Kids were tripping when they saw Santa driving around their neighborhood. It's amazing how everyone who doesn't skate, from your mom to little kids, instantly go for the mall grab when holding a skateboard. I wonder whose old boards those were? They're brand new to these kids. Joe Pelham. Renowned Ringling Bros. Gebel-Williams got a makeover. Nonetheless, the sleight of hand worked. The point is for pushing.
The hook, inserted in the mouth or at the top of the ear, is for pulling. Both are sharp enough to pierce elephant hide. Having neither claws nor teeth, men make these things, and worse. Abusive techniques are absolutely prohibited. It was not pretty. In December of that same year, two attendants on the Blue Unit left the tour during a stop in Huntsville, Alabama. They called a local animal welfare office, explaining they had quit in disgust over the way the elephants were treated.
Her supporters organized protests outside performances and shot videos of trainers hitting elephants. The attendants, Glenn Ewell and James Stechcon, had lived transient, sometimes troubled lives, working off and on for circuses.
At Ringling, where they mucked out elephant pens and assisted with feeding, they claimed to have witnessed regular elephant abuse and more than a dozen extended beatings during their three months on the road.
Sweet-natured but clumsy, Nicole would frequently miss her cues to climb atop a tub and place her feet on the elephant next to her, Stechcon said in his videotaped statement. I mean, really hard. Like a baseball bat or something striking something not—not soft, and not hard…I turned around to look, and this guy was hitting her so fast and so hard [with the ankus], and sometimes he would take both hands and just really knock her, and he was just doing that.
Benjamin, a precocious three-year-old, also suffered frequent beatings from his trainer, Ewell and Stechcon said. Able to balance on a wooden barrel, ride a tricycle, shoot hoops, play musical instruments, and paint a picture by holding a brush with his trunk, Benjamin had appeared on The Today Show and CBS This Morning. His trainer, Pat Harned, told journalists that Benjamin had been trained thanks to rewards of bread or bunches of bananas. The whistleblowers told investigators that Harned also used force.
Derby helped the men file a formal complaint to the USDA. In early January, a senior investigator and veterinarian followed up with a surprise visit to the Blue Unit, on tour near Miami. The USDA team found scars and abrasions on several elephants and a fresh puncture wound on another.
But all five trainers and handlers named by Ewell and Stechcon denied abusing elephants or ever seeing anyone else do so. I treat these elephants as my children. DeHaven, the animal care unit director, received a report from the senior investigator that none of the allegations could be confirmed. But he also received a complaint from the director of the Eastern regional office about the quality of the investigation.
Vail advised against proceeding. And DeHaven closed the case , writing that he ultimately was swayed by the vehement denials of the accused trainers. Their last stop was the night holding barn, where they found two baby elephants, restrained with ropes and chains, barely able to move. The elephants, month-olds named Doc and Angelica, each had lesions on their hind legs and scars from healed injuries.
In the morning, Harned let the elephants wander into a pond on the property. A little while later, Benjamin was dead. Harned says when he called to the elephants to get out, Shirley came, but Benjamin just dove underwater and died. Experts hired by Feld eventually surmised that he may have suffered a heart attack, though they puzzled over why such a young, healthy elephant would succumb.
A senior USDA investigator interviewed the other witnesses who said Harned struck Benjamin with his bullhook while he was playing near the shore, which is why he swam into deeper water.
Once again, DeHaven and Vail saw no cause to act. A year before Benjamin died, Rider said he saw Harned strike the young elephant repeatedly with his bullhook in the presence of the adult elephants. Females are very protective, and Karen, an older elephant, began to clank her leg chains aggressively. Harned stopped hitting Benjamin, the affidavit said. It just went on and on. Meyer proposed that PAWS file a federal lawsuit against Feld Entertainment, seizing on a provision in the Endangered Species Act that allows citizens to sue violators directly.
Such citizen lawsuits had been used to protect endangered animals in the wild but not in captivity. A win would revolutionize animal exhibits. That same spring, two private detectives visited Derby. George, who died in August, received a pardon from President George H.
Derby filed a civil lawsuit against Feld Entertainment for racketeering and fraud on June 8, , in the federal courthouse for the Eastern District of California. About a month later, Meyer filed the elephant lawsuit in the federal district courthouse in Washington, DC. Soon after, lawyers for Feld approached Derby with a generous settlement offer on the spy case. They would donate elephants and cash to her wildlife sanctuary if she dropped the elephant lawsuit and refrained from publicly criticizing Feld Entertainment.
