When two abused elephants are reunited after 23 years, their joy is trumpeted throughout the colony.
Freedom and Friends
To enter the Elephant Sanctuary, you have to pass through a massive gate, part of the thick, cabled fencing that surrounds the perimeter. It’s the kind of fence that kept the dinosaurs locked inside Jurassic Park. Inside, small birds flit in the grass, and there’s an unusual stillness for a place that’s home to the world’s largest land animals.
Travel farther down the almost impassable packed dirt that acts as a major boulevard, and the sanctuary continues to surprise. It’s a banquet table of subtropical landscaping. Lush forests of sweet gum trees and maples give way to brush that seamlessly becomes hilly terrain, then opens up to savanna-like plains. It’s a perfect spot for elephants. Surprising, since we’re in Hohenwald, Tennessee, and not Burma or Africa as it might seem.
The sanctuary was started in 1995 by Carol Buckley and Scott Blaise. The two former elephant trainers had seen enough abuse and neglect at circuses and zoos to inspire them to create a haven where elephants could live out their lives. The sanctuary would offer what Buckley considers the three staples for a happy elephant: freedom from dominance, room to roam and lots of other elephants.
At the 2,700-acre preserve, the 19 African and Asian elephants in residence are allowed to exist as they would in the wild. Elephants in zoos and circuses are typically moved with a tool called an ankus, a nasty-looking wooden shaft with a metal hook protruding from the top. It’s banned at the sanctuary.
Instead, “we created a system where dominance does not exist at all,” says Buckley. “We give them the option to say no.”
Our photographer saw this firsthand. Buckley and Blaise would not bring us to the elephants, nor would they scatter hay in order to draw them out. Instead they gave the elephants the option to come to us. Luckily, two elephants, Shirley and Bunny, eventually did appear. And in a sweetly affectionate gesture, they even held trunks.
Yes, Buckley confirms, just as we’ve read in National Geographic and seen on the Discovery Channel, elephants show great compassion toward one another. Because the elephants she works with have suffered neglect and abuse, Buckley sees this empathy demonstrated in some unforgettable scenes, including this remarkable story.
A circus refugee, Jenny had often been tied up for 23 hours a day or crammed into small train cars traveling from one city to the next. After suffering a crippling leg injury, she was dumped at a dog-and-cat shelter, which was ill-equipped to care for an elephant, let alone an ailing one. An animal rights activist contacted Buckley, who brought Jenny to Hohenwald.
Side by Side
Freedom’s a wonderful thing, and Jenny was eager to experience it. She was kept alone in a yard for one day due to injury, but that proved stressful for her. So she was let out with the rest of the herd. And that’s when she stumbled on a friend from the past.
Jenny was still a calf when she and Shirley first met years before, toiling together at a circus. Although they’d spent only a few weeks with each other, Shirley assumed the role of surrogate mother to Jenny before they were separated. But that was 23 years earlier—would they remember?
Jenny knew right away who Shirley was. Soon Hohenwald was rocking as the two greeted each other with trumpeting and celebratory bumping.
Shirley and Jenny instantly fell into their old routine, wandering the sanctuary side by side. The good times had lasted only a few years when Jenny became ill, the result of her previous leg injury.
When she grew too weak to roam the hills and hollows, Jenny trundled toward a shady valley, found some soft, beaten-down underbrush, and lay down. Shirley stood vigil night and day, using her trunk to help her friend to rise and even shift her weight. Also by Jenny’s side were two other sanctuary friends, Tarra and Bunny. At one point, the four spent three hours vocalizing and trumpeting—the vibrations felt by every living being in the sanctuary. In all her years of working with animals, Buckley had never seen anything like this joy-filled celebration of Jenny’s life.
The next day, October 17, 2006, the great animals continued their vocalizing. There was nothing urgent in their song. It was soothing. Still, it was too much for Shirley. About to lose Jenny for the second time, she retreated to a nearby hill to grieve alone. In her absence, Bunny and Tarra comforted Jenny by stroking her. They rested like that for some time, Bunny calmly answering each of Jenny’s rumbles with a crescendo trumpet, while Tarra accompanied the duo with high-pitched chirps. That evening, at the age of 36—young for an elephant—Jenny died. Tarra and Bunny stayed at her side through the night. But whereas Jenny’s suffering had ended, Shirley’s began.
Elephants wear their hearts on their trunks, as it were, so it was easy to tell that Shirley was not coping well with Jenny’s death—her shoulders slumped, her eyes were half shut and her trunk dragged on the ground. She wasn’t eating or vocalizing. She was depressed. Bunny followed her to the hill, where the two stayed for days before finally returning to the barn. There, a new arrival had made her presence felt. Another circus outcast, Misty is a gregarious bundle of energy who literally jumps for joy. Even Shirley couldn’t ignore her raucous spinning and loud, jubilant trumpeting. With her spirits restored, Shirley, the oldest and largest elephant at the sanctuary, began to eat and play, and even picked her trunk off the ground. She was back with the herd, where she belonged.
Watch an elephant walk on its hind legs or perform a hula dance at a circus and it’s easy to forget that these are sensitive, intelligent creatures for whom the family unit is everything.
Luckily for them, there’s a place in Tennessee that hasn’t.