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.