Get High!
Protesting is a high. It really is. Every new person that comes to a protest always leaves elated and wanting to participate again. It’s not hard to figure out why. When you believe in something enough that you are willing to stand in record heat, in exhaust laden intersections, holding signs until your shoulders and biceps sing…loudly, when you are willing to put yourself out there not knowing what the reaction will be, then that is truly living. Plodding through your life, doing the endless things that need to be done can cause our minds to literally numb. We are just getting through.
I believe this to be a huge problem in the states. It seems to me that we are working so hard to stay afloat, to keep up with bills and payments and fees, that we block out any receptors that would otherwise raise the warning sirens in our head, causing us to stop, look and act. I wonder in a time when we are inundated with information – we have access to more vehicles of data than at any other time in human history – how we are so woefully ill-informed.
We are pumped full of opinion and partisan slants, from both sides, it’s hard to discern. I know my leanings. However, I do like to think that I am open to all the facts. But what are the facts? Who is offering non-partisan, non-preferential treatment reporting? Can we have accurate information gathering when the purse strings are often held by the people needing the most investigation? When the president can call off a judicial investigation into his warrantless wiretapping, again, rubber stamping the neocon credo of “national security” on the front of the file? When we hear conflicting information about the crisis in the Middle East – both so slanted towards Israel or towards the Arab nations – it is impossible to know the truth. Both sides want to paint themselves as being the victim, the honorable, the righteous. And in the meantime, innocent people are caught in the crossfire, going to camp one day and the next sitting in a stifling bomb shelter.
Back to protesting. I believe strongly that the circus needs to end. The circus with animal acts. Over and over I have read testimony of people who have worked at the circus, people who have worked with elephants and the terrible shame and guilt the few feel for what they witnessed.
Here is one:
I worked for the Carson and Barnes circus for a year in the nineties, and have some real horror stories...way beyond what they show on television! I chose my username because my favorite elephant was a tall, moody girl named Alta. I'm sure she is still with that circus, I wish I could help her. We had a lovely elephant named Mona, who had a malformed or more probably injured back that made her look unusually tall and humpbacked. She could barely get around and moved very slowly so she didn't perform, instead she stood in the chains all day...and never got in trouble thank god. I had left the circus and was living in Indiana when Carson and Barnes visited Evansville, where I was living. Mona had fallen out of the truck and injured herself and so the circus dropped her off at the zoo there..the same one where Bunny was living. She died there, away from her family, and when I volunteered to work at the zoo later they told me Mona seemed to know that she was not going to walk again and just gave up. It is a shame she could not have been rescued, I think she would have lived another 20 years if she had been...she just wasn't able to climb in and out of semi-trailers twice a day. That circus has another elephant ( they have about 23 in total) named Dolly that is similarly crippled, and has had an extremely tragic life...and they were talking about using her as a ride elephant, dear god I hope they didn't, she was blind and would swing at you with her trunk if you came too near, She need to be in a refuge BADLY."
"Sad to say, using the bullhook in the rectum, vagina and on the breasts, is common, it was one of the things they did to Margaret- They did it to Opal one day and she cried( whimpered) when she peed for a couple of days. They will get a hook in from the rear between the legs and yank upwards as hard as possible, it bleeds like crazy when they do this."
"Just imagine the things I didn't see...alot goes on after dark at the circus-many of these men were sex offenders in the first place...there were rumors of men having favorite horses...and worse"
"I guess that over the years I have become 'accustomed' to the images in my head, it must be really shocking to hear about these things for the first time. The thing that made it all worse, was knowing the elephants personally. seeing their very complex personalities and unnervingly human reactions to things being done to them..and to be able to do nothing. On my first or second day with the show, we were still at winter quarters, I was without anything to do and I was just wandering around observing. The elephants were out in 'the yard', a small area behind the barn that they would put the ellys in when they needed to clear some manure out. They were put on a picket, just as they were in the barn and everywhere else they went. I noticed one elephant had a rock and was striking her chain with it. She would lay the rock down, as if to reposition it, and then pick it up and continue striking at the chain. This elephant had an extra set of chain bracelets on her front legs, and I was told later that this was Barbara, and that she wore those chains as she was a 'runner'. They told me that she once broke her chains and then removed the hinges from the barn door, laid it aside, carefully put aside all of the tools and things in the way, and then ate all the grain stores, making herself sick. She was also the one that broke loose one day several years ago, set two of her friends free, and then together they escaped to Hugo lake and were at large for several days before they actually had to call in a big game hunter to track them down!
To anyone who may think that an elephant is smart in the way that an exceptional dog is smart, tales like these might sound fabricated...I didn't really believe the things I saw either, I mean, to believe it was to face the fact that an animal with a sentient mind and human emotions was being treated so horrifically...it was very disturbing.
