Ringling Bros. Retired Its Elephants. This is Where They Live Now.
Sept. 9, 2015 - Amid scrutiny for the handling of their performing elephants, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus announced in March of this year that they will be removing elephants from their shows by 2018. The retired elephants will be brought to the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation in Polk City, Florida. To help ensure the conservation of the Asian elephant, the animals will continue to be bred and studied at the center, with assisted reproduction and research into the diseases that plague them. Here, Ringling Bros. staff were given the opportunity to talk about the work being done to save the Asian elephant.
UPDATE: May 19, 2017
Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey announced the company will put on their last performances in May 2017. Citing an overall decline in ticket sales exacerbated by the retirement of their elephants, Ringling said in a statement the 146-year-old circus had become “an unsustainable business for the company.” Ringling retired its elephants to a facility in central Florida last year.
Transcript
Stephen Payne
Vice President of Corporate Communications
Feld Entertainment
In March of 2015 we announced that we were going to transition all of the elephants on our three Ringling Brothers touring units t0 the Center for Elephant Conservation. So those 13 animals will come and live here.
The reason is takes three years is we need to determine, do we have enough water supply, do we have enough staff, do we have enough barn spaces. We have a two year-old elephant and a 69 year-old elephants, so the decisions we make today will have decade of repercussions.
It's a 200 acres working facility that was designed and today still is specifically for the care of these magnificent animals.
Trudy Williams
Manager of Animal Stewardship
Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation
A lot of the cities we play in are not allowing the tools that we use to work with the elephants, so it's just too hard for a business to conduct itself that way.
Basically all it is is an extension of our hand. There's a point at one end, and then it curves at one end so I can like say, Mysore com here, and I can pull her towards me with part of it, or I can say get over and then I can push her over. And everybody is trained to use them properly so it's a very, very good tool just like using a collar and lease on dog and a bit and bridle on a horse.
Stephen Payne
Since 1976 you can't import elephants or export elephants from countries where they live. The best thing about our elephants here, they're never in danger from poachers, they're never, as you can see, going to go hungry. They don't have to walk 30, 40, miles a day to forage for food and water. So we think that this is an ideal environment to be an elephant.
Everything that you see now in a Ringling Brothers performance is part of their natural behaviors. Elephants do stand on their heads, I've seen it here on many occasions. I've seen them balance on balls that they play with. So their training will continue because they're used to being around people and you have to work with them and they have to be used to people for us to continue the valuable research.
You could put two elephants in this section, three in the other, or right here you could have one, one and two on the other side. Most trains have at least two of these cars, if not more depending on how many elephants they have.
This is like wearing a seat belt, you can keep them tethered if it's going through an area with a lot of curves so that obviously you don't want them, they weigh enough that that's why you would have them in this way, rather than this way. They can move around throughout their area and we make sure we can clean up behind them, refresh feed in front of them, make sure the ventilation, if you look above you, you can open the doors, all of this could open.
Wendy Kiso
Conservation & Research Scientist
Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation
Our primary goal is to ensure that the Asian elephant does not go extinct. And also to make sure we have better care and welfare for the Asian elephant.
By using the elephants here, we're learning so much from them wether it's their physiology, their reproduction, their endocrinology. EHV is actually a very fatal hemorrhagic disease in Asian elephants. So fortunately for us we have a resource of so many elephants, so what it enables us to study, wether why certain elephants are more prone for this disease, or what kind of immunity they have.
When they eventually come here we're really excited because all 42 elephants will be here on one site and many of them are younger females, so that way we can either naturally breed them or be part of the artificial insemination herd.
Trudy Williams
We've had 26 births so far, and these two females here, Mysore is 69 she's our oldest, and Sara is 58. They spent a lot of time on the circus when they were younger and they're retired here. What our company would like to do is just make it so the Asian elephant is existing in the Western hemisphere for everyone to see. We want our grandkids to see an Asian elephant.
