An Apology to Elephants

Amy Schatz's eye-opening heartbreaking, HBO-aired documentary—narrated by Lily Tomlin in an Emmy-winning performance—looks at the fate of elephants who are displaced from their native environments and kept in captivity for people's entertainment. Elephants are naturally intelligent, tactile, loyal, empathetic, emotionally expressive, and self-aware creatures, descended from a species that was successful on every continent 50,000 years ago before being all but wiped out by humans. Revered but also exploited, elephants were caged and sent off to circuses—and later zoos—beginning in the mid-18th century. Various scenes here of elephants captured in Africa or Asia and tortured into submission in Western circuses are very difficult to watch, but for anyone who thought the sight of an elephant “handstand” was cute, these revealing sequences of sheer brutality are a revelation. The ethics of breeding these extraordinary mammals in zoos is debated, and the film also examines other threats to elephant populations, including poaching and deforestation. On a happier note, the film visits a PAWS sanctuary for retired circus elephants, where viewers hear moving stories of psychological healing following decades of man-made hell. Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (T. Keogh)