Jacy Marmaduke

jmarmaduke@coloradoan.com

It's a popular anecdote for children touring the Larimer County Landfill — one often accompanied by handfuls of animal crackers.

It's the nearly forgotten tale of how an elephant was born in India and zigzagged from zoos and circuses across America only to end up dead in Colorado and buried in Fort Collins, of all places, nearly 20 years ago.

And Hattie's story is even more intriguing given the 145-year-old Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus featured elephants in its show for the final time on Sunday. In fact, Hattie’s unusual death marked a landmark in the charge to remove elephants from circus acts.

Here's her story, stitched together from a trove of online sources.

Hattie, an Asian elephant, was born in 1970 in a tropical forest in India.

But she didn’t enjoy life in the wild for long. Before she was a year old, she arrived at Nehru Zoological Park in Hyderabad, a massive Indian city that hugs the banks of the Musi River. Soon after, she moved again. And again. And again.

According to the Elephant Encyclopedia, she first touched American soil in 1971 as part of Gene Holter’s Movieland Animals. Holter, a North Dakota native, collected exotic animals and put on shows with no music, the sound of his voice the only melody in the tents.

Those shows might have been Hattie’s first taste of circus life — and her last, for a while.

She spent the next 19 years drifting from zoo to zoo in cities like San Francisco, Jacksonville and Los Angeles.

In 1990, John Cuneo bought her from the Los Angeles Zoo. Years later, after Hattie’s death, Cuneo would face federal charges alleging he violated the Animal Welfare Act by failing to provide his elephants with adequate food, water, shelter and medical care.

Cuneo, owner of the Hawthorn Corporation, kept 20 elephants and 80-some tigers on his farm in Illinois, a plot of land surrounded by trees and a barbed wire fence. Most of his elephants were tethered to a chain in a barn, and when they weren’t there, they were traversing the country for circus performances.

Circus life didn’t go well for Hattie. In a 1995 memo, Ron DeHaven, then the western region supervisor of animal care under the USDA, recommended the agency create a list of potentially dangerous elephants that distributors might keep separate from the public. Hattie was included on the list because she had allegedly injured several handlers, according to Carol Bradley’s “Last Chain On Billie: How One Extraordinary Elephant Escaped the Big Top.”

Animal rights groups have protested elephants’ inclusion in circus acts for decades, saying the animals spend most of their lives confined in cramped trailers and the rest forced to perform tricks for crowds and carry children on their broad backs. Some circuses have been accused of using violence to goad elephants into performing tricks.

Such treatment would be especially torturous for Asian elephants like Hattie, which have the largest brain of any land mammal and are known for their extraordinary cognitive processing. Along with dolphins, great apes and magpies, they’re the only mammals that can recognize their own reflection, a sign of supreme intelligence and self-awareness in the animal kingdom.

“They’re such majestic animals,” said Rose Watson, Environmental Education Center coordinator at the landfill. “I hate to think what happened to the animals that performed in those circuses.”

Hattie’s last circus venture was with Circus Vargas in Southern California, a once-mighty act that by the 1990s had shrunk to one ring. It had gotten rid of its herd of elephants in favor of short-term elephant leases. Circus Vargas representatives didn’t respond to a request for information about what the elephant performances included at that time.

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It was during that tour — on Aug. 3, 1996 — that a visibly emaciated Hattie performed for the last time.

Fort Collins became a part of Hattie’s story by chance. The day after the performance, her hind legs gave out as she was being unloaded from a truck. On Aug. 6, she died. The caravan, en route to Illinois from Southern California, was in Colorado when Hattie’s handlers realized she had died. The took her to Colorado State University where her necropsy was conducted.

At 26 years old, she'd outlived the average life expectancy of an Asian elephant in captivity by 9 years.

Another elephant on the tour, named Joyce, died the day of Hattie's last show and was shipped to San Bernardino for a necropsy.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a contagious disease that can spread among humans and other mammals, killed Hattie and Joyce. Necropsies found their lungs were 80 percent clogged, according to an investigation of their deaths and Bradley’s book. It's not clear exactly how they contracted the disease.

They were the first elephants in America to die of tuberculosis since the 1800s. Their deaths triggered investigations into Cuneo’s alleged animal abuse and studies of a tuberculosis epidemic in elephants that persists today. And their deaths brought attention to the quest of animal rights groups to keep elephants and other animals out of circus tents, contributing to a gradual phasing-out of the practice.

Circus Vargas eventually eliminated elephants and other animals from its acts in 2010.

When it was all over, Hattie's body was taken to the Larimer County Landfill for an immediate burial. She doesn’t have a headstone. And no one knows exactly where she's buried because the landfill's animal burial area was later moved and then eliminated altogether.

But somewhere in those ocher hills, she rests.

Reporter Jacy Marmaduke covers environment and breaking news for the Coloradoan. Follow her on Twitter at @jacymarmaduke and Facebook at facebook.com/jacymarmaduke1.

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