 These next two comments are in regard to the picture below. Richard Reynolds asks - -What year is this? Looks to be about 1954. The animal is Abele (Emily),a rare forest elephant (cyclotis). She was brought from the Congo in 1947 by Howard Bary for RBBB and dropped dead in NYC while walking to the train in 1956. I suspect she had TB.At the end on WWII it was easier to get forest elephants through the Belgian training station at Gangala na Bodio than it was to try for the larger bush elephants from East Africa. After a hiatus of some 20 years, the latter did not start coming on the market again unil the 1950s. from Jim Stockley.......Can you tell us about this elephant?From this angle it looks very like a forest elephant? (L.a.cyclotis) as opposed to the more common savannah model (L.a.africana From Buckles This elephant was delivered to the Ringling Show June 26, 1947 at New Brunswick, N.J. six days after Hugo Schmitt and the five Hagenbeck elephants arrived from Sweden. The above picture is dated 1948 (Daisy Doll in the howdah) and the one below 1949. I saw her with the lot in Chicago in 1955 and I was amazed at how much she had grown. The following year on closing night in NYC she suddenly dropped dead right in the middle of 8th Avenue while returning to the train.  |
Thursday, April 19, 2007
"Emily" 1948
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14 comments:
Too many!
why has USA stayed away from African elephants i one regrouped 2 Asian and 2 African was great to work one African died and have had hell since.
Richard Reynolds says - - -
Neither the Barnum, Ringling nor RBBB combined shows had an African elephant from about 1910 until 1936 when three were imported via Howard Bary from Gangala na Bodio, Belgian Congo. Two were cyclotis (forest elephants) and the third a common bush elephant. All three were advertised as “Pygmy Elephants.”
The combined show under North control had only two other Africans - - cyclotis Emily (Abele) and the male that became known as Diamond. They disposed of him to Knoxville zoo in ’63. So, after 1910 and up through 1963, RBBB and antecedent shows had only five Africans in total.
It would be nice to know the individual who is anonymous in Europe in regard to why we do not have many African elephants here in America. I have trained four of these animals, plus a number of the Asian variety and have observed most of the ones appearing in circuses for the past twenty five years, including the few trained by Buckles and Rex and Smokey. We have found that they do not have the intelligence nor the abilities of the other species and do not have any longivety as do the Asians. There are no Opals, Anna Maes, Burmas, or other Babes, Jennys that the African species would be comparable to for the above obvious reasons. Here in America the elephant has always been important as a work animal on circuses and that specie would be completely foreign to such use. I saw an acy on video of some three Africans appearing in Monte Carlo festival with a couple St. Bernard dogs and in the act they constantly three ring sawdust, tore at their blanket headpieces, shook the dogs off and were obviously uncontrollable and this is Monte Carlo where we see the cremedeplume. I was not surprised as it could be expected. I do know as well that all African elephants that I have observed as a trainer and ringmaster over the years, without exception manage to shit the ring full of crap each and every performance on a regular basis. I am pleased that you enjoy your Africans in Europe so please keep them there. They are not worth five cents and to me they are not what are referred to as elephants in general terms. I hope as an old pro I have answered your question. As of late the reason we have seen a few more Africans is that they are cheap and more easily obtained.
Hello John Herriott, Your are dead on in your comments. I have worked with 6 Africans, and their physical abilities no where near compare with an Asian's. Put one of each side by side, stand them on their hind legs, and see which one struggles the most. If Anonymous Europe, was as learned as he/she pretends, he/she would look at the body shape/mass, and realize that a draft horse will pull more weight than a race horse, a lipizzaner will collect and perform "airs" more readily than a Saddlebred, etc. etc. And yes, they seem to be geneticly hard-wired to shit in the ring. Just a thought friend Col., if what appears at Monte Carlo now day's is the "gold-standard", maybe a lot of us are really just wasting our time. As proud as you, to sign my name. Wade Burck
Buckles, Johnny, Josip, Clubb, Chipperfield, Frisco, Hall, Dean, others. Jesus, it seem's we may have a "unique situation" here. Have any of you ever had an animal die in your act, and you've "had hell since". Please comment, It will be a great learning experience for us all, if we are ever faced with it. Wade Burck
dear Mr Burcke, sorry i have seemed to annoy you iam writing this for a friend sorry the translator in my head German* English. my friend cannot spell. Sorry if the comments have come over negative, they were not supposed to. Apologising to you All.