She agreed. But the elephant lawsuit limped along with Meyer remaining lead counsel and Rider and seminal players in the animal rights movement—including the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Animal Welfare Institute, the Fund for Animals, and eventually the Animal Protection Institute—as plaintiffs. The appeals court overruled him in , at which point Meyer subpoenaed government documents and filed discovery requests with Feld Entertainment.
Meyer prepared for a sizable document dump. But at the appointed hour the deliveryman left just two cardboard file boxes of press releases and other innocuous materials. Most of the German shepherds who followed Strongheart and Rin Tin Tin in Hollywood had just a burst of fame and then were forgotten. In real life, too, the dog hero was having its day. Even so, Rin Tin Tin was singled out. He was praised by everyone from the director Sergei Eisenstein, who posed for a photograph with him, to the poet Carl Sandburg, who was working as a film critic for the Chicago Daily News.
From the start, Rin Tin Tin was admired as an actor but was also seen as a real dog, a genetic model; everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of him. Kellogg, the cereal magnate. They appeared at hospitals and orphanages, gave interviews, and visited animal shelters and schools. When describing a visit to one shelter, Duncan sounded as if he were telling the story of his own childhood through Rin Tin Tin. Or how he, as a little war orphan, had found a kindred spirit in his master and friend, also a half-orphan.
In the evening, Duncan and Rinty would go to a theatre where a Rin Tin Tin movie was playing, and afterward come onstage. At this point in the show, Duncan would run Rinty through some of his tricks—his belly-crawling, his ability to stand stock-still for minutes on end, his range of expressions from anger to delight to dread. One such night, according to a writer named Francis Rule, Duncan began by calling Rinty, and then, for laughs, scolded him after he strolled lazily onstage, stretched, and yawned.
And it fairly took your breath away to watch that dog respond, his ears up unless told to put them down and his eyes intently glued on his master. There was something almost uncanny about it. Everywhere Duncan and Rinty appeared, the dog was treated like a dignitary. One of his first jobs was writing ads for Yuccatone Hair Restorer. Zanuck left advertising to work for the director Mack Sennett and, later, for Charlie Chaplin.
Mal St. Clair had also worked with Sennett, and several of his films had included dogs. The movie that Zanuck had in mind was set in a remote timber camp. He and St. Clair acted it out for Harry Warner, with Zanuck playing the part of the dog.
It concerned a pretty girl and her father, a lighthouse keeper who is going blind. Warner Bros. Even so, he wrote at least ten more scripts for Rinty, all of them great successes.
By the time he was twenty-five, Zanuck was running the studio. Around the Warner Bros. Duncan was given every privilege: he was driven to the set each day, and he had an office on the Warner Bros.
Duncan had never imagined this part of the equation. He started buying snappy clothes and cars. He bought land in Beverly Hills and built a house for himself and his mother.
Then he bought a house in North Hollywood for his sister, Marjorie. His biggest splurge was on a beach house in a gated section of Malibu, where his neighbors were Hollywood stars.
On top of the movie income, Rinty was signed to endorsement deals. An executive from Chappel Brothers, which had recently introduced Ken-L Ration, the first commercial canned dog food, was so eager to have Rin Tin Tin as a spokesperson that, in a meeting with Duncan, he ate a can of it to demonstrate its tastiness. Duncan was convinced. It feels like it could have been released yesterday. Alan Krumwiede is a kind of character who still felt a little fantastical, as I recall, in He goes on national television to accuse CDC director Dr.
Ellis Cheever Fishburne and the entire government apparatus of conspiring with Big Pharma to suppress a simple homeopathic cure, called forsythia, in order to profit off a vaccine. But Krumwiede is a charlatan who stands to profit off forsythia himself. Cheever, trying to keep his cool, rebuffs him. In order to get scared, all you have to do is come into contact with a rumor, or the television, or the internet. I think what Mr. Krumwiede is spreading is far more dangerous than the disease.
Then he reveals on air that an email written by Cheever has surfaced and is circulating on Facebook. They are withholding the truth from us. Obviously, people have always been able to sell theories and fake remedies for all kinds of problems to people who are scared for their lives, throughout history.
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