Speaking Up For A very Sick Creature
It was a blessing being able to support quite local
activists outside of Bobby Roberts circus at Wrexham. The demonstration
was to highlight the plight of Anne, a lone and severely arthritic
elephant. Anne had been cruelly captured from the forest regions of Sri
Lanka at around 5 years of age. As a female elephant, living in the
fellowship of a herd, she was incarcerated and, subsequently, trained to
do unnatural gimmicks that would later accelerate arthritis. Indeed, for
no less than half a century to follow, Anne was, more often than not,
confined to a transporter van, a tent with a shackle attached to one of
her feet – to limit her movement further! – and paraded to amuse shallow
minded humans. I say ‘shallow minded’ because ‘where ignorance is bliss’
– the saying has it – then ‘it’s folly to be wise’. To delve deeper, as
do animal activists, is to be repulsed by the background cruelty
involved in making an elephant more submissive than an average human!
Indeed, to add to poor Anne’s drawn out and pitiable
existence, within recent years two of her companions have died. And now
this poor, aged and arthritic elephant, biologically created for
fellowship with a herd of her kind, exists today in daily hours of drawn
out solitary confinement. An exemption being that her owner, Bobby
Roberts, is charging I’m told, £6 a time for humans to be photographed
at the side of her.
Indeed, he declined an offer of around 25’000 pounds, raised through
the Sunday Mirror readership, to have Anne removed so as to spend her
final days within the spaciousness of the Born Free Foundation of
Virginia Mc Kenna. Well, ‘thanks be to God’ that there are activists and
welfarists prepared to stick out their necks and be counted, in a vile
and cruel world where the majority do all they can to experience a calm
and unruffled existence with a selfish attitude of ‘don’t poke your nose
where it’s not wanted’. Yes, or ‘be like Nelson and turn a blind eye to
the telescope’. I tell you that this world – and this country! – is in
the appalling mess of the present time because the majority would
‘rather pay to watch a prize fight than fight for a prize hereafter’.
Few, indeed, are the prophets left in the land, yet I’m more than
delighted to have these few brave and outspoken souls as amongst my
friends.
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