Minnie looked sick and worn-down — but instead of being able to rest, the old Asian elephant was forced to give ride after ride to people at a fair.
“She’s clearly very sick and her feet hurt really bad,” Collyer wrote in a Facebook post about Minnie that went viral. “She kept picking them up and shaking them and she was limping. She also looks malnourished and tired.”
The team at the Nonhuman Rights Project, an animal welfare organization, has been campaigning for Minnie to be legally recognized as a person and retired into a sanctuary for quite a while now. Unfortunately, things have yet to change for Minnie and the other elephants.
Minnie spent the next four years in the care of a couple, who used Minnie in their traveling petting zoo, and also rented her out for parties, sales promotions and Republican political gatherings.
Then in 1976, the couple sold Minnie to Commerford Zoo, which isn’t a zoo in the traditional sense, but a business that rents out animals for film productions, weddings, circuses and fairs. Besides Minnie, the zoo owns two other elephants, Beulah and Karen, whom the Nonhuman Rights Project are campaigning for as well.
In many photos of the elephants at the Big E, handlers are seen holding bullhooks, sharp prods used to make an elephant behave in a certain way.
“In many videos we got, we saw the handlers actually using the bullhook on Minnie to force her to either move in a certain direction, or to stop doing whatever she was doing,” Fern added. “It was very upsetting that she was being physically harmed while she was being forced to give rides to people for hours on end.”