A statement from PETA, quoted in "Elephant escapes circus, roams streets of Montana" (WaPo).
People are finding this amusing...
... but it isn't, really.
April 20, 2024
"Elephants learn crucial social and behavioral skills from their mothers and other relatives, with whom they share intense emotional bonds."
"Instead of experiencing all this in their natural homes, elephants used in circuses are exploited—made to do meaningless circus tricks on the road."
A statement from PETA, quoted in "Elephant escapes circus, roams streets of Montana" (WaPo).
A statement from PETA, quoted in "Elephant escapes circus, roams streets of Montana" (WaPo).
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36 comments:
And like the Buddhist monks in Saigon, another martyr to another religion- prqogressioism
Generally trainers bond with the animals they train, so the elephant does better than in the wild, really. Huge vocabulary. Elephants never forget a word.
Alpha bulls, breeding cows, and their unPlanned calves in an evolutionary functional model. Abstiment aunts and uncles are tolerated as contributing members of the herd.
Somebody watched Dumbo as a kid and took it to heart.
Out for a walkabout.
Maye he's looking for a take out place.
Elephants live in families whose leaders are elder females, and the families are part of larger clans. Scientists who study African elephants have found that a typical female adult elephant will know about 100 other elephants.
Elephants have names for each other.
They can communicate via infrasound for miles. Check out the Elephant Ethogram to see the dozens, maybe hundreds, of ways elephants communicate specific messages through specific sounds and body language.
They have an awareness of death and grieve. If a calf dies, its mother will hover over the carcass for days. When elephants come across bones of an elephant, they will examine them as if trying to determine whose bones they are.
A hundred years ago there were 40 million elephants in Africa. Today there are 400,000.
At least it wasn't stolen, like Twain's White Elephant.
And I recall "Cease, Queenie, cease!" from WC Fields.
And Sabu the Elephant Boy.
I never forget an elephant.
"Instead of experiencing all this in their natural homes, elephants used in circuses are exploited—made to do meaningless circus tricks on the road."
Whereas dogs....
"Elephants learn crucial social and behavioral skills from their mothers and other relatives ..."
This is perfectly plausible, given what I have learned about the matriarchal and family-based social structure of elephant herds, however the fact that it was issued by PETA does give me pause. Unfortunately for the true believers of PETA, science is not an old-style Chinese menu, where you can pick and choose one from column A and two from column B and one more from column C.
elephants are smart - and in circus captivity they are bored and often mis-treated.
Circus life is an endless recycled loop of dumb tricks - and elephants are often forced to learn dumb tricks in cruel ways.
Circuses should die fast. people should stop paying to go.
PETA first needs to atone for their premeditated kidnapping and extermination of people's pets before they open their yaps about anybody else.
Fk'm
Humor is when something bad almost happens but doesn't. It's not high humor but an elephant harmlessly truckin' through town is amusing because it's an anomaly.
A real pink elephant, with polka dots,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwJfXgTO7J4
Besides the visual anomaly, I think people laugh in part because they identify with the elephant escaping the normal strictures and expectations of its life.
Juvenile male elephants need a mature, bull elephant to make them behave.
https://www.bbcearth.com/news/teenage-elephants-need-a-father-figure
Elephants can develop a deep bond with their caretaker.
https://www.cbc.ca/strombo/news/saying-goodbye-elephants-hold-apparent-vigil-to-mourn-their-human-friend.ht
Too bad, so sad. DUMBO forever! JUMBO forever! Elephants are great creatures but if they were great eating (other than elephant ears at the state fairs), I'd have no problem chowing down. Animals are here for our enjoyment, our food, whatever we wish. We shouldn't be cruel if possible, but taming of wild creatures isn't done in a therapist's chair. Working elephants in parts of Asia are commonplace; why is that different than having them entertain us? We sympathize with them in many ways, but they are still animals. Imagine the suffering a cat endures being the prisoner of a AWFL with her boxed wine and her incessant neediness?
