Thursday, January 28, 2010
The Finale
January 28th
Pictures are back! I’m putting them up right now; I'll try to post as many as possible tonight, but they take a while and internet is slow here. Unfortunately, only one of three rolls came out. For some reason my camera decided it doesn’t like Fujifilm. Not too happy about that, but at least I’ve got these. Enjoy!
We’re on our last week here, the last leg of the journey. It’s been an experience, that’s for sure, and more and more I realize how blessed I am—to be here, to have friends like Gail, to have a family that so unquestionably supports me, and to simply be. Be here, be alive, be loved. It’s all such a blessing. I know I haven’t been writing much lately, but that’s simply because I’ve just been enjoying myself too much. You’d think a seven-hour manual labor work day would get old, and sure I want to go home and see family and friends, but man, it’s going to be hard to leave here. Which brings me to my fifth reason I got into all of this. It’s pure love, being here. There’s no real way of explaining it; for some people you get that feeling of all being well in the world from a job, from children, a spouse. Right now in my life, I feel like I get that from doing this, being around the animals I love with people I love. There’s nothing that beats a job like that. It’s funny, being here and realizing how little so many things mean in comparison to how much the little things mean. I’ve been eating the same lunch every single day, wearing the same clothes, have a constant and healthy supply of hay in my boots at any given time, and there’s generally not a steady supply of toilet paper here. Lucy barks non-stop until the wee hours of the morning, the guinea hens make sounds in the night that sound like rusty door hinges creaking in the wind, and yet…everything is right. I’ve grown to love this community, the people, the elephants, the land, the flaws. These people are here because they want to be, not because they have to be. That’s the difference. I’m surrounded by people who care about the same things as I do, and to a degree I haven’t seen in a long time. It’s refreshing to be around such genuine human beings. It’s good to know they’re still out there, you know? Even if it is in the bowels of this off-the-grid, population 549 Arkansas village. They’re here; they exist. It’s been a wonderful five weeks, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I may be coming home, but I’ll be going back. There’s no question there.
Pictures are back! I’m putting them up right now; I'll try to post as many as possible tonight, but they take a while and internet is slow here. Unfortunately, only one of three rolls came out. For some reason my camera decided it doesn’t like Fujifilm. Not too happy about that, but at least I’ve got these. Enjoy!
We’re on our last week here, the last leg of the journey. It’s been an experience, that’s for sure, and more and more I realize how blessed I am—to be here, to have friends like Gail, to have a family that so unquestionably supports me, and to simply be. Be here, be alive, be loved. It’s all such a blessing. I know I haven’t been writing much lately, but that’s simply because I’ve just been enjoying myself too much. You’d think a seven-hour manual labor work day would get old, and sure I want to go home and see family and friends, but man, it’s going to be hard to leave here. Which brings me to my fifth reason I got into all of this. It’s pure love, being here. There’s no real way of explaining it; for some people you get that feeling of all being well in the world from a job, from children, a spouse. Right now in my life, I feel like I get that from doing this, being around the animals I love with people I love. There’s nothing that beats a job like that. It’s funny, being here and realizing how little so many things mean in comparison to how much the little things mean. I’ve been eating the same lunch every single day, wearing the same clothes, have a constant and healthy supply of hay in my boots at any given time, and there’s generally not a steady supply of toilet paper here. Lucy barks non-stop until the wee hours of the morning, the guinea hens make sounds in the night that sound like rusty door hinges creaking in the wind, and yet…everything is right. I’ve grown to love this community, the people, the elephants, the land, the flaws. These people are here because they want to be, not because they have to be. That’s the difference. I’m surrounded by people who care about the same things as I do, and to a degree I haven’t seen in a long time. It’s refreshing to be around such genuine human beings. It’s good to know they’re still out there, you know? Even if it is in the bowels of this off-the-grid, population 549 Arkansas village. They’re here; they exist. It’s been a wonderful five weeks, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I may be coming home, but I’ll be going back. There’s no question there.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Back to the Beginning
January 23rd
Bad news—the photos aren’t in yet. They’ll hopefully be up by Monday, and if not then, then Tuesday. For now, I’ll take the time to tell a story I’ve neglected thus far to share: The Beginning. In all stories there is always a beginning, always a middle, and always an end. Right now I’m in the middle, and it’s hard to say where the end will lie. The beginning started a year ago, in a little classroom on Interlochen Arts Academy’s campus in the dead of a Michigan winter. For those of you who don’t know, I attended the Academy as a creative writing major for four years, studying fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and literary publications. Fall semester of my senior year I was enrolled in a poetry workshop. This was the semester, the class, and the experience that would define the current obsessive fascination I hold with elephants. As a class of nine, we had each other to exploit as creative resources on a daily basis, and would bring in work daily to be read, critiqued, and later polished. Although we always had somewhat specific assignments, I always felt that, as much as it urged us to practice self-discipline in the art of writing, it was lacking in the aspect of drawing entirely from the self and not from another’s creative juices. And so, I was entirely pleased when a new assignment was born: The Important Excitement. We were given complete creative freedom with one condition—find something that excites you, gets you thinking, grabs ahold of you and won’t let go, and write the hell out of it. While some people chose to write about something they were already excited about, I chose to look for something new. It was in this way that I discovered the dark past of circus elephants. There were five defining moments of discovery that clawed into me and set something uncontrollably loose.
