I repeat: These are not actual elephants.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus has announced that it will stop using elephants in its shows by 2018, but that’s not enough for PETA — they now want a Dumbo remake that will free the film’s fictional elephants, too.

After Disney revealed plans to have Tim Burton remake the classic movie, PETA’s senior president wrote an open letter to Burton, urging him to change the ending so Dumbo and his mom “can have a truly happy ending by living out their lives at a sanctuary.” (A little weird considering that these elephants do not actually exist and therefore will not be actually living anywhere at all.)


“We’re hopeful that in your adaptation of Dumbo, the young elephant and his mother can have a truly happy ending by living out their lives at a sanctuary instead of continuing to be imprisoned and abused in the entertainment industry,” Lisa Lange stated in the letter on Wednesday.

Lange clarified, however, that PETA does “love the original Dumbo because it tells the story of the heartbreaking abuse that elephants in circuses endure, and we hope you will keep this storyline in the new film.”

So — she’s okay with the abuse of these (fictional) animals, but only for part of the movie but like definitely not at the end, because that apparently makes some kind of huge difference.



K.

— Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review Online.