I have many more stories like these and I feel that the more widely they are told the better. I have been telling them for years, and have turned more than a few people against the circus in that time. I really am so glad that I have found this site and I definitely want anything I say to be passed around, by whatever venue. My name is Courtenay Tosti, please feel free to use my name or whatever I say on your site! Now if we could just get it onto the billboard at Times Square....."
Many days were so muddy, the trucks couldn't drive into place themselves, so they had the elephants do it. I often saw them straining so hard you could hear popping noises in their legs, and they would shake from the exertion, sometimes they would slip and go down in the mud, and the handlers would club them to get them up, no mercy. After a morning of this they would be so tired their heads would droop, then Suzy would do two shows (after helping to erect the tent), give rides for hours, tear down the show, which had a number of tasks shared between the four "tent ellies", Suzy, Barbara, Minnie, and Bunny. Kay was one, but they retired her from it a couple of months before she died.), and then pull trucks back out of the mud, after they'd settled deep into it for a few hours.
Suzy is the new herd matriarch, and now the oldest girl on the show, in her 50s. Suzy was intense and imposing, and often was in trouble, I saw her beaten several times.
Suzy had humanlike eyes, a small chin that gave her a granny appearance, and seemed very intelligent, and unhappy.
Suzy could also remove the cap from the gas tanks of the semis, and she would drink all of the fuel, spray it around, then get sick later. Once I watched as she bit down on a can of silver spray paint she had snatched, you could hear it pop when she bit it, and paint blew up all over her face and mouth. She dropped the can and began rubbing her mouth with her trunk tip, and squeeking pitifully, while her handlers stood around and laughed at her, but didn't offer her water.
One of the veteran elephant handlers was coming out of his truck, and stopped and had a disagreement with another employee, during which they argued heatedly. Afterwards, when the other employee walked away, the handler turned around and began hitting Opal, one of the C&B elephants, on the face and head with a hook with all his anger and strength..for no reason but that he was mad...I saw another, violent elephant handler do the same thing one day, as he too was coming out of his bunk...he was trying to nap, apparently, and was annoyed by the jingling of the chains caused by the racking of the elephants..he came storming out of his bunk with a baseball bat, and began clubbing Suzy on the head with it, and calling her filthy names..he hit her so hard she went to her knees, the echo from him hitting her skull went right through the pit of my stomach.
Winter Quarters at Carson and Barnes Circus:
"The Carson and Barnes Circus has it's winter quarters in the small town of Hugo, Oklahoma, a town where my grandfather was Mayor, and where I spent most of my teenage years. Hugo called itself 'circus town USA' and I went to school with several performers children, some of them performers themselves, as well as with the daughters of the owners Gary and Barbara Byrd. One of my friends in high school was an elephant rider who was the daughter of David Rawls, the owner of the Kelly-Miller circus, a smaller offshoot of C&B. So to was almost natural that at some point I would join, it was the only job left in town, anyway. When I first joined, the show was still at winter quarters, doing repairs and creating the new props for the next season. I didn't have much to do and mainly just ran around observing those first few days. I remember seeing the bullhooks hanging in the barn and asking what they were used for and the handlers just laughing. I was so excited that day when I heard they were going to be putting Kelly-Millers three elephants through their paces that day in the big barn...I climbed up in the loft to get a great Arial view. The handler walked the elephants in and I saw he had a pocketful of carrots...then he immediately screamed " alright you f*****g b*******s MOVE UP!!!! It got worse from there, he hit them constantly even though they were doing their best, and called them filthy names. I was shocked when Viola, a young African who did a cute little wave with her trunk, began crying at one point, for which she was struck over the face repeatedly. This went on for the whole 45 minutes or so that he was working them...oh, and he never gave them a single carrot. I was to soon find out that this was the daily reality for the elephants, much of it alot worse."
A letter written to a circus patron who denied seeing abuse while visiting, this was Tosti's response:
"Alright, well I DID work there, and not only is it as bad as they say it is, it is in fact, worse. Lengthy conversations between me and Carson and Barnes elephant handlers made it clear that daily abuse, insufficient diet, exposure to weather extremes and shortened life spans were par for the course at any circus, not just Carson and Barnes. The brutal training methods are standard procedure. Not just to take their word for it, I also witnessed these things, ad-nauseum, on a daily basis. Despite whatever you think you saw, the elephants are NOT bathed on a daily basis, if ever. In fact, if an elephant were to attempt to even spray itself with water it was beaten, as a muddy elephant would mess up the costumes of the riders. Who said they were kept in cramped cages? They are, for the most part, kept chained front and back legs to a picket line, unable to move. Are you going to refute the pictures and video of this? Do you really think these pictures are fabricated?
I don't have to be licensed to inspect elephants to see them limping on infected feet, bleeding from bull-hook inflicted wounds and wounds that have developed in the cracks of their dry skin. I don't need to be an expert to know that elephants need something other than hay and sweet grain in their daily diets.
