Wednesday, June 29, 2011

From Jerry Digney #8

The RBBB elephant walk (21 elephants), Hartford, 1983--was this your herd, Buckles?


"No, you can barely see Axel at right. He was on the show for another 10 years."
Buckles
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are you sure this is Axel? Enlarge picture, I believe the man has a beard.

Larry Louree said...

For what it's worth, when Axel brought the herd to CW Florida that Thanksgiving, I remember he had a couple of his bulls chained together like this. I suspect it was a normal way of doing things when they were not in a controlled area.

Was it normal/common practice to have the bulls chained together like this when out walking/parade? I know they are still 'wild' animals and could be dangerous.

Buckles said...

With a big herd of elephants, if they were marched in teams it shortened the distance from front to back and in theory enabled you to better see whats going on.
Gunther walked his in single file.
When the decision was made to take the Circus World elephants on the road, Kenny asked me if I would do the same as Gunther since back then they were already getting complaints from activists about "elephants in chains".