Bread and games. The agony of elephants

  • 2013-06-12
  • Katrin Broks and Martin Lee Muller

Back in the 1930s, an Asian work elephant and her three-month-old calf got trapped in the rapidly rising flood of a Burmese river. Helpless onlookers watched as the calf screamed in terror, unable to climb the steep, 5 meter high river bank. At times, when the baby began to float away on the torrential current, the mother seized her child with her trunk, pulling it back towards herself. But the powerful current took the calf at last and carried him downstream. The mother threw herself into the stream, swam after the calf, grabbed him once more, and, in obvious desperation but with equally obvious resolution, used her head to pin the calf against the river bank. At last she gathered her strength and lifted her child onto a rocky ledge that had not yet been flooded by the river. When the calf was safe, she crashed backwards into the water and was carried away quickly.

Half an hour later, she returned. J.H. Williams, the British manager of the nearby elephant camp, later recalled “the grandest sounds of a mother’s love I can remember.” As soon as she was able to get out of the river, the mother had run back upstream, “calling the whole time - a defiant roar, but to her calf it was music. The two little ears, like little maps of India, were cocked forward listening to the only sounds that mattered, the call of the mother.” By the next morning, both mother and calf had left the site, reunited, and safe.

A happy ending was not part of the life story of Medi, another Asian elephant who was brought to Estonia from Germany as part of a travelling circus in mid-May. Medi died unexpectedly in the Narva River in Estonia on June 7. Reports say she died of heart failure. This is the image we are going to remember of her: She stood alone in a desolate wasteland in plain sight of a Tallinn shopping mall, in the shadows of nine-story apartment blocks made of concrete and steel. She was chained, unable to roam freely, and under strict supervision. Her trunk was partly paralyzed and she could hardly lift her legs. Born in 1966 in the wild, but then captured as a 7-year old calf and taken to the arenas of Europe, this was her life: this chain, this boredom, this isolation. This broken body.

What we want to know is: How did this fellow creature wind up chained to the ground between a shopping mall and high-rise concrete blocks? Medi was a circus elephant, of course. And that makes all the difference.

Circuses are displays of dominance

Circuses emerged in antiquity. One of the first - and, to this day, largest - circuses in history was Rome’s Circus Maximus, which was so vast that 250,000 people could visit it at any one time. Circuses in antiquity were expressions of power and dominance. In the first century AD, Emperor Trajan held games for 123 days at a stretch, on the occasion of his conquest of Dacia. He had 11,000 animals slaughtered during the festivities, including elephants, and many others as well, such as tigers, lions, giraffes, rhinos, stags, bulls, crocodiles and snakes. Another example of this display of power comes from as late as 1719, when German Augustus II of Dresden decided that in order to display his might, he would personally kill his entire menagerie. ‘The Saxon Hercules,’ also known as ‘Iron-Hand’ or simply ‘the Strong,’ executed his plan, slaying them all: tigers, lions, bulls, boars, and bears.

Modern circuses emerged only decades later. Philip Astley of Great Britain popularized his horse-riding Circle, to which he added tumblers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, a clown, and performing dogs: the first modern circus. Soon after, American circuses introduced travelling combinations of animal and human oddities, including human freak shows.

Today’s travelling circuses have largely replaced the display of the ugly, repulsive, and frightening with ‘disneyfied’ animals: horses, goats, and elephants wearing funny hats and colourful coats, presenting skilfully choreographed headstands, hind-leg stands or dances. The overt message of today’s circuses is benign, and bright: behold, these animals love being in a circus.

But the underlying element of power has never disappeared. It may be more concealed now than it once was. But circuses never stopped being about control, and supremacy. The European Elephant Group puts this poignantly: “The [elephants’] performances in the arena alone require a husbandry system based on dominance exerted by humans. This means a need for life-long dominance over the elephants by the circus trainers.”

For the sake of entertainment – is it all worth it?

Circus animals are subjected to rigorous training based on intimidation of and control over the animal. Although circus animal trainers claim to care for their animals and use only positive reinforcement in the training, the truth of the matter is that in order to protect circus workers and establish dominance over the animal, they cannot avoid using painful methods. Kenneth Feld, CEO of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, testified in a 2009 U.S. District Court hearing that circus elephants are routinely struck behind the ears, under the chin, and on their legs with metal tipped rods, also known as bull hooks.

In the wild, elephants roam vast areas, covering many kilometers in search of food and water. According to a study conducted by Wageningen University in 2008, circus elephants are kept chained for 17 hours every day, on average, and spend 10 hours a day stereotyping, like trunk swaying or rocking from side to side. In captive animals, this kind of repetitive behavior is caused by deep mental and physical stress, including boredom, the abnormal environment, and lack of mental stimulation. Such behavior has never been described in free-roaming animals. Cramped cages, extreme restrictions on movement, and inadequate diet also cause elephants to experience physical health problems, like deformed hind legs and growth disturbances.

Medi was 47-years-old when she died. She had a partly paralyzed trunk and it was obvious that she had difficulties moving around, her steps were heavy and slow. Like Medi, many elephants used in circuses nowadays have been caught from the wild. It was relatively common in the 1970s and 1980s that poachers attacked elephant herds with showers of bullets, killing the older elephants for their tusks and capturing the calves for the Western market of circuses and zoos. As elephants possess excellent memory, perhaps surpassing even the capacities of humans, it is only logical to conclude that captive elephants who have witnessed the slaughter of their families, carry this trauma with them for the rest of their lives.