Who are you? Did you work for Ringling or Clyde Beatty? If you were just visiting they were putting their best face forward. Carson and Barnes employees were instructed to keep their use of the bullhook to a minimum when the animal rights people were there. They would put on a phony show of feeding the elephants bread and lettuce, they would even pat the elephants as if they cared, but it was all bogus. Circus people are talented con artists and could make the layman believe whatever they wanted them to. You fell for it, good for you.
By the way, I am not an activist. I eat meat, I wear leather. I do not go out and picket pet shops. I do however, carry with me the terrible images of elephants being beaten until they fell down and urinated on themselves. I worked alongside the animals at C&B and I cannot forget the deaths of Nelson, the Siberian Tiger, Kay, the elephant, Rick, the horse, and the four-horned sheep who was put away in a hot trailer and allowed to die without treatment while having difficult labor. What about Mona, the elephant crippled in her youth, barely able to walk yet kept touring with the show for years until she fell out of the truck twice and was mortally injured, then abandoned at a zoo to die? All of these animals deaths were untimely, suspicious and occurred within a few months of each other. Kati, the pygmy hippo, who was not given water to lay in and whose skin was cracked and bloody-do I need to be an expert to know that hippos need water? Our hippo from the previous year died prematurely, as well.
Families getting to sit for a couple of hours and watch animals do silly tricks is not worth this kind of carnage, I hope you can sleep well knowing that you have stood up for the abuse of animals for your entertainment.
People in the circus industry can be ruthless and mob-like in dealing with their enemies. Do you think I would risk my well-being coming forward about this if I didn't know it were really going on? Like they said, watch the C&B training video, then come back on here and refute what you saw, I dare you."
"I don't suppose there is much they could do, except maybe try to discredit me. I was a troubled teen when I first joined...Other than that, if something happened to me or my family, everyone would know who did it!! As I said before, one rainy day in a dramatic little scene I was bawling my eyes out and promised Alta I would try to help her and the others if I could, whenever or however that would be. It is my duty to do anything I can, however small. I don't know what one persons testimony could do, though. A sad fact is that people would come to the circus to see this 'abuse' they had heard about, thus reversing the desired effect of making public what was going on. I am Just hoping that intelligent people hear the news and refuse to visit the circus anymore, as many of my friends have. Please let me know what I have to do, I am ready."
Margaret is the elephant I watched receive a terrible beating involving 8 men with baseball bats and bullhooks. They attacked her for nearly an hour, until she fell on her face, she wailed like a baby, and urinated and defecated in fear. They stuffed mud into her wounds and she performed in the show that night as if nothing had happened.
Paula was the subject more than one USDA citations, concerning her ongoing, untreated skin condition. Paula was a 'runner', and not allowed to perform, instead she stood in the chains, all day...
Mona is the elephant left to die at the Mesker Park Zoo after falling out of the trailer twice and being mortally injured. Mona was crippled in her youth during a brutal training session, and could only walk with a humpback, taking tiny steps. She was unable to perform and stood in the chains, all day.
Dolly was a recent addition to the lineup in 1994, acquired from another show that was going out of business. Dolly was old, and very arthritic, unable to move above a snails pace. Dolly face was slumped from an injury from a bullhook, she was senile and apt to try to smash you if you came too near. Her handler, Danny B., was thinking of making her a ride elephant.
"Mona was an Asian ele with C&B, who from what I was told by a handler was crippled during her early training, which as you know is so harsh, some baby eles don't even survive it.(the elephant death list records her as having metabolic bone disease, but....I don't believe it.) Mona stood in a strange humpbacked manner, with her back standing about 4 feet higher than the other eles. There was a worn spot in the roof of the trailer where she rode, from her back brushing it for years. Mona was unable to perform or even walk very well, taking very slow, painstaking steps. Even so, she was expected to climb in and out of the trailer, with no patience shown her, and then she stood in the chains all day...that was her whole life. She was so helpless, they would occasionally let her off the picket, and she would stay right around the showgrounds..you'd be running along to work or whatever and you'd run smack into her. She was totally harmless, one of many of their eles that was completely tame and sweet, and not considered a risk to the public.
Mona had developed rotten feet just like Calle, and so many others, from spending so many long years standing immobile in her own waste, they soaked her feet but it wasn't helping any.
Mona fell out of the trailer once, and they got her up but she did it again a few days later and was severely injured, I'm not sure what the exact injuries where, though. I had JUST quit the show, and gone back to Evansville to live, when they arrived there with Mona and left her at Mesker Park Zoo, where Bunny was still living.
I later volunteered at the zoo, and the ele handlers were interested in talking to me. They told me the C&B handlers just sort of stood around like idiots when they were trying to get Mona out of the sling to see if she was going to be able to stand. The said at some point she just sort of stood back on her hind legs and backed out of it, and this was unusual, she was a smart ele.
