An Elephant Never Forgets

I am a soft touch. Mr. Clean grimaces when he sees an ad for a Hallmark movie, because he knows it will be littered with Hallmark commercials. Immediate water works for me! While I was sick and cuddling with the remote I ran a across a documentary on PBS. Now rarely does anything on PBS make me cry, but in this case the tears would not stop.

The story was about a retired 50 year old Asian circus elephant who lived in a zoo in the south. It was a small zoo and only had room for one elephant so Shirley was it. She had a dedicated handler, Solomon James who had been in charge of her care for the 20+ years she had lived there, but he was her only company so she was quite lonely (elephants are "pack animals"). The zoo decided that it was time to let Shirley go and found a new home for her at The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee.

The first thing that turned on the faucet was the fact that Shirley's handler was going to have to say goodbye to his elephant friend. He rode with her to her new home and had the chance to bathe her one last time. Through tears he commented (paraphrased), "I wasn't the first to put a chain on her, but I will be the last to take it off and leave it off". Then the camera got a shot of him removing her leg restraints in a huge barn full of hay.

Soon after, her new owners (the sanctuary's owners) decided to introduce her to some of the other elephants so that she could get acquainted. Not knowing the initial reaction, they left Shirley in an enclosed part of the barn while they brought in Jenny, a 20 something year old elephant. Immediately the elephants began trumpeting and trying to get to one another through the steel bars. They wrapped trunks as if embracing one another and stayed as close as the bars would allow. By morning, the two had actually bent the steel bars trying to get to one another so the sanctuary staff opened the bars and let them come face to face sans the bars.

They later discovered that Shirley had acted as an "adoptive" mother to Jenny 22 year earlier when an orphaned Jenny was a baby at the same circus of which Shirley was a performer. These two knew each other straight away after 22 years apart! By this time I was in full on "sob mode". They went on to tell how from that instant on they were never apart and stayed by each others' side.

This story originally aired in 2000. In October of 2006, young Jenny died from a complication caused by an infection. Shirley's reaction was heart breaking. Here is the rest of their story from the PBS website...


Shirley and Jenny