Born in Sri Lanka at some point in the early 1950s, Anne was taken from her mother and her home and shipped in a crate to Britain. There is considerable disagreement about the exact circumstances of her life before being bought by Bobby Roberts’ father.
In Bobby’s version, she was born to a captive mother who lived with a mahout. ‘I was just a little boy,’ he recalls. ‘There used to be a pet shop and [the owner] had a shed at the bottom of the garden with a sack over it and he’d have two or three elephants over there. You’d go there and say that one and that one.’ She was sold to his father for £3,000 – around £90,000 in today’s money.
According to ADI and the Born Free Foundation, Anne was taken from a wild herd and kidnapped from the jungle and her mother by poachers at the age of about four. This is based on the idea that there were no captive breeding programmes in Sri Lanka at the time. There are no written records that could be traced to determine the truth. What little is known is based on an entry on an online database – elephant.se – which has since been taken down. It would clearly not have existed at the time she was born so it is difficult to know how much to rely on it. She was imported during the time of a huge influx of elephants destined for European circuses before the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora was made law in 1975.
Because there are no records, there is disagreement about how exactly she would have been removed from her mother and the possibilities range from the prosaic to the distressing. ADI described one harrowing method: Poachers would stalk a herd of elephants in the jungle and then slaughter all the adult females before trapping the calves as they tried to comfort their dying mothers.
Bobby Roberts says that the dealer they bought her from said she was born to a captive mother who lived with a mahout, but says that as his father bought him he cannot be sure. Chris Draper of the Born Free Foundation also believes she would have been born in the wild as he thinks that there were no captive breeding programmes in Sri Lanka in the 1950s, something Jon Cracknell agrees with. But Asian elephant expert Khyne U Mar thinks that Anne’s good behaviour and longevity indicate that she was born to a captive mother. The truth is not known.
Although almost unheard of now, circuses with wild animals were big business in the 1950s and it was then normal for exotic and endangered creatures to be snatched from their habitats and brought to Europe. Tigers, elephants and lions were part of almost every big circus. Harrods in London once sold elephants, panthers and tigers and had a collection of animals that was said to rival London Zoo. And it wasn’t just circuses buying them. Future American president Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, rang up Harrods to buy a baby elephant called Gertie in 1967. Legend has it the shop worker on the other end of the phone said: ‘Would that be African or Indian, sir?’ Playwright Noël Coward was also a famous customer, having had an alligator bought for him for Christmas in 1951. The section, which first opened its doors in 1917, finally closed in 2014 to make way for a womenswear section.
The public still loves the magic of circuses, but today the company Cirque du Soleil, featuring acrobats and street performance by humans without performing animals, is the kind they prefer. Gone are the days in which lions jumped through flaming hoops and elephants stood on tubs. The word ‘circus’ comes from the Latin for circle and was used by the Romans to describe their venues for gladiator battles and feeding live Christians to lions. But the circus as we know it was invented in England in 1768 by a horse trainer named Philip Astley, according to the website Circopedia, which gives a history. Astley introduced jugglers, clowns and acrobats to fill the gaps in between his equestrian performances. He is also credited with having discovered the perfect diameter for a circus ring – enough space to get a horse up to a gallop and still be able to balance on its back – and this is now the international standard for all circus rings.
Back then, circuses were popular entertainment and almost all featured animals. Christmas television slots were dominated by live circus performance and became a British tradition. But as animal rights groups started to make an impression in the 1980s, performing animals fell out of favour. Local councils increasingly banned them from cities. Circuses began to focus on the once peripheral acts of tightrope walkers and sword swallowers. Now, while there are still around fifty circuses in Britain today, only a handful of these present domestic animals like horses and dogs. And only three present exotic animals. In Britain today, there are lions, tigers, snakes, a camel, a raccoon and an Ankole – an African bull with enormous horns.
Anne originated from a different era when elephants were bought for circuses and she was once one of a herd of twelve who performed with the Robertses’ family. Though there are no records of her birth, her capture or training, she would almost certainly have had a similar start to other elephants taken from their natural habitats and their mothers at that time.
Those who claim to know the most about Anne’s history, apart from Bobby Roberts himself, are Jan Creamer and Tim Phillips, ADI’s founders. ADI had been monitoring her situation since 1995, when concerns first started to be raised about her welfare, and researched her history. Tim says that Anne came to Britain at a time when circuses were as popular a form of entertainment as cinemas are now. ‘Anne would have arrived in the heyday of circuses in the 1960s when there were massive sell-out shows and great herds of elephants who were all destined to die young,’ he says. ‘There were lions, tigers, bears and everything. It was the era of the Chipperfield Circus on television. The 1950s and 60s were the glory days of the circus industry. In the 1970s, it was still holding its own but it started to decline from then on. In the 1980s, it was starting to come under pressure from animal rights groups but it was still very strong in the 1990s. In 1996, there were sixteen elephants touring the UK. This is a very small country to have sixteen elephants touring it and, obviously, Anne was one of those.’
