The Red Unit train pulled into Wilkes-Barre the last week in April. Since the District, it’d been to Fairfax, Va., and Charleston, W.Va. In each city the routine was the same: a couple of “dark days” for travel and rest, then two shows a day, occasionally three, each with a preshow. The animals and handlers also did public relations events: visits with children fighting cancer, a training demo for congressional staffers, television interviews, Animal Open Houses.  When the gates opened for the open house that final weekend, Sonia Foster was one of the first inside. Earlier that morning she’d driven 21/2 hours up from York, Pa., to the animal compound in the parking lot of Mohegan Sun Arena. Tomorrow was the elephants’ last show, but Foster didn’t just want to see the show; she wanted to see the elephants up close at the open house. Back when she was growing up in California, she went to the circus every year to see the elephants. And when the car dealership would offer elephant rides during big sales promotions, she’d go ride them.  “I hate that PETA’s getting rid of the circus elephants,” Foster said to the family with an awestruck child next to her at the paddock. She had already taken her grandchildren to an earlier show. When I asked why she liked elephants so much, she didn’t really have an answer. Maybe it’s like the difference between looking at pictures of trees and taking a walk in a forest. Like all animals, we experience the world through our senses, some of them subconscious. When all our senses are engaged, we learn and feel on a level beyond words.  Elephants learn without words. So it’s impossible to know for sure what they’re learning from their close contact with us. But a wild-born elephant like Asia may have suffered the typical miseries of capture and breaking, losing her family followed by days of beatings without food or water. She may have endured old-school circus training techniques. If so, she surely hasn’t forgotten any of it, nor that humans were responsible. Studies of elephant behavior and brains, with their bigger pyramidal neurons built for more connections than ours, have proved it really is true that elephants never forget. Yet Asia seemed as drawn to humans as they were to her.  Psychologist G.A. Bradshaw, author of “Elephants on the Edge,” describes how elephants have demonstrated they’re capable of distinguishing between humans who hurt them and humans who don’t. In Africa, young elephants who witnessed the slaughter of their families by one group of humans were rescued by other humans. Later, out in the bush, those still-wild elephants protected their human rescuers from dangers that included their fellow wild elephants.  In this country, animal rights activists and circus people have been demonizing each other in a long-running war of protests and legal battles over the fate of America’s performing elephants. Meanwhile, the ones who’ve set the best example of forgiveness might just be the elephants.
Those who take care of captive elephants in circuses, zoos and sanctuaries don’t all agree on what makes a good home for them.