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When Ringling Bros. Retires Its Elephants, This is Where They Live | National Geographic


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

In March of 2015, we announced that we were going to transition all of the elephants on our three Ringling Brothers Touring units to the Center for Elephant Conservation. So, those 13 animals will come and live here. The reason it takes 3 years is we need to determine do we have enough water supply, do we have enough staff, do we have enough barn spaces. We have a 2-year-old elephant and a 69-year-old elephant, so the decisions we make today will have decades of repercussions.

It's a 200-acre working facility that was designed, and to this day still is, specifically for the care of these magnificent animals. A lot of the cities that we play in are not allowing the tools that we use to work with the elephants, so it's just too hard for a business to conduct itself that way. Basically, all it is, is it's just an extension of our hand. There's a point at one end, and then it curves at one end, so I can, like say, "My S, sir," and I can pull her towards me with part of it, or I can say, "Get over," and then I can push her over. Everybody is trained to use them properly, so it's just a very, very good tool—just like using a collar and leash on a dog and a bitten bridle on a horse.

Since 1976, you can't import elephants or export elephants from countries where they live. The best thing about our elephants here is they're never in danger from poachers, they're never, as you can see, going to go hungry. They don't have to walk 30 to 40 miles a day to forage for food and water, so we think that this is an ideal environment to be an elephant. Everything that you see now in a Ringling Brothers performance is a part of their natural behaviors. Elephants do stand on their heads; I've seen it here on many occasions. I've seen them balance on balls that they play with. Their training will continue because they're used to being around people, and you have to work with them. They have to be used to people for us to be able to continue the valuable research.

You could put two elephants in this section, three elephants in the other, or right here you have one, one, and then two on the other side. Most trains have at least two of these cars, if not more, depending on how big they have. You can—it's like wearing a seat belt—you can keep them tethered if it's going through an area with a lot of curves. So, that obviously, you don't want them because they weigh enough; that's why you would have them in this way rather than this way. They can move around throughout their area, and we make sure we can clean up behind them, refresh feed in front of them, and make sure the ventilation—if you look above, you can also pop open the indoors. All of this can open.

Our primary goal is to ensure that the Asian elephant does not go extinct and also to make sure we have better care and welfare for the Asian elephant. By using the animals here, we're learning so much from them, whether it's their physiology, their reproduction, their endocrinology. EHV is actually a very fatal hemorrhagic disease in Asian elephants. So, fortunately for us, we have a resource of so many elephants. So, what it enables us to study is whether certain elephants are more prone to this disease or what kind of immunity they have.

When they eventually come here, we're really excited because all 42 elephants will be here on one site, and many of them are younger females. So, that way we can either naturally breed them or be part of the artificial insemination herd. We've had 26 births so far, and these two females here—my sore, is 69; she's our oldest, and Sarah is 58. They spent a lot of time in the circus when they were younger, and they're retired here. What our company would like to do is just make it so that the Asian elephant is existing in the Western Hemisphere for everyone to see. We want our grandkids to be able to see an Asian elephant.

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