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Freedom’s a wonderful thing, and Jenny was eager to experience it. She was kept alone in a yard for one day due to injury, but that proved stressful for her. So she was let out with the rest of the herd. And that’s when she stumbled on a friend from the past.Jenny was still a calf when she and Shirley first met years before, toiling together at a circus. Although they’d spent only a few weeks with each other, Shirley assumed the role of surrogate mother to Jenny before they were separated. But that was 23 years earlier—would they remember?
Jenny knew right away who Shirley was. Soon Hohenwald was rocking as the two greeted each other with trumpeting and celebratory bumping.
Shirley and Jenny instantly fell into their old routine, wandering the sanctuary side by side. The good times had lasted only a few years when Jenny became ill, the result of her previous leg injury.
When she grew too weak to roam the hills and hollows, Jenny trundled toward a shady valley, found some soft, beaten-down underbrush, and lay down. Shirley stood vigil night and day, using her trunk to help her friend to rise and even shift her weight. Also by Jenny’s side were two other sanctuary friends, Tarra and Bunny. At one point, the four spent three hours vocalizing and trumpeting—the vibrations felt by every living being in the sanctuary. In all her years of working with animals, Buckley had never seen anything like this joy-filled celebration of Jenny’s life.
The next day, October 17, 2006, the great animals continued their vocalizing. There was nothing urgent in their song. It was soothing. Still, it was too much for Shirley. About to lose Jenny for the second time, she retreated to a nearby hill to grieve alone. In her absence, Bunny and Tarra comforted Jenny by stroking her. They rested like that for some time, Bunny calmly answering each of Jenny’s rumbles with a crescendo trumpet, while Tarra accompanied the duo with high-pitched chirps. That evening, at the age of 36—young for an elephant—Jenny died. Tarra and Bunny stayed at her side through the night. But whereas Jenny’s suffering had ended, Shirley’s began.
Elephants wear their hearts on their trunks, as it were, so it was easy to tell that Shirley was not coping well with Jenny’s death—her shoulders slumped, her eyes were half shut and her trunk dragged on the ground. She wasn’t eating or vocalizing. She was depressed. Bunny followed her to the hill, where the two stayed for days before finally returning to the barn. There, a new arrival had made her presence felt. Another circus outcast, Misty is a gregarious bundle of energy who literally jumps for joy. Even Shirley couldn’t ignore her raucous spinning and loud, jubilant trumpeting. With her spirits restored, Shirley, the oldest and largest elephant at the sanctuary, began to eat and play, and even picked her trunk off the ground. She was back with the herd, where she belonged.
Watch an elephant walk on its hind legs or perform a hula dance at a circus and it’s easy to forget that these are sensitive, intelligent creatures for whom the family unit is everything.
Luckily for them, there’s a place in Tennessee that hasn’t.
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