The circus went on without Mona, and she was dead soon after, I still assume she was euthanized, although one of Bunny's caretakers said she was extremely depressed and just died. I don't know, though."
Bunny had a large boil on her knee from a hook wound. She is a very sweet elephant.
" I have been holding a novels worth of stories in for years now, and I promised the elephants that I would try to help them someday, so I would like to get my info out. I know that sounds corny but after getting to know what sentient beings the elephants were, and then watching them get beaten on a daily basis, I began to get REAL emotional. It is why I eventually quit."
Minnie was also one of the 5 elephants that were used to do the heavy labor of erecting the tent, putting up the seats, dragging semi haulers into place, out of, and into it and a myriad other jobs, also doing the 2 daily shows. It seemed obvious to me that Minnie found many of the tricks painful, shaking her head and crying out during the long mount, and the crawl.
She was pretty, with unusual, up-turned eyes, and a very sweet, almost, childish, personality.
"During the year traveling circuses often intersect each other and more than one circus stopped and 'visited' with Carson and Barnes. Culpepper- Meriwether was one of them, and I just remember checking them out to see if maybe their elephants had it any better than ours...they didn't. They were chained front and back just like ours were. They were struck continually and cursed at, just like ours were. They were thin and dehydrated, just like ours. The article mentioned that the handlers were saying that the elephants clearly could have overturned the trailer and broken their chains but that they didn't because they were so happy...truth is the reason they don't is that they are very intelligent and know that to escape would only mean being gunned down. Many of the older elephants had seen this happen themselves, and I feel they may have passed it on to the younger elephants. I'm certain that many of the elephants who finally lose it and rampage, such as with Tyke, have made a conscious decision to commit suicide. Also notice that even in a crowded tent it is usually only the elephants handlers that get killed. These elephants don't want to hurt anybody..but when they do they choose their victim for good reasons."
"All of the ellys would suffer in cold weather, we would tour every state, including Idaho, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. The poor, naked elephants didn't sway back and forth in these climates, they stood, heads down, huddled together. The Rhino, Goliath, was left out in the cold weather and he would lay unmoving at the back of his pen-this would be in sub-zero weather, we would be frozen in several layers of clothing, imagine how these naked animals must have felt. Sometimes, if it was especially cold they would load the elephants back into the trailers after the show, but I doubt it was much warmer that way and besides, 5 elephants packed into a trailer for endless hours....need I say more?"
Gogo was a sweet, puppy dog of a rhino, who I would stop and scratch around the eye (the only soft part on a rhino) every day. He lived in this tiny, filthy box, and was left out even in icy weather, when he would huddle against the back of the cage. Every few years, the rhino would die, or become too large..I don't know what they did with them, the rumor was they shot them and buried them out behind winterquarters..after keeping their head or skin, or horn, to decorate their homes and offices.
"4 or 5 years ago a series of cable programs was coming on (either discovery or TLC) titled, "the secret life of;" and it would be about different professions, the one I am talking about was "the secret life of- the circus and sideshow." The featured circus was Carson and Barnes. I remember Frisco clearly now, because he was the Animal Supervisor in the show, which was filmed in about 1999. He was standing there with MARGARET, and talking about how she was a 'crazy girl' and so on. She was the elephant I saw receive the gang beating! I was like "who the **** is that guy, and I was so mad, you could tell he was an even bigger creep than Carr."
"Was somebody saying that they read that Kay died at 60? I was just looking in the 1993 route book for C&B and it has her age as being 46, and she died the next year. I think that they may have lied about the actual ages of the ellys in these books, they also have Barbara and Suzie as being 46 and 45, when in fact they were younger than Kay. The route books are sold to the circus goers..I guess if the public knew they were using a 60 year old elephant to push and pull semi trucks into place in the mud and to put up the tent, some may object? That's like using your old grandmother to push your car out of the mud!"
So that is why I protest. That is why this matters to me. Because of testimony’s like that. Because all the testimonies are nauseatingly similar. Videos of a man beating an elephant, a small chained elephant, over an over and over and over, without uttering one word. No instruction. No explanation of what is going on. Just venting frustration and anger. All you hear is this little guy screaming. SCREAMING. And then collapsing.
I know people need help. I know there are children that need help. I know that there are refugees and sick and hungry people that need help. But for now, I want the circus to go away. And that is what I am concentrating on. Those that don’t see the relationship aren’t trying hard enough. ‘How you treat the least amongst you, is how you treat me,’ to paraphrase Jesus.
If you have never protested anything, if you have never added your voice to something you believe in, if you have never had that crazy adrenaline rush from standing up for something, even though you know that society and law enforcement want you to go away, then you have not lived.
It is a great feeling.
