On May 1, after more than a century of featuring elephants in its shows, the Ringling Bros. circus will wrap up its very last shows with these majestic animals. We’re told that the elephants are being “retired,” but where are they actually going?
While SeaWorld recently pledged to stop breeding orcas, Ringling has made clear that, though it will no longer use elephants in traveling circus acts, it has every intention of continuing to use them as breeding stock at its Florida compound—despite acknowledging that there is no possibility of the animals Ringling breeds ever being released.
Elephants in the wild are active for about 18 hours every day, but according to Ringling’s own testimony, elephants at the Florida facility are typically chained on concrete by one front and one back leg for more than half of every day. Often, including in the case of pregnant elephants and babies forcibly removed from their mothers, they are chained for 23 hours a day or even longer. According to an elephant expert who inspected the compound under a court order, the elephants have spent so much time chained that they have worn grooves into the concrete.
Even when unchained, the elephants have access to only a tiny fraction of the space they would roam in the wild. While Ringling brags that its center has more than 200 acres, the elephants don’t have access to the vast majority of this space. Analysis reveals a total of less than sixteen acres divided up for dozens of elephants, with an average of about just one third of an acre per elephant. Wild Asian elephant ranges are thousands of—and sometimes more than a hundred thousand—acres.
Under conditions that so starkly contrast with the wild, it should come as no surprise that Ringling’s medical records reveal that nearly all of the elephants have suffered from painful (and often fatal) foot problems and arthritis—both virtually unknown in the wild.
Many also have tuberculosis, which is aggravated by close confinement and stress. Elephants can carry the human strain of TB and easily transmit it to people through the air. According to the Department of Agriculture, Ringling’s facility has had the highest incidence of elephant-borne tuberculosis in the United States. As of October 2015, more than half of the elephants at Ringling’s compound were under government-mandated quarantine for tuberculosis.
Ringling’s medical records also reveal a recurring pattern of wounds consistent with bullhook abuse. Bullhooks are devices with sharp hooks on the end that resemble fireplace pokers and are used to hurt and punish elephants. Most zoos no longer use these weapons, and many jurisdictions have banned them. But Ringling continues to handle elephants with bullhooks—as well as electric prods.
Chilling photographs from the circus’s Florida compound show electric prods and bullhooks being used on baby elephants. According to the sworn testimony of a former Ringling trainer, “Raising a baby elephant at Ringling is like raising a kid in jail.” In describing the manager of Ringling’s Florida facility’s training of an elephant, the former trainer explained, “[B]eatings were daily. . . . She had quite a few hook marks on her and we used quite a bit of electricity.”
One baby elephant died after shattering his legs during a training exercise at the facility. Wielding bullhooks, circus trainers were attempting to force the eight-month-old to perform on a circus-style pedestal.
Numerous other baby elephants have also died at the compound. Just earlier this year, two year old elephant Mike became the latest to die from a herpes virus that is closely associated with stress.
Taking elephants out of the circus is an important first step, but it’s not enough. Ringling should follow SeaWorld’s lead and immediately stop breeding elephants who are doomed to be confined to what are effectively tanks on land. And the elephants who have endured so much—and made millions of dollars for Ringling—deserve to be retired to a true, accredited sanctuary where they will have space to roam and never again be subjected to bullhook abuse or any other form of punishment.
Delcianna J. Winders is Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Fellow.