The first was elephant graveyards. While elephants don’t bury their dead, they do something equivocally emotive. When a herd comes across the bones of another elephant, they will stop their trek and mourn. The same is true for the sick. Elephants never leave one of their own behind, even if it means their own death. While I can’t prove this to be true, I would say that I believe it under the same circumstances as humans would act: you may not risk your life for your whole herd, but there is that small group of people that you would die for. The same seems to go for elephants. But maybe there’s some amount of ignorance there, believing everything I read simply for the sake of pure, childlike fascination with this beast. That may be just it—a fascination with possibility, not necessarily fact. The second discovery was of the circus. These discoveries were fact, are fact, and will be fact throughout history. In the 1920’s, the circus was a common form of entertainment, having all sorts of attractions from the Strongman to trapeze artists to the elephants. I believe, because of the abuse of the occupation in the past, that trainers have earned a scathed name for themselves. Scott, the owner here, considers himself an oldschool trainer. That equates to a certain amount of brutality. The problem is, many people tend to use words such as cruelty and abuse synonymously with the word brutality. I did before I got here. The difference, I believe, is in where the line is crossed. While brutality is a necessity to training such large, wild animals, cruelty is not. The line is crossed at cruelty, and the line where brutality becomes cruelty is precariously thin. There is, it seems, an art to finding the balance necessary to command control over an elephant without crossing over to becoming the beast yourself. Scott, I believe, is a man that knows the line well and has walked it all of his life. Many trainers in the past mistook brutality to mean something physical. While it may be in some cases, it is not, and cannot be, in the case of training elephants. Brutality in this case is purely verbal and emotional. You must command control over the animal by asserting a certain amount of verbal and emotional brutality. To them, you must become the alpha if you want to gain any of their respect. This misconception of a single principle caused many deaths in circuses due to mistreatment of elephants. Many trainers were killed, and many elephants went with them for their actions. Such was the case with Murderous Mary, an elephant that turned on her trainer and, as a result, was hung by a crane for a crowd in Kingston, Tennessee in 1916. The first time they hung her the chain snapped and she broke her hip. The second time was a success, but if you can imagine how long it took—in the end, it was her weight that pulled her to her death, slowly. I can’t say for sure whether or not her trainer used excessive force, but what I can say is that PETA wasn’t around back then to go batshit on an over-zealous trainer. Animal abuse was more accepted then. Which leads me to my third and forth discoveries: Edison’s Elephant and The Elephant Ballet. For those who weren’t aware, Thomas Edison was an extremely cruel person. He treated his workers like dirt and thought nothing of it. At the time of the invention of electricity, Edison faced a competitor, Tesla. While Edison had invented a type of continuous-current electricity, Tesla had invented alternating current electricity, the kind we use to this day. Edison felt the need to exploit the dangers of Tesla’s form of electricity, and so went cross-country electrocuting stray cats and dogs to prove his point. And that’s when another elephant turned on another trainer, and when Edison got his hands on the ultimate spectacle: electrocuting an elephant. The horrific event was filmed, and was the first motion picture to circulate around the nation for all to see. Now, I saw the film for myself, thinking it necessary for research’s sake. While it may have been necessary, it was the most pain I’ve ever felt for any non-human suffering I have ever witnessed. While I’ve been here, I’ve learned a handful of things, one of them being a certain fear all elephants have: electricity. Elephants are terrified of it, even amounts that humans can barely detect with their bare skin. Now imagine having a current circulating throughout your body, burning you inside out until you fall over dead. I knew there was something greater than death happening in that video when I first saw it, but when I thought back again, I realized what had been locked in that elephant’s eyes: utter terror. It was the worst death a man could give such a beast, and Edison had enthusiastically complied.