Join.
Protesting is a high. It really is. Every new person that comes to a protest always leaves elated and wanting to participate again. It’s not hard to figure out why. When you believe in something enough that you are willing to stand in record heat, in exhaust laden intersections, holding signs until your shoulders and biceps sing…loudly, when you are willing to put yourself out there not knowing what the reaction will be, then that is truly living. Plodding through your life, doing the endless things that need to be done can cause our minds to literally numb. We are just getting through.
I believe this to be a huge problem in the states. It seems to me that we are working so hard to stay afloat, to keep up with bills and payments and fees, that we block out any receptors that would otherwise raise the warning sirens in our head, causing us to stop, look and act. I wonder in a time when we are inundated with information – we have access to more vehicles of data than at any other time in human history – how we are so woefully ill-informed.
We are pumped full of opinion and partisan slants, from both sides, it’s hard to discern. I know my leanings. However, I do like to think that I am open to all the facts. But what are the facts? Who is offering non-partisan, non-preferential treatment reporting? Can we have accurate information gathering when the purse strings are often held by the people needing the most investigation? When the president can call off a judicial investigation into his warrantless wiretapping, again, rubber stamping the neocon credo of “national security” on the front of the file? When we hear conflicting information about the crisis in the Middle East – both so slanted towards Israel or towards the Arab nations – it is impossible to know the truth. Both sides want to paint themselves as being the victim, the honorable, the righteous. And in the meantime, innocent people are caught in the crossfire, going to camp one day and the next sitting in a stifling bomb shelter.
Back to protesting. I believe strongly that the circus needs to end. The circus with animal acts. Over and over I have read testimony of people who have worked at the circus, people who have worked with elephants and the terrible shame and guilt the few feel for what they witnessed.
Here is one:
I worked for the Carson and Barnes circus for a year in the nineties, and have some real horror stories...way beyond what they show on television! I chose my username because my favorite elephant was a tall, moody girl named Alta. I'm sure she is still with that circus, I wish I could help her. We had a lovely elephant named Mona, who had a malformed or more probably injured back that made her look unusually tall and humpbacked. She could barely get around and moved very slowly so she didn't perform, instead she stood in the chains all day...and never got in trouble thank god. I had left the circus and was living in Indiana when Carson and Barnes visited Evansville, where I was living. Mona had fallen out of the truck and injured herself and so the circus dropped her off at the zoo there..the same one where Bunny was living. She died there, away from her family, and when I volunteered to work at the zoo later they told me Mona seemed to know that she was not going to walk again and just gave up. It is a shame she could not have been rescued, I think she would have lived another 20 years if she had been...she just wasn't able to climb in and out of semi-trailers twice a day. That circus has another elephant ( they have about 23 in total) named Dolly that is similarly crippled, and has had an extremely tragic life...and they were talking about using her as a ride elephant, dear god I hope they didn't, she was blind and would swing at you with her trunk if you came too near, She need to be in a refuge BADLY."
"Sad to say, using the bullhook in the rectum, vagina and on the breasts, is common, it was one of the things they did to Margaret- They did it to Opal one day and she cried( whimpered) when she peed for a couple of days. They will get a hook in from the rear between the legs and yank upwards as hard as possible, it bleeds like crazy when they do this."
"Just imagine the things I didn't see...alot goes on after dark at the circus-many of these men were sex offenders in the first place...there were rumors of men having favorite horses...and worse"
"I guess that over the years I have become 'accustomed' to the images in my head, it must be really shocking to hear about these things for the first time. The thing that made it all worse, was knowing the elephants personally. seeing their very complex personalities and unnervingly human reactions to things being done to them..and to be able to do nothing. On my first or second day with the show, we were still at winter quarters, I was without anything to do and I was just wandering around observing. The elephants were out in 'the yard', a small area behind the barn that they would put the ellys in when they needed to clear some manure out. They were put on a picket, just as they were in the barn and everywhere else they went. I noticed one elephant had a rock and was striking her chain with it. She would lay the rock down, as if to reposition it, and then pick it up and continue striking at the chain. This elephant had an extra set of chain bracelets on her front legs, and I was told later that this was Barbara, and that she wore those chains as she was a 'runner'. They told me that she once broke her chains and then removed the hinges from the barn door, laid it aside, carefully put aside all of the tools and things in the way, and then ate all the grain stores, making herself sick. She was also the one that broke loose one day several years ago, set two of her friends free, and then together they escaped to Hugo lake and were at large for several days before they actually had to call in a big game hunter to track them down!
To anyone who may think that an elephant is smart in the way that an exceptional dog is smart, tales like these might sound fabricated...I didn't really believe the things I saw either, I mean, to believe it was to face the fact that an animal with a sentient mind and human emotions was being treated so horrifically...it was very disturbing.
