'Karmic Payback' For Retired Circus Elephants Loving Florida Life

YULEE, FL — Two weeks after the first 12 of Asian elephants retired from the former Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus had arrived at an expansive refuge for rare species in northeastern Florida, karma has turned things around for these majestic beings.

“It is quite clear we now work for these elephants,” said Michelle Gadd, who leads conservation efforts for Mark and Kimbra Walter, the philanthropists who are building an expansive new home for the pachyderms at White Oak Conservation. The dozen newly arrived elephants will have 135 acres to roam on the 17,000-acre refuge that also provides habitat for other rare species. Eventually, the elephant preserve will span 2,500 acres.

The Walters' generosity means these Asian elephants will spend the rest of their lives doing whatever they want — not what we mere humans want them to do or find entertaining. The dozen currently settling in range in age from 8 to 38 and are all females. Eight males are among the up to 20 that will eventually join the herd.

“Our goal is to let elephants do what elephants choose to do,” Gadd told Patch.

"For Once, We Can Give Back"

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey ended 145 years of tradition in 2016 when it decided to stop using elephants in marquee circus acts, a year and a half earlier than had been planned.

Feld Entertainment, the owner of the circus that started in 1871 as P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, had been under enormous pressure to stop using elephants, both by animal rights groups that claimed the animals had been mistreated and by a changed society that saw using elephants for our entertainment as harmful exploitation. The circus itself folded its big top for good in 2017.

“It really is kind of karmic payback,” Gadd said. “Elephants have brought joy to humans for so many years. For once, we can give something back.”

“The girls,” as Gadd calls them, are closely related, and the Walters were determined not to break up the family. Many are half siblings and a few are full siblings, including a pair of brothers who will arrive later.

Still, some difficult choices must be made.

One elephant who won’t be making the trip to White Oak Conservation is Mysore, named for a town in India. She’s 75 years old — well beyond the average life expectancy of 49 years for an elephant in captivity — and the 200-mile trip from the Center for Elephant Conservation in Polk County is too dangerous for her.

Others acquired in the transaction with Feld Entertainment are “exceptionally old [or] not in the best of health,” Gadd explained, saying the staff at the refuge will continually monitor their health to determine if moving is in their best interests.

Elephants Wear Their Emotions

The largest mammal on Earth, elephants are special creatures. Capable of complex thought and deep feelings, they are exuberant and joyful, but also experience anger, grief, empathy and love.

In other words, they feel much of what we feel and “experience all kinds of emotions,” said Gadd, guarding against anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human traits, emotions and intentions to non-human animals or things.

“But you look at them, and you see surprise, sometimes confusion or indecision,” she says. “Some are mischievous. Some are super goofy — always looking for something to mess with or something to break. Others are just sedate, mosey along and eat and not quite as wound up. They all have strong personalities.”

These endangered creatures can tower to 10 feet and weigh up to 10,000 pounds. Gadd has watched with amazement at the care they take when picking up things, marveling that “someone so big and incredibly bulky can just be so delicate and sensitive.”

Elephants also have long memories and never forget another elephant or a human. Elephants also have favorites among our species and theirs, and members of both they choose to ignore.

“Elephants have a depth of intelligence and social connection we have only scratched the surface on,” she said. “They certainly recognize each and every individual and person, and have complex emotions surrounding them, whether friendly or hostile.”

Gadd won’t speculate on their lives with the circus, or its yearslong legal battle with People for the Treatment of Ethical Animals, other than to say the pachyderms didn’t have the expansive range they’re now free to roam at White Oak Conservation. Feld Entertainment did eventually prevail in a lawsuit dating back 14 years, and PETA was ordered to pay $16 million in damages for its unproven abuse allegations.

“From what we know about them, they had everything provided by their human companions,” she said. “They’re used to being fed, used to operating on the schedule of the people and used to having a very limited diet. They certainly can’t have had this much space available to them.”

It’s clear the elephants’ caretakers love them as they would a family member, Gadd said.