That’s it for now. I’ll write more later about Tchaikovsky’s ballet and the fifth reason for this insane obsession.
Bad news—the photos aren’t in yet. They’ll hopefully be up by Monday, and if not then, then Tuesday. For now, I’ll take the time to tell a story I’ve neglected thus far to share: The Beginning. In all stories there is always a beginning, always a middle, and always an end. Right now I’m in the middle, and it’s hard to say where the end will lie. The beginning started a year ago, in a little classroom on Interlochen Arts Academy’s campus in the dead of a Michigan winter. For those of you who don’t know, I attended the Academy as a creative writing major for four years, studying fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and literary publications. Fall semester of my senior year I was enrolled in a poetry workshop. This was the semester, the class, and the experience that would define the current obsessive fascination I hold with elephants. As a class of nine, we had each other to exploit as creative resources on a daily basis, and would bring in work daily to be read, critiqued, and later polished. Although we always had somewhat specific assignments, I always felt that, as much as it urged us to practice self-discipline in the art of writing, it was lacking in the aspect of drawing entirely from the self and not from another’s creative juices. And so, I was entirely pleased when a new assignment was born: The Important Excitement. We were given complete creative freedom with one condition—find something that excites you, gets you thinking, grabs ahold of you and won’t let go, and write the hell out of it. While some people chose to write about something they were already excited about, I chose to look for something new. It was in this way that I discovered the dark past of circus elephants. There were five defining moments of discovery that clawed into me and set something uncontrollably loose.
The first was elephant graveyards. While elephants don’t bury their dead, they do something equivocally emotive. When a herd comes across the bones of another elephant, they will stop their trek and mourn. The same is true for the sick. Elephants never leave one of their own behind, even if it means their own death. While I can’t prove this to be true, I would say that I believe it under the same circumstances as humans would act: you may not risk your life for your whole herd, but there is that small group of people that you would die for. The same seems to go for elephants. But maybe there’s some amount of ignorance there, believing everything I read simply for the sake of pure, childlike fascination with this beast. That may be just it—a fascination with possibility, not necessarily fact. The second discovery was of the circus. These discoveries were fact, are fact, and will be fact throughout history. In the 1920’s, the circus was a common form of entertainment, having all sorts of attractions from the Strongman to trapeze artists to the elephants. I believe, because of the abuse of the occupation in the past, that trainers have earned a scathed name for themselves. Scott, the owner here, considers himself an oldschool trainer. That equates to a certain amount of brutality. The problem is, many people tend to use words such as cruelty and abuse synonymously with the word brutality. I did before I got here. The difference, I believe, is in where the line is crossed. While brutality is a necessity to training such large, wild animals, cruelty is not. The line is crossed at cruelty, and the line where brutality becomes cruelty is precariously thin. There is, it seems, an art to finding the balance necessary to command control over an elephant without crossing over to becoming the beast yourself. Scott, I believe, is a man that knows the line well and has walked it all of his life. Many trainers in the past mistook brutality to mean something physical. While it may be in some cases, it is not, and cannot be, in the case of training elephants. Brutality in this case is purely verbal and emotional. You must command control over the animal by asserting a certain amount of verbal and emotional brutality. To them, you must become the alpha if you want to gain any of their respect. This misconception of a single principle caused many deaths in circuses due to mistreatment of elephants. Many trainers were killed, and many elephants went with them for their actions. Such was the case with Murderous Mary, an elephant that turned on her trainer and, as a result, was hung by a crane for a crowd in Kingston, Tennessee in 1916. The first time they hung her the chain snapped and she broke her hip. The second time was a success, but if you can imagine how long it took—in the end, it was her weight that pulled her to her death, slowly. I can’t say for sure whether or not her trainer used excessive force, but what I can say is that PETA wasn’t around back then to go