I have many more stories like these and I feel that the more widely they are told the better. I have been telling them for years, and have turned more than a few people against the circus in that time. I really am so glad that I have found this site and I definitely want anything I say to be passed around, by whatever venue. My name is Courtenay Tosti, please feel free to use my name or whatever I say on your site! Now if we could just get it onto the billboard at Times Square....."
Many days were so muddy, the trucks couldn't drive into place themselves, so they had the elephants do it. I often saw them straining so hard you could hear popping noises in their legs, and they would shake from the exertion, sometimes they would slip and go down in the mud, and the handlers would club them to get them up, no mercy. After a morning of this they would be so tired their heads would droop, then Suzy would do two shows (after helping to erect the tent), give rides for hours, tear down the show, which had a number of tasks shared between the four "tent ellies", Suzy, Barbara, Minnie, and Bunny. Kay was one, but they retired her from it a couple of months before she died.), and then pull trucks back out of the mud, after they'd settled deep into it for a few hours.
Suzy is the new herd matriarch, and now the oldest girl on the show, in her 50s. Suzy was intense and imposing, and often was in trouble, I saw her beaten several times.
Suzy had humanlike eyes, a small chin that gave her a granny appearance, and seemed very intelligent, and unhappy.
Suzy could also remove the cap from the gas tanks of the semis, and she would drink all of the fuel, spray it around, then get sick later. Once I watched as she bit down on a can of silver spray paint she had snatched, you could hear it pop when she bit it, and paint blew up all over her face and mouth. She dropped the can and began rubbing her mouth with her trunk tip, and squeeking pitifully, while her handlers stood around and laughed at her, but didn't offer her water.
One of the veteran elephant handlers was coming out of his truck, and stopped and had a disagreement with another employee, during which they argued heatedly. Afterwards, when the other employee walked away, the handler turned around and began hitting Opal, one of the C&B elephants, on the face and head with a hook with all his anger and strength..for no reason but that he was mad...I saw another, violent elephant handler do the same thing one day, as he too was coming out of his bunk...he was trying to nap, apparently, and was annoyed by the jingling of the chains caused by the racking of the elephants..he came storming out of his bunk with a baseball bat, and began clubbing Suzy on the head with it, and calling her filthy names..he hit her so hard she went to her knees, the echo from him hitting her skull went right through the pit of my stomach.
Winter Quarters at Carson and Barnes Circus:
"The Carson and Barnes Circus has it's winter quarters in the small town of Hugo, Oklahoma, a town where my grandfather was Mayor, and where I spent most of my teenage years. Hugo called itself 'circus town USA' and I went to school with several performers children, some of them performers themselves, as well as with the daughters of the owners Gary and Barbara Byrd. One of my friends in high school was an elephant rider who was the daughter of David Rawls, the owner of the Kelly-Miller circus, a smaller offshoot of C&B. So to was almost natural that at some point I would join, it was the only job left in town, anyway. When I first joined, the show was still at winter quarters, doing repairs and creating the new props for the next season. I didn't have much to do and mainly just ran around observing those first few days. I remember seeing the bullhooks hanging in the barn and asking what they were used for and the handlers just laughing. I was so excited that day when I heard they were going to be putting Kelly-Millers three elephants through their paces that day in the big barn...I climbed up in the loft to get a great Arial view. The handler walked the elephants in and I saw he had a pocketful of carrots...then he immediately screamed " alright you f*****g b*******s MOVE UP!!!! It got worse from there, he hit them constantly even though they were doing their best, and called them filthy names. I was shocked when Viola, a young African who did a cute little wave with her trunk, began crying at one point, for which she was struck over the face repeatedly. This went on for the whole 45 minutes or so that he was working them...oh, and he never gave them a single carrot. I was to soon find out that this was the daily reality for the elephants, much of it alot worse."
A letter written to a circus patron who denied seeing abuse while visiting, this was Tosti's response:
"Alright, well I DID work there, and not only is it as bad as they say it is, it is in fact, worse. Lengthy conversations between me and Carson and Barnes elephant handlers made it clear that daily abuse, insufficient diet, exposure to weather extremes and shortened life spans were par for the course at any circus, not just Carson and Barnes. The brutal training methods are standard procedure. Not just to take their word for it, I also witnessed these things, ad-nauseum, on a daily basis. Despite whatever you think you saw, the elephants are NOT bathed on a daily basis, if ever. In fact, if an elephant were to attempt to even spray itself with water it was beaten, as a muddy elephant would mess up the costumes of the riders. Who said they were kept in cramped cages? They are, for the most part, kept chained front and back legs to a picket line, unable to move. Are you going to refute the pictures and video of this? Do you really think these pictures are fabricated?
I don't have to be licensed to inspect elephants to see them limping on infected feet, bleeding from bull-hook inflicted wounds and wounds that have developed in the cracks of their dry skin. I don't need to be an expert to know that elephants need something other than hay and sweet grain in their daily diets.