So ADI began the undercover investigations. What they discovered when they rigged up a secret camera in the barn was that her traumatic life was even worse than they had imagined. It revealed that she was subjected to severe physical suffering but it also left her with lasting psychological damage that is observed all too often in captive animals.
For Anne, that psychological damage would have started young. Before ever reaching the UK, she may have been ‘broken’, a horrific process that involved crushing her spirit and will through punishment and starvation before she could be trained. Usually it is a process carried out by a mahout, originally a word from the Indian language Sanskrit meaning ‘elephant keeper’.
ADI boss Jan Creamer has carried out investigations of this practice and describes how it works for elephants taken from the wild. ‘There are no records of Anne’s particular early training but the traditional training methods are still the same today,’ she says. ‘They put the baby elephant into a crush box, which is basically a really small box, and tie its legs up. They crush its body so it can’t move around. It goes through a period of that whilst being beaten. It will then be confined to the box for days and days until its spirit is broken.’
According to Jan, the creature is also beaten with bullhooks until it can’t fight back anymore. She goes on: ‘What they need is for the animal to just give up psychologically so any sense of self-preservation, any sense of independence, any will, is crushed and broken. That’s how they do it. So it’s days and days in these boxes, together with beatings and stretching it out, pulling its legs about, pulling the legs through – just anything deeply unpleasant to make it give in.’
Anne may have suffered more than other elephants due to her large size, believes Jan. ‘The chances are that because Anne is a large elephant, she would have taken longer to break in than others,’ she explains. ‘It would have taken weeks and months. Mahouts work in teams. There would have been one main mahout who would have been her main trainer and contact and then they’ll also have had a group of others who assist because obviously it can take several people.’
‘It’s really violent,’ says Tim. ‘If she left Sri Lanka at that age then she would have been broken when she arrived [in Britain]. She was wild-caught, we know that, so she was torn from her mother and her natural habitat and almost certainly broken to get her compliant. She’s a big animal so they take some beating so that they think: “I am going to obey everything” when the mahout has a bullhook or a stick leaning by their side. That’s a serious level of intimidation.’
Dr Khyne U Mar, who has featured on many BBC documentaries about elephants and is known as the ‘Elephant Lady of Burma’ (now Myanmar), has expanded on the concept based on her first-hand experience. The practices of Burma, she says, are the same across Asia. ‘If you have wild-caught calves, you have to break them immediately after capture. When the elephant’s spirit is broken they follow commands and do what the human wants them to do. They are put in a crush box and their mobility is restricted and their food is restricted so they’re hungry. Then they get food as a reward when they start training.’ She says that violence was often part of the breaking, though it didn’t have to be. ‘The process is usually done with food or fear,’ she adds. ‘If the elephant does not do what it’s told, the keepers start beating it and punishing it. This is when the abusive behaviour starts setting in.’ She says that the length of the process depends on the elephant’s personality, but they usually needed to be in the crush box for a few weeks; it is normal for a female to take two weeks, but males can be resistant and so the training can take longer. Once it is successfully broken, the elephant is prepared for a life of servitude to humans.
This is not how any of us think of mahouts when we journey to Asia and see them with their elephants. We think of it as a tradition steeped in history and we regard the relationship between a mahout and his elephant as mutually respectful. Mahouts work, eat and sleep with their elephant and appear to have a special bond with it. But as elephants are wild, dangerous creatures who do not choose to mix with humans it leaves many wondering at what price their obedience is obtained. The equipment used by mahouts suggests that it is not an equal relationship but one where one party dominates another. The bullhook – or ankus or goad – which is essentially a metal hook at the end of a pole, is used as an instrument of control. It is used to guide the elephant and is applied on the creature’s pressure points, in the head, mouth and inner ear, where it is most sensitive.
Because of this, many believe that the bullhook causes the elephant pain and debate rages about the ethics behind its use. Two American cities – Los Angeles and Oakland, both in California – have banned its use, but advocates say it is a necessary instrument of control and does not hurt the elephant. They argue that it is merely a useful method of elongating the arm and enabling the mahout to interact with the elephant. Its defenders also insist that bullhooks are a necessity in parts of the world practising what is known as ‘free contact’ as there is no other way to control the elephant. This is essentially the concept of controlling the elephant by interacting with it physically as opposed to protected contact, which is when the captive animal is free to move around as it pleases and has no direct contact with humans.
This is likely to be the sort of background that Anne came from. Torn from her mother and her home after being broken, she arrived in Britain to begin her new life. It was a sad start for an elephant destined to spend the majority of her days in a circus.