Richard Reynolds adds - -
Interesting about African intellignece.
The late Allen Campbell once told me he thought the African to be superior in intelligence. I've heard that from others as well.
I wonder how the Barredas feel about this. One of their females was really getting some size the last time I saw her. Those with the Pages are also big animals. When with Gunther they were pretty wild but the late Freddie Logan made good performers out of them.
What I think is undeniably true is that Africans are very much different animals in temperament and dietary requirements and do not react to old syle bull handling and feeding the same way as Asians.
As to size, we are only now beginning to see the truly gigantic size to which Africans can grow in capitivty. There has never been an elephant in USA approaching the size of Yossi at Tel Aviv. He is 11'- 6" The one in the Smithsonian Natural History rotunda stood some 13 ft.!!!!!
I've never seen an Asian as big as was Diamond at Knoxville and Mike Hackenberger's Angus was bigger than Diamond.
As to longevity we are also seeing some of them top 50 years in captivity. One at Basel comes to mind. She had been there almost 53 years at last account. Peaches at San Diego and then Lincoln Park logged over 51 years. Also Gunther's Kongo (Congo)made some 46 years.
Wade.I am a little disturbed by the comments of our respected authority on various species of animals in that he believes, what he refers to as our method of old style bull handling is not the correct method. I take personal issue with that rediculous comment in that I and others in our elephant training fraternity have spent alot of time in research on the subject and can assure you that we have used the best of the old methods and eliminated the worst and by using this guidline we have addeded to our repitoire by coming up with innovative ap-praches and have shared all of this with each other who would have interest and dedication to our craft. Having never been in the trenches I would suggest without opening up a can of angleworms that you do not know what the hell you have expounded about. There is more to the subject on which you suggest than you are aware of. Believe me we are not in that dark age frame of mind and method that you suggest. I would suggest that the one group of performing elephants you refer to are not composed of the original group and would find it difficult to find very few of Africans trained in the past twenty years that are still even performing. I still respect your knowledge of various species of animals as being your thing and would suggest that my business of training domestic animals is my thing. There is alot more on the subject of African elephants on there care and handling that I could expound on, but I perfer to leave well enough alone unless others knowledgable in the field would care to join in. Thanks
I think Buckles two word comment of "to many" said alot more than what I had to say. Anyway, thanks Wade for your support. and a ring full of shit to some of the others.
The best opinion on African elephants I ever heard came from a lady who said, "If they're so damn smart, why don't we see people riding them around town like they do in India?"
Not feeling qualified to speak to the matter of the difference in the training of the 2 specie,but I do question the veracity of the claim that there are more performing African elephants in Europe than in America. Can anyone come up with a comparison of numbers over the last 90 to 100 years ?
Especially for Larry Allen Dean:
Europe 28....USA 77
Both teams now go to the playoffs which will be anybody's guess since Mexico and Russia are out.
>< wink >< wink
Richard Reynolds says - - -
Hold the phone! - - Our animal trainer commentator has overreacted to, and taken the wrong meaning from, my phrase “. . .do not react to old style bull handling and feeding the same way as Asians.” I meant “ old” as in way back before the time of anyone living today. I had not intended to say that our commentator and other animal trainers of today are locked into the old style or to any other style except that which works based on their substantial body of empirical and rational knowledge which has evolved through time.
“Old” in my intended usage refers to the elephant training and handling of the mid-19th century. We have had “traveling” Asian elephants in the USA since 1796 when the first one landed here. In fact they were the only species until after the Civil War. By then the handling and training methodology for the Asians were well known. They worked well, based, as they were, on the tried and the true as taken from long established practices in India and SE Asia. Sometimes native mahouts came with the young elephants. The animals themselves were for the most part well used to interaction with humans. Essentially they were domesticated or semi-domesticated and already partially trained before heading this way.
