Posted on 09/09/2014 6:41:53 PM PDT by SMGFan
PORTLAND, Maine — A veterinarian and co-founder of Hope Elephants, which cares for retired circus elephants, was killed Tuesday when one of the animals stepped on him, police said in ruling his death an accident.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
His life was trunkated.
M4L
A Larson cartoon I recall is an elephant in a telephone booth, on crutches and missing a leg, talking to a man in another panel, the man sitting behind a desk with an odd wastebasket having big toenails, and the caption is the angry elephant saying: “They made a WHAT out of it?”.
Some creatures just have no gratitude - like the birds I feed all winter which end up pooping all over my car during the summer.....
That’s irrelephant.
I remember one by Gahan Wilson. A cartoon box depicting a semi-formal cocktail party with people milling about with drinks in hand. Among them was an elephant with a look of horror on his face. The caption said: “The party was going swell until the elephant noticed the piano keys.”
Yes, it was. He came on the show when Harvey Korman left.
i have lived around elephants—when a trainer abuses them—or is a jerk—there is an “accident” and the abuser dies. I have never seen any elephant harm a person they liked. Think of an elephant as a really big dog—who is really powerful. I do not know what happened here or what was the cause of the accident—It could well be a mental elephant, or a real accident—or any number of things—Maybe the elephant was sick?
Then he'd be luckier than Topsy, a female Asian elephant fried in 1903 for killing a trainer.
Yeah, that one is in Larson’s first “compendium” as well. The one I was thinking of had a second elephant commenting something like “Ed, look what youuu stepped in!” Larson used elephants in his work quite a lot.
Elephants can have psychotic moments. I used to work at the Knoxville Zoo and one elephant there was easy going. I was cleaning her paddock and she just wheeled around and socked me with her trunk. It was like being hit with a baseball bat. It knocked me about 15 feet away. I got up and finished the job. I was quite leery from then on.
If I had it to do over, I would go into zoology. We went to the Natural Bridge (VA) zoo a while back, and I got into a conversation with the elephant keeper. She talked about how she had worked her way up from a volunteer to her present job.
She brought her charge, a female elephant, over to meet me. I had the opportunity to pat her and to say hello to her. It was wonderful. She fixed her eye on me and listened to me while I talked.
The hair on an elephant’s hide is almost like spikes...feels like it could nearly cut you.
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