“I have not seen any indication of fear,” she said, explaining the elephants know the names of the people who have cared for them, “though they may choose to ignore them.”

Loving Elephants Isn’t Enough

No matter how kind or unkind the people interacting with these elephants in their former lives in entertainment, one thing is certain:

Elephants don’t thrive in tight spaces.

The Detroit Zoo retired Wanda and Winky in 2004 to a spacious sanctuary in California, where they could stretch their arthritic legs. The zoo had worked for years to increase Wanda and Winky’s habitat, but “every time we made those improvements that we thought were important, we then thought, from an elephant's point of view, it was not,” Ron Kagan, the soon-to-retire CEO and executive director of the Detroit Zoo, told The Dodo in 2016.

The zoo was the first in the country to decide solely on ethical grounds to no longer keep elephants, sparking an international conversation that moved forward the conversation on the ethics of keeping elephants in captivity. In the years since, more zoos have decided to give elephants more space to roam.

When the circus elephants weren’t touring, they lived on a 20-acre off-season farm. They had much more space than when they were on the road, but not enough space to really learn how to be elephants again. The Walters’ plan for the elephant sanctuary fits with optimum size recommendations.

Gadd and her colleagues are delighted, joyful even, over how well the elephants are settling in to a space that is completely new to them. They were transported two at a time, twice a day, and kept in an expansive barn with roof trusses that don’t start until 24 feet in the air until the full herd of 12 arrived.

Gadd worried they “might be agoraphobic” and afraid to leave their holding paddocks, but all 12 emerged within a minute of the gate being opened.

They acted as naturally as can be expected for elephants that have lived their entire lives in captivity.

“They rumbled, reassured and greeted each other,” Gadd said. “By afternoon, four had gone to the pond. One went her own way into the forest and spent her first night there alone. Others lingered close to the paddock and barn.”

For the first time, they’re foraging for themselves, seeing other wildlife such as birds, terrapins and snakes, wandering wherever they want to go and taking a dip in the pond when they get hot.

Gadd isn’t sure how much time the elephants spent in ponds before arriving at the sanctuary or if those were large enough for the elephants to swim.

“The first day, they tested the water, splashing it back and forth with their trunks, tasting it and spraying themselves,” she said. “Now, they’re totally sure. I saw no hesitation.”

Nick Newby, who leads White Oak’s expert team recruited to care for the elephants, has been getting to know the individual elephants and their habits for the past few years.

“Watching the elephants go out into the habitat was an incredible moment,” Newby said in a news release. “I was so happy to see them come out together and reassure and comfort each other, just like wild elephants do, and then head out to explore their new environment. Seeing the elephants swim for the first time was amazing.”

The girls are gaining independence “by leaps and bounds,” Gadd said, quoting one of the elephant specialists who has been caring for them and who said he “honestly hopes they forget” him as they go about building the same social structure they’d have in the wild.

They Can Be Free, But Not Wild

Though they’re showing more confidence with each passing day, the elephants’ dependence on and familiarity with people is a bit of a dilemma.

“They’re far more imprinted on humans than we would hope,” Gadd said, explaining, though, that the elephants are increasingly walking away from the humans they depended on for everything.

“This is the only life they have known, and from what I’ve seen, the people they know truly love them as a member of their family. They seek out encouragement and attention from us.”

That’s why returning them to Asia, where these U.S.-born elephants have never lived, is not only impractical but dangerous to their survival.

“They fully understand humans — how to get to us, our weaknesses and vulnerabilities,” she said. “They would have no hesitation to walk onto a farm and take what they wanted.”

Human-elephant conflicts, along with poaching and habitat loss, have helped wither the population of these majestic creatures, who now number only 30,000 to 50,000 in the wild. Their range has been reduced to 15 percent of what it was when the population was abundant.

“We want to protect wild animals in Asia,” Gadd said of the Walter Conservation mission. “These elephants could never live in the wild, so this is giving them the next best thing.

“Someone originally took these elephants’ families out of the wild,” she said. “For once, someone is paying that back, and giving them back to the wild, as best we can."

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