Then starting in the late 1860s African elephants began to turn up here. They were youngsters taken from what is now Sudan and Ethiopia where the European collectors had begun to tap the vast animal paradise of East Africa. Carl Hagenbeck was a big player in this. Huge numbers of animals of all kinds were taken and marched or carried (by camels) from interior collecting stations to the Sudanese Port of Suakin on the Red Sea. As examples, in 1870 32 little African elephants started on the march to the Port and another 14 were in a shipment around 1874. Losses were high. [The famous Jumbo was obtained in Ethiopia (then Abyssinia) in just this sort of operation.]
We know that a young African was on Dan Castello’s epic 1869 tour across the west on the newly opened transcontinental railroad. Quite a few Africans came this way from the likes of the Hagenbeck operations. They went to circuses because the zoos were only getting started at that time. They were rather common on circuses of the 1870s-1880s. As examples, the Barnum circus got 4 young Africans in 1879 and in 1887 Sells Bros was advertising 6 of them for sale.
But upon arrival these were truly wild animals. As youngsters they had been taken out of herds from mothers that were killed to get their calves. In no sense did they grow up in the comfortable ambiance, as it were, of the domesticity enjoyed by the Asians. And, in consequence the old elephant guys had trouble with them. This is evidenced in an interview given by Forepaugh –Sells elephant man Joseph Beatty to the Topeka (KS) State Journal in 1896. He said, “ We have only two African elephants [the well known Mike and Topsy]. They are wild and difficult and altogether very unsatisfactory.” Such statements may be found all throughout this period of time.
I think the key is what Robert Delort wrote in his handy and comprehensive book, The Life and Lore of the Elephant (1992), to wit - -
“Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, African elephants can be fully tamed, especially when young…If they come across as less ‘intelligent’ it is due simply to the comparison people make with Asian elephants , which are superbly trained and coached by handlers who can draw on procedures dating back thousands of years. Their spontaneous ‘anthrophilia’[preferring people] is more elusive than that attributed to the ancestral dog or dolphin, but their curiosity about people, which is initially friendly, is well established.”
I guess the point to take from all this is that Asians are preferred because we know more about them and they have over thousands of years evolved an almost instinctively positive reaction to handling and training.
If I might be permitted I will review some of the factors which coalesced to keep Africans from our handling and training rings until really very recent times.
In 1883 the nationalist Muslim, Muhammad Ahmad (“al-Mahdi”) led a savage uprising, expelling all “infidels” from the Sudan (sound familiar?) That put an end to the elephant collecting operations in Sudan and neighboring Abyssinia (Ethiopia) - -described above. With that out of commission, the importation of bush elephants virtually dried up because the colonization of elephant rich Kenya and Tanganyika (Tanzania) was yet to happen, and resulting animal collecting operations were not running there, at least not to the extent they later enjoyed.
The African drought as it were, is reflected in the elephant census that Karl Knecht took in 1933. He recorded 194 elephants traveling with circuses, carnivals, vaudeville troupes, fairs etc. Another 80 were in zoos. There was not one African with a circus and only 5 in zoos. In fact, looking back through Buckles’ comprehensive elephant lists, I cannot identify a single African arriving here for an American circus from 1890 to 1936 when Howard Bary went to Gangala na Bodio in the eastern Belgian Congo and brought back to RBBB the so-called pygmy elephants (two forest and one bush). True, Cole Bros got a big African bush elephant in 1935 but that was a male from the Detroit zoo, not an import for the show. Part of the problem was that during the first 40 years of the 20th century the First World War destroyed German animal collecting in East Africa. They were just getting it going again when the Great Depression hit and then came World War II.
As I mentioned in an earlier message on this subject, the Belgians operated African elephant training and domestication stations in the Belgian Congo. There were two prominent ones – at Api and later at Gangala na Bodio. They were initiated by King Leopold II in 1899 after some earlier experiments. One involved bringing Indian elephants to Africa and walking them all the way from the East Coast accompanied by large group of skilled mahouts. The African natives were utterly shocked to see tame elephants. They could not conceive of it. Leopold wanted to do with Africans what the Asians had done. And he did so. The Belgians succeeded in getting African elephants to work just like Asians. Buckles put me onto a fine book on this subject published in 1994 by Marine World-Africa USA.
