Notable Animals: Tuffi the Elephant
The circus! It sounds like a glamours lifestyle, or at least a romantic lifestyle. Working at the circus means you get to travel and see the world! You can meet all sorts of interesting and fascinating people! You can enjoy the glimmering glory of fame, if even only for a moment while under the spotlight.
Of course for animals, its not always so fun. Animals don't get to choose their path in life as a professional circus entertainer. Often, circus animals are abused, neglected and mistreated. Circus animals don't really get to be animals at all but instead vessels for our expectations.
When Tuffi the elephant escaped, we don't know what she was trying to escape from. We don't know if she was one of the elephants who was whipped and overworked, who was neglected and underfed. Or maybe she was pampered, but still dreamed of the life of a real elephant, the freedom of being wild.
Whatever it was, one day while crossing a bridge in Germany, Tuffi did escape. She broke her way free from her constraints and fell wildly over the bridge. She had seen people fly before. Every night she saw the trapeze artists soaring back and forth high in the air. So maybe for a brief second, she thought, "It's okay, I've got this' before realizing that her plummeting body was not lifting upward. Between the terror of the plummet, did she feel the briefest moment of relief that her bid for freedom succeeded?
Tuffi was okay though. She splashed hard into the river water. The water must have shot up around her like a giant wave. She was helped out of the water, and as she left the water, she entered a life of true notoriety but also a life that hadn't changed at all. Her attempt at freedom hadn't really worked. She went back to the circus and kept preforming, kept running in circles around the circus tent, kept waking up to the smell of her breakfast brought by the stable boy, kept hearing the same background sound of different performers bickering with each other, kept avoiding the sticky handed grasp of children reaching toward her skin. Sometimes though, she would fall asleep and have a glorious dream. She was free in the air, the world blurring around her in colors, a spasm of joy shooting through her as the wind encapsulated her body.
Of course for animals, its not always so fun. Animals don't get to choose their path in life as a professional circus entertainer. Often, circus animals are abused, neglected and mistreated. Circus animals don't really get to be animals at all but instead vessels for our expectations.
When Tuffi the elephant escaped, we don't know what she was trying to escape from. We don't know if she was one of the elephants who was whipped and overworked, who was neglected and underfed. Or maybe she was pampered, but still dreamed of the life of a real elephant, the freedom of being wild.
Whatever it was, one day while crossing a bridge in Germany, Tuffi did escape. She broke her way free from her constraints and fell wildly over the bridge. She had seen people fly before. Every night she saw the trapeze artists soaring back and forth high in the air. So maybe for a brief second, she thought, "It's okay, I've got this' before realizing that her plummeting body was not lifting upward. Between the terror of the plummet, did she feel the briefest moment of relief that her bid for freedom succeeded?
Tuffi was okay though. She splashed hard into the river water. The water must have shot up around her like a giant wave. She was helped out of the water, and as she left the water, she entered a life of true notoriety but also a life that hadn't changed at all. Her attempt at freedom hadn't really worked. She went back to the circus and kept preforming, kept running in circles around the circus tent, kept waking up to the smell of her breakfast brought by the stable boy, kept hearing the same background sound of different performers bickering with each other, kept avoiding the sticky handed grasp of children reaching toward her skin. Sometimes though, she would fall asleep and have a glorious dream. She was free in the air, the world blurring around her in colors, a spasm of joy shooting through her as the wind encapsulated her body.