batshit on an over-zealous trainer. Animal abuse was more accepted then. Which leads me to my third and forth discoveries: Edison’s Elephant and The Elephant Ballet. For those who weren’t aware, Thomas Edison was an extremely cruel person. He treated his workers like dirt and thought nothing of it. At the time of the invention of electricity, Edison faced a competitor, Tesla. While Edison had invented a type of continuous-current electricity, Tesla had invented alternating current electricity, the kind we use to this day. Edison felt the need to exploit the dangers of Tesla’s form of electricity, and so went cross-country electrocuting stray cats and dogs to prove his point. And that’s when another elephant turned on another trainer, and when Edison got his hands on the ultimate spectacle: electrocuting an elephant. The horrific event was filmed, and was the first motion picture to circulate around the nation for all to see. Now, I saw the film for myself, thinking it necessary for research’s sake. While it may have been necessary, it was the most pain I’ve ever felt for any non-human suffering I have ever witnessed. While I’ve been here, I’ve learned a handful of things, one of them being a certain fear all elephants have: electricity. Elephants are terrified of it, even amounts that humans can barely detect with their bare skin. Now imagine having a current circulating throughout your body, burning you inside out until you fall over dead. I knew there was something greater than death happening in that video when I first saw it, but when I thought back again, I realized what had been locked in that elephant’s eyes: utter terror. It was the worst death a man could give such a beast, and Edison had enthusiastically complied.
That’s it for now. I’ll write more later about Tchaikovsky’s ballet and the fifth reason for this insane obsession.
Pictures Tonight!
Hello everyone!
I went to Wal-Mart a week ago to get my pictures developed and hopefully they'll be done when I go out for groceries today. I made sure to get a CD so I can just post them here for everyone to see. Check back!
Amelia
I went to Wal-Mart a week ago to get my pictures developed and hopefully they'll be done when I go out for groceries today. I made sure to get a CD so I can just post them here for everyone to see. Check back!
Amelia
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Goodbyes, Elephant Attacks, and Births
January 14th
Today was a good day. Aside from working way later than usual, the events that unraveled throughout the morning, afternoon and evening were…satisfying. In the morning we rushed off to the normal routine of preparing diets (the term for meals), shoveling and sweeping hay and poo, hosing, and driving around various trucks that, by my standard, are far past their due dates for the dump. And yet…they all somehow still run. Like everyone on this farm, they’ve got just enough left at the end of the day to get the job done and to do the job right.
Tomorrow is Zoe and Pete’s last day here. They’ve finished the one-month internship that Gail and I still have two weeks left of. It’ll be sad to see them go, but it’ll mean that the days may end up more structured than they have been lately, which will be quite nice. With so many people (seven) there’s not always something for everyone to do, so more often than not there’s a loner off in the distance sweeping up the same stray poolets (as Stacey, a new intern, calls small pieces of poop) over and over. Rather than getting things done more quickly, tasks tend to get performed just as well in a less efficient manner. So good riddance to you both, but I shall miss your jolly company.
After lunch we went down to the Asian barn where Booper, a retired circus elephant, was marched out of her yard to give Zoe and Pete their graduation rides. Poor Booper has had foot problems lately, and recently it’s spread to her whole front right leg. She’s been favoring her left side, and flinches and barks whenever Scott tells her to lift. (Lift is the generic command a trainer uses to get an elephant to lift a leg, usually to either keep them steady while doing something or to put on or take off a leg chain) So, Zoe and Pete got their ride, and afterward Booper was rewarded with the solution to her foot problems. Because of the swelling and the heat Scott could feel in her upper leg, he decided the leg needed to be drained, In order to do so, the infection essentially needs to either be opened up or cut out. In the last case where Booper’s same foot got infected, they cut out the infection, something I think was avoided today by simply opening the skin where her nail meets her foot (essentially the cuticle, if it were a hand). It was hard to watch, because you could see her trying not to move, but she’d flinch and close her eyes tighter every time he yanked another piece off to reveal more of the infected flesh. Hopefully it’ll have drained some by tomorrow.