In African savannah, there have been records of elephants mourning their family members by standing vigil over the bodies of their dead companions for a week, placing branches and grass clumps on and around the carcass and then visiting these sites for years afterwards, handling the bones gently. Cynthia Moss, an elephant researcher, witnessed a 7-year old elephant calf staying with the jaw bone of her mother who had died a few weeks earlier. While the herd was passing through the camp site where the scientist had brought the jaw bone for inspection, the herd made a detour to examine and be with the bone. The other elephants moved on after some time, but the calf stayed behind, touching the jaw and turning it over with his feet and trunk. Moss concluded that “the calf was somehow reminded of his mother - perhaps remembering the contours of her face. He felt her there. It seems certain that the calf’s memory was at work here.”

Being an elephant means being in a relation, being in a family. Elephants lead socially complex lives in extended families where the matriarch mothers are assisted by aunts, sisters and cousins in taking care of the young and ensuring the well-being of the herd, passing over elephant wisdom from generation to generation. Elephants inhabit a world of deep emotional experience, and they form social ties that we humans can easily identify with.

In the face of this, we can assume without reasonable doubt that when they are forcefully removed from their family to live solitary lives under the strict authority of humans, when they are chained up for an average of seventeen hours a day (every day, year-round), when they are disciplined routinely with metal bull hooks, when they are forced to perform tricks even under severe physical pain, when they carry in their unforgetting memory the trauma of seeing their mothers being killed - that these creatures experience emotional wasteland. For the sake of entertainment, they are subjected to unimaginable suffering, suffering that humans have inflicted and continue to inflict upon them. Some of them try to cope by seeking nearness to whomever they can reach. One captive elephant routinely put aside a little of her grain for a mouse to eat.

Why do we go to animal circuses?

A question follows from all of this. Do we, as a society, wish to approve such cruel and degrading treatment of animals in the name of entertainment? And if we don’t - what would be the necessary steps to end it?

The question of whether to allow using wild animals in circuses leads to another important question. What is it that we hope to experience when we are going to see a circus performance that exhibits elephants, tigers, lions, even crocodiles? For one thing, we search for excitement. We even may trick ourselves into believing that we can experience the magnificence and the exotic presence of circus animals, because we love them. For another, as paradoxical as it may seem, we may hope to experience some sort of connectedness, a perverse sense of similarity with beasts who, by having learned a few human-like tricks, may appear closer to us, as if the curtain between them and us has been let down, even if just for a moment.

But the opposite may be true – with every animal consumed in the circus, with every performance, the gap between us and the animals becomes wider. What if there were a better way to experience animals in their richness and magnificence? What if we chose instead to observe animals patiently in their natural environment? What if we resisted the temptation to chain them and put them on display, but approached them with time instead, and patience, so that they could reveal themselves to us on their own terms? What if we could actually encounter them in their nature, their characteristic traits, even their personality? And what if, through it all, we found that in some crucial ways, these animals are actually very much like us?

Learning from elephants

A year ago, the renowned conservationist Lawrence Anthony passed away at his home in South Africa. Anthony had been known for his tireless work in rescuing wildlife and rehabilitating elephants all over the globe from human atrocities. He had created the Thula Thula reserve in South Africa, a safe haven for elephants that would have been otherwise killed. Just a few days after his death, a procession of elephants, altogether 31 of them, led by two large matriarchs, in a solemn one-by-one line came to his house. For two days and two nights the elephants remained by the house, without eating anything. The witnesses of the procession were baffled not only by the elephants’ behavior, but also by the precise timing of their arrival. How did the elephants know that their patron had passed away?

This remarkable event is evidence of the specialness of these creatures, of something that transcends our narrow habitual concepts about animals; it shows that there is still so much to discover. It also gives hope that respectful, reciprocal relationships between humans and elephants are still possible – when we encounter them on their own premises, and give them the chance to be themselves, which means in place, in family, in relation.

In the words of Paul MacKenzie, “a problem is created when the closure of the mind leads to the suffering of countless beings. This is where we as a collective people must make a stand by, once again, connecting our minds to our hearts.” In the particular case of using wild animals in circuses, we can make a stand relatively easily. By not attending circus performances that use animals. By prohibiting the use of wild animals (and hopefully all other animals) in the laws governing our society. Many societies have already made this choice explicit and a growing number of countries are following their suit. Bolivia and Peru have banned the use of all animals, wild and domestic, in circuses, while Austria, the Netherlands, Croatia, Greece, Finland, Costa Rica, Singapore, Israel, Denmark, numerous municipalities in Spain and many parts of Australia have banned the use of wild animals in circuses. England is now considering such a ban to come into effect in 2015 and several other countries in Europe are having similar discussions.

Medi is now dead. But many elephants remain in circuses. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, where people are known for their love of nature, have a choice to ban this practice in their countries, better sooner than later.


Katrin Broks is a doctoral student at the Law Faculty of the University of Basel in the program “Law and Animals: Ethics at Crossroads;” Martin Lee Muller is a PhD candidate of ecophilosophy at the Center for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo.