Elephant Article in NYT Mag

If you didn't catch the article about elephants in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, I highly recommend reading it. You can click the title above to go to the article. Jack Kornfield sometimes tells a story about the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, but his is about the happy reunion of Shirley (an elephant) and another elephant Shirley had known in the circus 22 years before--they remembered each other after all that time and gleefully reunited as old friends when Shirley was brought to the Elephant Sanctuary. The NYT article tells a much darker tale about the plight of elephants and their clashes with man. Here's an excerpt:

"Shortly after my return from Uganda, I went to visit the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, a 2,700-acre rehabilitation center and retirement facility situated in the state’s verdant, low-rolling southern hill country. The sanctuary is a kind of asylum for some of the more emotionally and psychologically disturbed former zoo and circus elephants in the United States — cases so bad that the people who profited from them were eager to let them go. Given that elephants in the wild are now exhibiting aberrant behaviors that were long observed in captive elephants, it perhaps follows that a positive working model for how to ameliorate the effects of elephant breakdown can be found in captivity.

Of the 19 current residents of the sanctuary, perhaps the biggest hard-luck story is that of a 40-year-old, five-ton Asian elephant named Misty. Originally captured as a calf in India in 1966, Misty spent her first decade in captivity with a number of American circuses and finally ended up in the early 80’s at a wild-animal attraction known as Lion Country Safari in Irvine, Calif. It was there, on the afternoon of July 25, 1983, that Misty, one of four performing elephants at Lion Country Safari that summer, somehow managed to break free of her chains and began madly dashing about the park, looking to make an escape. When one of the park’s zoologists tried to corner and contain her, Misty killed him with one swipe of her trunk."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html

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