In the evening we all went about doing our own things as we usually do, ate dinner, and drove off to the Baskin Robbins to get Scott a pint of his favorite ice cream as a sort of bribe to show us his various elephant tapes he kept stored in his house. Gail and I baked him cookies, another demand he made in return for the movies. They were all different movies about elephant attacks, and after each one he’d ask us what went wrong. In one it was simply an issue of doing too much, where the trainer kept repeating the same command whether or not the elephant was complying or not, and wasn’t enforcing the command when it wasn’t. Another was a simple case of stupidity in allowing a 14-year old to be a licensed trainer, and another yet was a trainer’s failure to acknowledge the danger of introducing a stranger to a downright mean elephant. The results? A man pushed and kicked across a yard, a man thrown against a wall through the brute force of an elephant barreling through a gate, and a boy trampled by an agitated elephant. It’s true, these animals are highly intelligent, and they are vindictive, but they can also be downright mean, and often without legitimate reason. When an elephant decides it wants to kill you, for whatever reason, you don’t have much of a chance. You can continue to work with that elephant until it finds the perfect moment, or you can accept that you will forever be in danger with that animal and discontinue working with it. Whatever your choice, staying with the animal is a certain death wish. They will not forget the decision they made, nor will they go back on it.
The last video wasn’t one about death, but about birth. Scott had told us many times about how many captive females will reject, even kill their babies, when they birth a calf. Eight out of ten pregnant captive elephants will try to kill their baby. Many will accept the calf after the mother has realized what it is, and I never really understood why that motherly instinct didn’t just simply kick in until Scott explained it.
“Imagine being a woman, outcast from all of society. You never see any other humans, never hear about babies, never hold a doll in your entire life. Somehow you become pregnant, and 9 months later you’re in the worst pain you’ve ever felt. Suddenly something’s coming out of you, and all you know is that it’s hurting you. What are you going to do? You either run from it or you hurt it back,” he said. Of course as humans we understand not to hurt our babies because we go into the situation understanding what will come out of it. On the other end of the spectrum, a wild animal that needs a matriarchal society to understand birth is without that novelty and thus rejects what’s hurting it. In the wild some females still kill their babies, but the matriarchs are there to act as a sort of guide through the birthing, and to guard the baby once it’s born. With the matriarch protecting the thing the mother recognizes as the source of pain, the mother begins to understand she shouldn’t hurt it back. In captivity, humans must intervene seconds after birth to pull the baby out of the mother’s reach so as to avoid bodily harm to the calf, as we saw in one of the videos where a trainer failed to tie up the cow in labor. It sounds bad to tie up an elephant that’s giving birth, but it forces them into the best birthing position and keeps them from accidentally or purposely stomping the baby once it’s out. I suppose that if you think about it, maternal instinct in humans is actually a taught thing; we learn it first from our mothers, then teach it to our daughters, and so on. It really is something, being here and learning all about their behaviors. It's not everything you'd expect, but it sure makes you open your eyes to the realities of what it means to care for wild animals in such a way that you both protect them and maintain the utmost respect for the wildness.
Today was a good day. Aside from working way later than usual, the events that unraveled throughout the morning, afternoon and evening were…satisfying. In the morning we rushed off to the normal routine of preparing diets (the term for meals), shoveling and sweeping hay and poo, hosing, and driving around various trucks that, by my standard, are far past their due dates for the dump. And yet…they all somehow still run. Like everyone on this farm, they’ve got just enough left at the end of the day to get the job done and to do the job right.
Tomorrow is Zoe and Pete’s last day here. They’ve finished the one-month internship that Gail and I still have two weeks left of. It’ll be sad to see them go, but it’ll mean that the days may end up more structured than they have been lately, which will be quite nice. With so many people (seven) there’s not always something for everyone to do, so more often than not there’s a loner off in the distance sweeping up the same stray poolets (as Stacey, a new intern, calls small pieces of poop) over and over. Rather than getting things done more quickly, tasks tend to get performed just as well in a less efficient manner. So good riddance to you both, but I shall miss your jolly company.
