So Anne had settled into life at Longleat and all seemed to be going well, but the first signs of trouble were starting to emerge. It was originally agreed that it would only ever be a temporary place of safety to get her out of the circus, but as it became clear she would remain at the safari park, issues started to emerge between those interested in her welfare. ADI had agreed that she should go to Longleat initially, but ultimately wanted her to go to a sanctuary in the US. So from that point on, there were tensions between the group that helped save her from the circus and those now responsible for her welfare.
Tim Phillips of ADI says: ‘She was arthritic and in a real state. It would probably have added a year to her life climate-wise.’ His wife and colleague Jan Creamer adds that the US had good elephant sanctuaries where Anne could have been rehomed, including California-based PAWS (the Performing Animal Welfare Society) and the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. But two vets who specialise in elephants – one working for the RSPCA, and the other working for SWS – concluded that she would not be able to travel overseas. ADI said at the time that she was used to transport and would have been OK, but the consensus from everyone else was that she would have to stay in Britain. Jon Cracknell at Longleat says that Anne has since been assessed by Susan Mikota from the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, who has decided it is not viable to move her. There is the further issue that, although her health has improved, she is older and her arthritis will never be healed. In terms of other places in the UK that she can go, there are many issues with introducing her to existing herds of elephants in other zoos and safari parks.
So, with an overseas home ruled out, and not many options within the UK, the next step was how to improve her life at Longleat. In the aftermath of Anne’s rescue, Jon Cracknell of Longleat had the idea of creating an elephant sanctuary at the safari park. There was a desperate need for a sanctuary in Europe to home ex-circus, zoo and safari park elephants, and Anne’s arrival at the park was the perfect opportunity. He was planning to recruit other elephants from Europe to become her companions.
But it wasn’t to be. After consultation with other sanctuaries, experts, charities and animal rights groups, it was decided that Longleat was not the ideal place for it. ‘I was trying to push the idea of an elephant sanctuary because I didn’t see us managing elephants for breeding and conservation,’ Jon explains. ‘At the time, I said that what we needed to focus on was that there were elephants that needed homes.’ But when they did further research, they realised that Longleat didn’t meet the criteria to become a sanctuary. The Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries (GFAS) sets out a precise set of conditions that must be met. ‘They have a strict but very good policy of what an animal sanctuary should be,’ says Jon, ‘and one of them is that you can’t have paying people coming in. So we could never be an animal sanctuary but we could live with their ideals but also we’re a commercial business… They were never going to make Anne do parades or dance for her supper, but we are a commercial business.’
A meeting had been held on Valentine’s Day 2014 to decide how to proceed with the idea of a sanctuary. The attendance list is secret – Jon says that Longleat persuaded a number of animal welfare groups to attend who would never normally sit down with a zoo, which is what Longleat is classed as, so they remain anonymous. Those who did declare their attendance were Ed Stewart of PAWS which is a sanctuary based in California, plus Matt Ford of SWS, Deborah Bradfield – an animal health inspector for the City of London – and Chris Draper of the Born Free Foundation. Having someone from PAWS attend was something of a coup as they run Ark 2000. Set in 2,300 acres in California, it is regarded as one of the best sanctuaries in the world. ‘The idea was to critically appraise [the idea], look at what a sanctuary should be and look at what Longleat’s options were,’ says Jon.
The group ultimately decided that Longleat wasn’t the right place for a sanctuary. Jon reflects: ‘We saw the paper, we’d moved her in a week, within three days of the article we’d come up with this concept and actually in retrospect, was it the right thing to do? It was a sanctuary for Anne, great. She had nowhere else to go. But not for other elephants.’ He adds: ‘There was probably a naivety on my part. If I’d have been here a year, I probably wouldn’t have been so effusive.’
So they decided to model Anne’s Haven, her current home, on the ideals of a sanctuary. To meet these standards, they had to move to a model of ‘protected contact’, where there is no direct interaction with humans, as opposed to free contact. Protected contact is the accepted standard now for elephants in captivity in the Western world. With this concept, there is no need for bullhooks or chains, and the elephant can come and go as it pleases. The elephants are still trained as vets need access to them, but they are trained with food and word association rather than with bullhooks and chains and a trainer in the pen with them. ‘Zoos are moving to protected contact,’ says Jan Creamer from ADI, ‘where no one goes into a space with an elephant with a weapon in their hand. That’s the change in America, in Europe, that’s the change everyone knows needs to be made.’
Anne had been free contact for her entire life and was therefore free contact for the first few years at Longleat. ‘Free contact is about dominion,’ says Jon Cracknell. ‘You’re part of the herd but you’re the main character and you’re dominating everything. It doesn’t have to be physical violence. Some people do that but that’s not really in this country. Protected contact is about elephants choosing to interact and if they don’t want to, they’ll just sod off. There’s still an element of training but because they can walk away at any point it’s not about dominion, it’s about mutual respect.’
