ELEPHANTS
How to Help Elephants Reconnect After Years Apart
Joyful trumpeting echoed through the serene morning dialogue, resonating across opulent verdant landscapes and vast open fields as the two ancient comrades eagerly embraced each other. However, the other residents of The Elephant Asylum in Tennessee likely took notice and pardoned the exuberant duo, who had been separated for over two decades.
Shirley and Jenny, the elephants, had once performed together in the same circus twenty-two winters ago. Shirley was already a 20-year-old matriarch when Jenny, a calf from Asia, joined the troupe.
“A narrator reflects in the video below, ‘Perhaps Shirley was her solace and mother in this strange new land.'”
The dynamics shifted when they reunited after many years; this time, Jenny warmly welcomed Shirley, who arrived at the sanctuary after a 14-hour journey.
“I don’t know who was the first to put a chain on her, but I’m glad, you know, that I was the last to take it off,” expressed a sanctuary specialist, affectionately caressing Shirley as he bathed her. “She’s free at last.”
Later, when Jenny returned to the barn, the two immediately recognized each other. Their affection was evident as they entwined their trunks around each other’s faces and shoulders, emitting joyful rumbles from their throats.
“In their eagerness to get closer throughout the night, Shirley and Jenny have bowed the steel bars between them,” the narrator explained. Finally, when a door between their enclosures opened, Shirley stepped through to properly welcome her friend.
“That was the love that started our elephant family,” shared the sanctuary’s executive director, Carol Buckley. “After Shirley’s arrival, elephants who had previously been acquaintances and friends were now sisters and close relatives in the bond of Shirley and Jenny. The future of the sanctuary was bestowed upon it by them.
Just like with humans, the reunion of Jenny and Shirley proves that neither time nor distance can break the genuine bond of friendship!