Who are you? Did you work for Ringling or Clyde Beatty? If you were just visiting they were putting their best face forward. Carson and Barnes employees were instructed to keep their use of the bullhook to a minimum when the animal rights people were there. They would put on a phony show of feeding the elephants bread and lettuce, they would even pat the elephants as if they cared, but it was all bogus. Circus people are talented con artists and could make the layman believe whatever they wanted them to. You fell for it, good for you.
By the way, I am not an activist. I eat meat, I wear leather. I do not go out and picket pet shops. I do however, carry with me the terrible images of elephants being beaten until they fell down and urinated on themselves. I worked alongside the animals at C&B and I cannot forget the deaths of Nelson, the Siberian Tiger, Kay, the elephant, Rick, the horse, and the four-horned sheep who was put away in a hot trailer and allowed to die without treatment while having difficult labor. What about Mona, the elephant crippled in her youth, barely able to walk yet kept touring with the show for years until she fell out of the truck twice and was mortally injured, then abandoned at a zoo to die? All of these animals deaths were untimely, suspicious and occurred within a few months of each other. Kati, the pygmy hippo, who was not given water to lay in and whose skin was cracked and bloody-do I need to be an expert to know that hippos need water? Our hippo from the previous year died prematurely, as well.
Families getting to sit for a couple of hours and watch animals do silly tricks is not worth this kind of carnage, I hope you can sleep well knowing that you have stood up for the abuse of animals for your entertainment.
People in the circus industry can be ruthless and mob-like in dealing with their enemies. Do you think I would risk my well-being coming forward about this if I didn't know it were really going on? Like they said, watch the C&B training video, then come back on here and refute what you saw, I dare you."
"I don't suppose there is much they could do, except maybe try to discredit me. I was a troubled teen when I first joined...Other than that, if something happened to me or my family, everyone would know who did it!! As I said before, one rainy day in a dramatic little scene I was bawling my eyes out and promised Alta I would try to help her and the others if I could, whenever or however that would be. It is my duty to do anything I can, however small. I don't know what one persons testimony could do, though. A sad fact is that people would come to the circus to see this 'abuse' they had heard about, thus reversing the desired effect of making public what was going on. I am Just hoping that intelligent people hear the news and refuse to visit the circus anymore, as many of my friends have. Please let me know what I have to do, I am ready."
Margaret is the elephant I watched receive a terrible beating involving 8 men with baseball bats and bullhooks. They attacked her for nearly an hour, until she fell on her face, she wailed like a baby, and urinated and defecated in fear. They stuffed mud into her wounds and she performed in the show that night as if nothing had happened.
Paula was the subject more than one USDA citations, concerning her ongoing, untreated skin condition. Paula was a 'runner', and not allowed to perform, instead she stood in the chains, all day...
Mona is the elephant left to die at the Mesker Park Zoo after falling out of the trailer twice and being mortally injured. Mona was crippled in her youth during a brutal training session, and could only walk with a humpback, taking tiny steps. She was unable to perform and stood in the chains, all day.
Dolly was a recent addition to the lineup in 1994, acquired from another show that was going out of business. Dolly was old, and very arthritic, unable to move above a snails pace. Dolly face was slumped from an injury from a bullhook, she was senile and apt to try to smash you if you came too near. Her handler, Danny B., was thinking of making her a ride elephant.
"Mona was an Asian ele with C&B, who from what I was told by a handler was crippled during her early training, which as you know is so harsh, some baby eles don't even survive it.(the elephant death list records her as having metabolic bone disease, but....I don't believe it.) Mona stood in a strange humpbacked manner, with her back standing about 4 feet higher than the other eles. There was a worn spot in the roof of the trailer where she rode, from her back brushing it for years. Mona was unable to perform or even walk very well, taking very slow, painstaking steps. Even so, she was expected to climb in and out of the trailer, with no patience shown her, and then she stood in the chains all day...that was her whole life. She was so helpless, they would occasionally let her off the picket, and she would stay right around the showgrounds..you'd be running along to work or whatever and you'd run smack into her. She was totally harmless, one of many of their eles that was completely tame and sweet, and not considered a risk to the public.
Mona had developed rotten feet just like Calle, and so many others, from spending so many long years standing immobile in her own waste, they soaked her feet but it wasn't helping any.
Mona fell out of the trailer once, and they got her up but she did it again a few days later and was severely injured, I'm not sure what the exact injuries where, though. I had JUST quit the show, and gone back to Evansville to live, when they arrived there with Mona and left her at Mesker Park Zoo, where Bunny was still living.
I later volunteered at the zoo, and the ele handlers were interested in talking to me. They told me the C&B handlers just sort of stood around like idiots when they were trying to get Mona out of the sling to see if she was going to be able to stand. The said at some point she just sort of stood back on her hind legs and backed out of it, and this was unusual, she was a smart ele.