However, elephants had been domesticated in Africa 2000 years before but only in the northernmost part. As far back as 275 BC the Ptolemys of Alexandria, Egypt had elephants from Africa, some used in warfare. So did the Carthaginians [Carthage was located in present Tunisia.] The Ptolemaic animals were from northern Sudan or Ethiopia before elephants were exterminated there.
The Carthaginians likely used the now extinct Atlas elephants (a race thought to have been more closely related to the forest elephants of the Congo basin) - - -though there is some suggestion that Asian elephants were also employed. The Atlas elephants were found in the Mountains of that name in what are now Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. The Romans took 100 of these African elephants to Italy after conquering the Carthaginians in Sicily in 251 BC., during the first Punic War.
However, the most famous of the Carthaginian elephant exploits were those later led by Hannibal in 218 BC during the second Punic War vs. the Romans. He marched 37 of them all the way from present Spain, through southern France, and then over the Alps to Italy to do battle.
At the time of Jesus Christ, during the reign of Caesar Augustus in the early years of the new epoch (AD), the Romans even had an African elephant breeding farm southwest of Rome. All of this and much more is laid out by George Jennison in his wonderful 1937 book, Animals for Show and Pleasure in Ancient Rome.
Buckles, to answer your question, these ancients did indeed ride around on Africans. There is a coin depicting such - -clearly an African.
From Jennison
Numidia was in present Algeria
After the decline of the Roman Empire no effort was made to domesticate the African elephant for some 12 centuries or until the Belgian effort in the Congo. The native black peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa never made any effort to tame them. In their subsistence farming there was no need for it. [However, they did make splendid mahouts in the Belgian training projects.] In summary, the ancients of Mediterranean Africa knew how to work and domesticate African elephants, but the art was lost over the many centuries after the fall of Rome and until the Belgian effort in the Congo.
But let’s look at more recent times. With the Belgian efforts in the Congo producing Asian like domesticates, we started getting elephants out of there. It was much easier to go to the training station at Gangala-na-bodio and pick out what you wanted than to try to run down wild bush elephants in the east. Examples of G. n. Bodio exports were Howard Bary’s trio of imports of 1936 for RBBB, three to the Bronx zoo in 1946, and another from Bary for RBBB in 1947 (Emily, nee Abele).
The Congo lost out as a source to the more modern collecting operations of animal catchers working out of Kenya and Tanganyika (Tanzania). This got into full swing in the 1950s. The director of Basel Zoo, E. Lang, wrote a fine paper about it, published in the Journal of the Elephant Managers Association. In 1952 he brought to Basel from Tanzania the first bush elephants to arrive in Europe after W.W.II. It is from that point forward that we began to see lots of African elephants coming to American zoos and circuses.
What happened to the training station at Gangala na Bodio? It operated until the Belgians withdrew in 1960. All-out civil war then erupted, and internecine fighting is still going on there after 47 years. I have heard that the warring factions slaughtered all the remaining elephants at Gangala.
Meanwhile, our elephant professionals had become quite adept at training Africans. To name but a few - - in the late 1950s we saw Hugo Schmitt work Diamond into a good performance routine. Gunther brought over Kongo who performed in Germany and on RBBB(Red) for some forty years, and Buckles made a good performer out of his Amy. Alan Campbell had his 5-act that did good turns, also the Barredas with their six, and the Pages with their two really large females.
As to African intelligence I will close by quoting from David Blasko, elephant manger at Marine World Africa USA who wrote in 1994 - -“At Marine World we have been successful in teaching our Africans to perform almost all the same behaviors as those typical of Asian elephants. This includes some the more difficult ones such as hind leg stands, harness work, logging exercises and rides.”
All of this is said in the spirit of collegiality among folks who love elephants and train them. I hope it is so taken.
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