A hundred years ago there were 40 million elephants in Africa. Today there are 400,000.
Curiously, the places that have completely outlawed elephant hunting are doing the worst job at conserving them. The local people whose crops they destroy have no incentive to call the law on poachers, or may even kill the animals themselves.
In places where tightly regulated hunting is permitted, and enormously expensive fees are collected for the privilege, the elephants are seen as community assets. An elephant hunt provides high paid employment for many locals, and a massive community feast afterwards.
Botswana just re-opened to elephant hunters, in fact. This was done at the behest of rural farming communities who were suffering after their government outlawed elephant hunting eight or ten years ago in a misguided attempt to curry favor with loudmouthed busybody left-wing white women who had never set foot in Africa.
I've seen some horrific videos of rogue elephants from the Indian subcontinent. They can be positively murderous when they escape confinement. How nice that this one just wanted to get the hell out of there.
Would make a nice trophy.
Lots of hunters in Montana...
It is a little bit amusing. Not the sort of thing you see every day in Montana.
Symbolism. The elephant is tired of representing the spineless Republican Party.
Listen quietly as a group of them slowly walk past you on the savanna. You can hear the low rumble of their vocalization, you can feel it in your body. If you experience that you will never think or feel about these creatures the same again. An amazing experience that you cannot realize while they are in captivity.
This is all highly discriminatory to the working mom elephants who NEED some sort of childcare every day. Sure, a kid will always be more secure and happy in mom's presences, but in these tougher economic times, the two-income elephant family has become the norm.
At current, the future of the elephant species is to be slaughtered once more for their tusks for trinkets in Beijing. That's not to try and reduce this to whataboutism or dismiss the need to minimize animal cruelty, but Peta, being an axillary force of Libtard, Inc, is more interested in scolding white people than any actual commitment to the long term things they nominally care about.
Stop the circuses, fine. Just don't expect the outcome to be a 1:1 change in the number of elephants leading a good life back on the Savannah.
Where's Tarzan when you really need him?
Then there's Groucho's story: "On safari one morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know".
A great topic for discussion, because nobody has any true knowledge of the subject.
People harbor all sorts of untruths about dog and cats. But we'll happily expophnund on Elephants.
I have questions.
How do they know if a young elephant's emotional bond with it's mother is intense or not?
What is intense for an elephant?
Do some elephants experience an emotional bond with their mothers so intense it is considered unhealthy?
Do some elephant calves grow up to break their mother's hearts?
If an elephant joined the Navy, would it get a tattoo of an arrow through a heart that says Mom?
"A hundred years ago there were 40 million elephants in Africa. Today there are 400,000."
T'were better 40 millions elephants in Africa (or anywhere) today, even if that required fewer human beings.
it would have been harmless and amusing only until law enforcement [big guns] got involved.
is there space shuttleport in Butte? an order from Impsec Chief Captain Simon Ilyan of Barrayar must have sent courier to fetch elephant from Earth to give as diplomatic gift!
Hmmm. I'm not an elephant expert. But the tossed off implication that Mom is key and dad is among "other relatives seems very PETAish.
"T'were better 40 millions elephants in Africa (or anywhere) today, even if that required fewer human beings." File this as, "Always volunteering others".
Montana Lil’s. A MT institution, of sorts. They are dark inside and filled with slot machines. Join their player’s club, and you can get low priced burgers and beer. Very often attached to a Town Pump gas station and C Store.
It's a little amusing
Made to do meaningless tricks.
Most of my jobs were like that, too.
So fey to write "the streets of Montana". You know, that way-out-there place that we could give a fuck about - mentally ripping-off Saul Steinberg's 'View from 9th Ave'.
The elephant reminds me of the armless, legless guy in Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Performing may not be much of a life, but look what happens to you when your performance becomes obsolete. Elephants will rue the day when the Circus goes away.
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