They surely do, every animal has their own personality, and elephants are no exception. And there are good elephants, there are bad elephants, and I’m fully aware of all the fatalities that have occurred with elephant accidents and actual, not accidents, but incidents where elephants have been responsible for the death of people. I wouldn’t say that all of those are the result of lack of training, because there are individual differences with a given elephant, but each one of them could be avoided by people not taking the chance, there’s some elephants that should only be handled under protective contact. There’s no question about that, but there are others that certainly can be dealt with. I admire elephant trainers and elephant handlers. I think they have to be trained to do it well. And I think zoos, if they’re gonna be involved with elephants, it’s incumbent upon the zoo to make sure that their elephant people are properly trained to do that, and not just take somebody and let them learn in-house. They need to get some experience with other people that know something.