The circus went on without Mona, and she was dead soon after, I still assume she was euthanized, although one of Bunny's caretakers said she was extremely depressed and just died. I don't know, though."
Bunny had a large boil on her knee from a hook wound. She is a very sweet elephant.
" I have been holding a novels worth of stories in for years now, and I promised the elephants that I would try to help them someday, so I would like to get my info out. I know that sounds corny but after getting to know what sentient beings the elephants were, and then watching them get beaten on a daily basis, I began to get REAL emotional. It is why I eventually quit."
Minnie was also one of the 5 elephants that were used to do the heavy labor of erecting the tent, putting up the seats, dragging semi haulers into place, out of, and into it and a myriad other jobs, also doing the 2 daily shows. It seemed obvious to me that Minnie found many of the tricks painful, shaking her head and crying out during the long mount, and the crawl.
She was pretty, with unusual, up-turned eyes, and a very sweet, almost, childish, personality.
"During the year traveling circuses often intersect each other and more than one circus stopped and 'visited' with Carson and Barnes. Culpepper- Meriwether was one of them, and I just remember checking them out to see if maybe their elephants had it any better than ours...they didn't. They were chained front and back just like ours were. They were struck continually and cursed at, just like ours were. They were thin and dehydrated, just like ours. The article mentioned that the handlers were saying that the elephants clearly could have overturned the trailer and broken their chains but that they didn't because they were so happy...truth is the reason they don't is that they are very intelligent and know that to escape would only mean being gunned down. Many of the older elephants had seen this happen themselves, and I feel they may have passed it on to the younger elephants. I'm certain that many of the elephants who finally lose it and rampage, such as with Tyke, have made a conscious decision to commit suicide. Also notice that even in a crowded tent it is usually only the elephants handlers that get killed. These elephants don't want to hurt anybody..but when they do they choose their victim for good reasons."
"All of the ellys would suffer in cold weather, we would tour every state, including Idaho, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. The poor, naked elephants didn't sway back and forth in these climates, they stood, heads down, huddled together. The Rhino, Goliath, was left out in the cold weather and he would lay unmoving at the back of his pen-this would be in sub-zero weather, we would be frozen in several layers of clothing, imagine how these naked animals must have felt. Sometimes, if it was especially cold they would load the elephants back into the trailers after the show, but I doubt it was much warmer that way and besides, 5 elephants packed into a trailer for endless hours....need I say more?"
Gogo was a sweet, puppy dog of a rhino, who I would stop and scratch around the eye (the only soft part on a rhino) every day. He lived in this tiny, filthy box, and was left out even in icy weather, when he would huddle against the back of the cage. Every few years, the rhino would die, or become too large..I don't know what they did with them, the rumor was they shot them and buried them out behind winterquarters..after keeping their head or skin, or horn, to decorate their homes and offices.
"4 or 5 years ago a series of cable programs was coming on (either discovery or TLC) titled, "the secret life of;" and it would be about different professions, the one I am talking about was "the secret life of- the circus and sideshow." The featured circus was Carson and Barnes. I remember Frisco clearly now, because he was the Animal Supervisor in the show, which was filmed in about 1999. He was standing there with MARGARET, and talking about how she was a 'crazy girl' and so on. She was the elephant I saw receive the gang beating! I was like "who the **** is that guy, and I was so mad, you could tell he was an even bigger creep than Carr."
"Was somebody saying that they read that Kay died at 60? I was just looking in the 1993 route book for C&B and it has her age as being 46, and she died the next year. I think that they may have lied about the actual ages of the ellys in these books, they also have Barbara and Suzie as being 46 and 45, when in fact they were younger than Kay. The route books are sold to the circus goers..I guess if the public knew they were using a 60 year old elephant to push and pull semi trucks into place in the mud and to put up the tent, some may object? That's like using your old grandmother to push your car out of the mud!"
So that is why I protest. That is why this matters to me. Because of testimony’s like that. Because all the testimonies are nauseatingly similar. Videos of a man beating an elephant, a small chained elephant, over an over and over and over, without uttering one word. No instruction. No explanation of what is going on. Just venting frustration and anger. All you hear is this little guy screaming. SCREAMING. And then collapsing.
I know people need help. I know there are children that need help. I know that there are refugees and sick and hungry people that need help. But for now, I want the circus to go away. And that is what I am concentrating on. Those that don’t see the relationship aren’t trying hard enough. ‘How you treat the least amongst you, is how you treat me,’ to paraphrase Jesus.
If you have never protested anything, if you have never added your voice to something you believe in, if you have never had that crazy adrenaline rush from standing up for something, even though you know that society and law enforcement want you to go away, then you have not lived.
It is a great feeling.
Join.
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