordinary scientific studies in the last few years have revealed just how intelligent they are.

“Empathy, enduring family bonds, cooperation, intelligence, long memories, taking care of their environment – to name just a few.” “We see the qualities and characteristics in elephants that we aspire to have ourselves,” says Patricia Sims, the co-founder of World Elephant Day. We are, as a species, generally fascinated by elephants. Watching her now, it’s hard to imagine Flora – a female African elephant, the largest and arguably most regal terrestrial animal on the planet – dressed up in a silly costume performing in a one-elephant act for 18 years. The Elephant Sanctuary spreads over 2,700 rolling acres.Arizona executes inmate for 1984 killing 8-year-ol.