Although pretty much everyone was happy with the plans for the new elephant home, there was another complication: the issue of how long it took to get Anne there. The old elephant house had been converted for rhinos and wasn’t a perfect home for her. Also, it was free contact, which meant using bullhooks on her. ADI, the Born Free Foundation, the RSPCA and even the Robertses started putting pressure on Longleat to stop the use of bullhooks and to move towards protected contact.
There were also issues with heating, flooring and access as Anne shared the old home, which was only ever supposed to be temporary, with a rhino. To replace it, Daily Mail readers and members of the public raised £410,000. But it took nearly four years for her new home to be constructed and for her to move in. Longleat blamed the long delay on the difficulties of obtaining planning permission as the safari park is built on Grade I parkland and Jon Cracknell mentions ‘internal management wrangling’ and funding issues. Whatever the reason, Longleat admits that this was a ‘fail’. Anne was stuck in a sub-standard home for far longer than anticipated, which is particularly sad given she is in her twilight years. So although the plans for the new home were met with widespread approval, having been formulated with the help of leading elephant sanctuaries, the delays meant that groups including ADI, Born Free and the RSPCA became very frustrated with the situation. Jon says that the new elephant house was designed within six months of her arrival and the plan was to build within eight months, but he says there were a lot of ‘challenges’. ‘There was a lot of criticism – some of it rightly so,’ he admits. ‘We did take too long on it. It was always going to happen, it was just that there were funding issues, challenges of conservation heritage and internal challenges.’
Once the home was finally built and Anne moved in on 5 February 2015, yet another hurdle was to prove impossible to overcome: what to do about companionship. The experts are agreed that elephants should be kept together. They are highly sociable creatures, living in herds in the wild. There is an ongoing dispute between Longleat and those, including ADI, who say she should have the companionship of other elephants. They, and many others, think it is cruel to keep her on their own. But Anne’s case is difficult: she has been reviewed by various experts and at the moment it doesn’t seem sensible to send her anywhere else. Introducing new elephants to Longleat would mean that the safari park would have to maintain a herd and keep introducing new elephants so that none were left on their own – something no one wants. The Robertses have also insisted that Anne didn’t like other elephants. Jon Cracknell said at the time that Anne’s ears had previously been chewed from her interactions with other elephants. There is a worry that if she didn’t get on with the new elephants, there would be a serious risk to her health. Longleat acknowledge that it is another ‘fail’ that she has no companion elephants.
When she was initially liberated, there was a suggestion that she could go to a zoo or safari park with existing herds but this was later decided against due to her health problems. Jon says there would have been serious issues of integrating her. ‘It can work well or it can work terribly,’ he explains. ‘If you put her in with a healthy middle-aged cow or bull then there will be a dominance issue. If there is an argument, the risk with her ailment is that if she goes down, she may never get up. It’s difficult because elephants should be in a group but if we’re bringing in one, two, three new elephants, there will be a change in dynamics. If she hasn’t got the capability to stand up to it and ultimately dies, we’ll get criticism. And you can’t step in. I saw an elephant kill another elephant recently [in the wild]. They’re not benign creatures. It’s like a moving train – you’re not going to stop it. And even if you could, it takes two seconds and an animal’s dead.’
Finding an elephant in a similar situation to Anne will always be hard, given she was Britain’s last circus elephant. In the past Longleat has had other elephants in mind, but some of them have since died or continue to be embroiled in legal disputes and none appear likely to need a home in the near future. ‘Now what that does mean is that ultimately Anne doesn’t have companionship and it is a fail,’ says Jon. ‘I can’t really justify it on the grounds that it’s a good thing but it removes any risk of her being killed by another elephant. Ultimately, if Longleat felt it could provide for elephants long term, then great. It feels it can’t, so we have to draw a line somewhere and that line is Anne. And Anne will be the last elephant at Longleat because Longleat doesn’t have the facilities and environment suitable for keeping elephants in this country.’
One of the reasons why he is keen not to establish a herd at Longleat is because it might encourage more breeding in the UK or Europe, which will not benefit the species. ‘The risk is if we take elephants from other collections, we’re leaving an elephant-sized hole where they can bring in a younger one,’ he explains. ‘Actually, bringing in elephants doesn’t benefit elephants as a whole – we could only bring three or four in with the space we’ve got and then that’s the end of it as your focus is on them. We’ve then got that situation where when one dies, you bring another one in and so you’re just perpetuating elephants here.’
So Longleat decided to change its focus and now invests £50,000 a year in helping elephants in the places where they are native. They help fund projects in Nepal and Sri Lanka and the idea is to improve welfare for captive or working elephants. ‘The hope is that this will have a bigger impact than ploughing the money into one or two equally important animals,’ says Jon. ‘This way we utilise similar resources to have a greater impact and improve the lives of many elephants.’