After lunch we went down to the Asian barn where Booper, a retired circus elephant, was marched out of her yard to give Zoe and Pete their graduation rides. Poor Booper has had foot problems lately, and recently it’s spread to her whole front right leg. She’s been favoring her left side, and flinches and barks whenever Scott tells her to lift. (Lift is the generic command a trainer uses to get an elephant to lift a leg, usually to either keep them steady while doing something or to put on or take off a leg chain) So, Zoe and Pete got their ride, and afterward Booper was rewarded with the solution to her foot problems. Because of the swelling and the heat Scott could feel in her upper leg, he decided the leg needed to be drained, In order to do so, the infection essentially needs to either be opened up or cut out. In the last case where Booper’s same foot got infected, they cut out the infection, something I think was avoided today by simply opening the skin where her nail meets her foot (essentially the cuticle, if it were a hand). It was hard to watch, because you could see her trying not to move, but she’d flinch and close her eyes tighter every time he yanked another piece off to reveal more of the infected flesh. Hopefully it’ll have drained some by tomorrow.
In the evening we all went about doing our own things as we usually do, ate dinner, and drove off to the Baskin Robbins to get Scott a pint of his favorite ice cream as a sort of bribe to show us his various elephant tapes he kept stored in his house. Gail and I baked him cookies, another demand he made in return for the movies. They were all different movies about elephant attacks, and after each one he’d ask us what went wrong. In one it was simply an issue of doing too much, where the trainer kept repeating the same command whether or not the elephant was complying or not, and wasn’t enforcing the command when it wasn’t. Another was a simple case of stupidity in allowing a 14-year old to be a licensed trainer, and another yet was a trainer’s failure to acknowledge the danger of introducing a stranger to a downright mean elephant. The results? A man pushed and kicked across a yard, a man thrown against a wall through the brute force of an elephant barreling through a gate, and a boy trampled by an agitated elephant. It’s true, these animals are highly intelligent, and they are vindictive, but they can also be downright mean, and often without legitimate reason. When an elephant decides it wants to kill you, for whatever reason, you don’t have much of a chance. You can continue to work with that elephant until it finds the perfect moment, or you can accept that you will forever be in danger with that animal and discontinue working with it. Whatever your choice, staying with the animal is a certain death wish. They will not forget the decision they made, nor will they go back on it.
The last video wasn’t one about death, but about birth. Scott had told us many times about how many captive females will reject, even kill their babies, when they birth a calf. Eight out of ten pregnant captive elephants will try to kill their baby. Many will accept the calf after the mother has realized what it is, and I never really understood why that motherly instinct didn’t just simply kick in until Scott explained it.
“Imagine being a woman, outcast from all of society. You never see any other humans, never hear about babies, never hold a doll in your entire life. Somehow you become pregnant, and 9 months later you’re in the worst pain you’ve ever felt. Suddenly something’s coming out of you, and all you know is that it’s hurting you. What are you going to do? You either run from it or you hurt it back,” he said. Of course as humans we understand not to hurt our babies because we go into the situation understanding what will come out of it. On the other end of the spectrum, a wild animal that needs a matriarchal society to understand birth is without that novelty and thus rejects what’s hurting it. In the wild some females still kill their babies, but the matriarchs are there to act as a sort of guide through the birthing, and to guard the baby once it’s born. With the matriarch protecting the thing the mother recognizes as the source of pain, the mother begins to understand she shouldn’t hurt it back. In captivity, humans must intervene seconds after birth to pull the baby out of the mother’s reach so as to avoid bodily harm to the calf, as we saw in one of the videos where a trainer failed to tie up the cow in labor. It sounds bad to tie up an elephant that’s giving birth, but it forces them into the best birthing position and keeps them from accidentally or purposely stomping the baby once it’s out. I suppose that if you think about it, maternal instinct in humans is actually a taught thing; we learn it first from our mothers, then teach it to our daughters, and so on. It really is something, being here and learning all about their behaviors. It's not everything you'd expect, but it sure makes you open your eyes to the realities of what it means to care for wild animals in such a way that you both protect them and maintain the utmost respect for the wildness.
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