April 19, 2006
SOON YOU'LL BE HITTING THEM AS THEY TRY TO CROSS HIGHWAYS:
Where Do 31 Elephants Sleep?: At a retirement home in Florida. (GEOFFREY NORMAN, April 19, 2006, Opinion Journal)
The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Center for Elephant Conservation...is not a tourist attraction. There are no billboards pointing the way, and the gate is locked and anonymous. The facility is closed to the public, though student groups and the like can arrange for tours. The purpose of this facility is not to entertain but to. . .well, what?"The three R's," Bruce Read, a biologist and Ringling's vice president of animal stewardship, explains: "research, reproduction and retirement."
The retirement part is easy enough. Elephants live a long time--45 years or so--and when their careers in show business are over, they need someplace to go. You can't drop them off at the local animal shelter or send them back to India or Malaysia or wherever they came from. The circus has been around for 135 years and has experience in the care and feeding of aging elephants.
"We have another facility, north of here, that is strictly a retirement operation," Mr. Read says. The mission of the CEC is much more ambitious. These 200 acres of what was formerly cattle and orange-grove country support, he notes, "the only sustainable elephant population in the world." That is, "more are born than die."
Mr. Norman is the author of an underappreciated series of detective novels.