Chris Draper from Born Free is in two minds about the outcome. He had wanted Anne to go to a sanctuary but he says: ‘There was always that doubt: what if she’s not healthy enough, what if she’s not strong enough and ends up dying on the journey, worst case scenario, or actually having an injury, falling over and making things worse? I think all of us had that in the back of our minds that this might not be feasible, we just hoped it was. But the more that she was looked at by vets who knew what they were looking at, the more it was kind of clear that it’s probably not going to happen.’ He says that it is ‘sad’ because it would be a ‘lovely end to her life’ to live with other elephants in a sanctuary. ‘It’s not just that they’ve got more space,’ he explains, ‘they’ve also got the facilities to manage different groups of elephants at the same time so they can test out relationships without coming to harm.’
Ros Clubb from the RSPCA was also disappointed but realistic about Anne not being able to go to a sanctuary abroad. She says it was a ‘really difficult decision’ for everyone to make. ‘There’s that fear that she would be better off with other elephants but equally far worse if she gets moved into a group and they’re not compatible. That could make her welfare much, much worse. There was always a question mark.’ She believes Longleat’s sanctuary idea to be the best option, though she would have preferred that it was not part of a safari park. ‘Overall, everything weighed up, it’s probably the best outcome,’ she says. ‘Ultimately, we would have loved to have gotten her over to the States to a sanctuary but it would have been too much risk for her, unfortunately.’ She admits that she found Longleat’s delays ‘frustrating’.
ADI still think Anne should have access to other elephants, even if she is kept from directly interacting with them, possibly with barriers in between. Jan Creamer says: ‘So they may get on and they like each other and if they don’t, even if you can at least argue with a neighbour, that’s still nice.’ She also believes that Longleat were too willing to listen to Bobby’s recommendations about Anne. ‘It started very quickly, with Bobby Roberts saying: “Well, she doesn’t like other elephants, so there’s no point in introducing her to another elephant,”’ she says. ‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? That’s his justification for keeping her alone.’
Jan believes it is crucial for elephants to have contact with other elephants. ‘We’ve watched elephants at night contacting and conversing with each other when no other humans are around,’ she says. ‘We’ve watched elephants who, after one of them has been beaten, they reach out to each other. We saw it at Mary Chipperfield’s. It was especially touching in the elephant barn at night how the three females would reach over to Rani [one of the beaten elephants] and touch her and also to the male. They would touch them in all the places where they had been hit and there was emotion in the way they communicated with each other. But Anne was never given the chance.’
She and Tim are also unimpressed with the choice of Anne’s new companions, who are there instead of other elephants. ‘She’s got goats now,’ says Tim, ‘which is kind of like you being locked in a room with a chimp or a dog or a cat.’
ADI remain convinced that Anne should have been sent to a sanctuary abroad. ‘Her life was transformed by the investigation and we’re glad of that and it was important for her to be got out as quickly as possible given the kind of vagaries of British law,’ Tim says. ‘She did deserve better and there was a window, there was an opportunity to send her to the US. She was travelling on a regular basis just months before and we monitored that, we filmed it, so we knew how well she loaded, unloaded, and she was very used to travelling at that point.’
It’s worth bearing in mind that for ADI, it was something of a slap in the face that Anne went to Longleat. Mary Chipperfield’s father Jimmy founded it and she previously kept elephants there. One of Anne’s keepers, Andy Hayton, had also previously looked after Mary Chipperfield’s elephants. It is also worth bearing in mind that ADI are staunchly against animals in captivity and cannot be seen to compromise on this. At the time, they posted on their website the following statement: ‘Many of our supporters will remember that many years ago, Longleat was run by the notorious Chipperfield family. However, they severed their ties with Longleat many years ago. This move does not indicate ADI’s support of captive wildlife but we are taking a practical approach in that Anne needs to be somewhere with the facilities to care for her.’
But Jan and Tim concede that, although they don’t believe that things are perfect for Anne, at least she has her freedom and she has a better life now. ‘She was pulled out of hell and she went somewhere not great,’ says Tim. ‘She deserved better, but her life was transformed. She was out in the open air with the sun on her back – that’s what I remember from when I first saw her at Longleat.’ He says that it was a ‘shame’ the luxury elephant house wasn’t built more quickly, which would have given her ‘four years of absolute bliss’. He adds: ‘She really deserved that. She’d had such a horrible, horrible life that those twilight years could’ve been as good as possible. I think that’s what everyone wanted for her – the fairytale ending instead of a compromise – but you reach a point where you know that in terms of our influence, this is as good as it’s going to get for Anne and it’s a shame and she deserved better, but at least she got the sun on her back and a better diet.’
‘She’s definitely in a better place than she had been so she is away from the abuse and out in the open air,’ Jan concludes.