 Hello, this is Kim Stored and the title of my presentation is Topsy, The Elephant We Must Never Forget. They say an elephant never forgets. If only we were equally capable of remembering each and every elephant whose life we have taken, we may not be standing on the brink of their extinction. There are many elephants whose lives deserve our respect, but there is one Asian elephant in particular who I believe deserves our special recognition. Topsy was in her late 20s when she was murdered at Luna Park on Coney Island in New York on January 4, 1903. The murder scene was at one of America's first theme parks at a time when the USA was emerging as an industrial world leader. My use of the word murder rather than killed is deliberate. Her life and death represent the fate of many animals, not just elephants and not just in the entertainment industry. Topsy's stated crime was manslaughter for which she was sentenced to death. Even though she killed and attacked, I believe she was innocent. Topsy's true crime, if indeed it was an offence, was to be an elephant. To be more precise, it was to be guilty of being a wild-core elephant held captive in a human-made environment unnatural for her kind. Why should we be surprised when abused elephants attack and kill people? Perhaps we should be surprised that they do not do it more often. Should elephants like Topsy be held responsible for their actions when the human impact on their lives is the real reason why their behaviours they do? In 1903 awareness about elephants and their psychological and behavioural needs was not as it is today. There were no elephant sanctuaries that could have sheltered her for the remainder of her life. Indeed, Topsy was doomed to die. Human deaths in the entertainment industry were not that unusual back then, sadly they are not that rare today either, but the rationale and method of Topsy's was extraordinary. On the day of her execution, she was first fed three carats, laced with 460 grams of potassium cyanide, which appeared to have no effect. Then she was electrocuted with 6600 volts of electricity for 10 seconds, which killed her. The three veterinarians did not declare her dead until she had been hung by the neck for 10 minutes after the poisoning and the electrocution. Her death was filmed by Thomas Edison's moving picture company and subsequently became important footage in the history of filmmaking. However, more is known about how Topsy's life ended than how it began. Most likely she was born in South East Asia in about 1875. She was probably captured with her mother in a keda, a large stockade which elephants are forced to enter to escape gunshots, noise and fire used by beaters to direct them into the compound. Although we never know for sure, it is possible she witnessed the murder of her mother. It was and still is customary for hunters and poachers to kill mothers to capture their babies. At the very least she was separated permanently from her mother in her first or second year when she was still suckling. Today we know that elephants are intelligent social animals with complex emotional, psychological and behavioural needs. Baby elephants suckle up to 2-3 years of age, adults both know to their young and care for their sick and elderly. They reach sexual maturity at 9-15 years of age and can live up to 60 years. But this life was denied to the baby elephant who became Topsy. She was shipped thousands of miles from Southeast Asia across land and sea to the USA by Germany. This journey would have taken 4-6 months. She would have travelled as cargo chained in place in the dark hold of ships and goods wagons pulled by trains. This baby elephant was sold by Karl Hagenbeck, the international wildlife dealer based in Hamburg, Germany. These clients included America's leading showmen, circus impresarios and arch rivals P.T. Barnum and Adam Fulpar. Both had bought elephants and other wild animals from Hagenbeck for their circuses. This baby elephant's arrival in America coincided with the country's centenary in 1876. Barnum opened his show with a 13-canon salute, one for each of the original colonies. Fulpar called his circus the Great Centennial Show. Moreover, Fulpar knew that for the young country, which at that time was welcoming thousands of immigrants from Europe, having the first American-born elephant would resonate with the celebration of independence, national pride and pioneering spirit. To be among the first American-born is to be part of America's exceptionalism even if you are an elephant. Fulpar did not have the first American-born elephant. He did have a baby Asian elephant who arrived in New York during the winter of 1876. Unlike previous elephants and other wild-core animals whose arrivals in the USA were greeted with much public celebration and press attention, this baby elephant was discreetly unloaded in New York and secretly brought to Fulpar's winter quarters in Philadelphia. His furtive behavior, Fulpar assumed, would help him to put off a major publicity stunts. In February 1877, Fulpar announced he had a baby male elephant born in the USA who stood 18 inches high. But Barnum suspected Fulpar was lying and had bought the baby Asian elephant from Hagenbeck. So Barnum issued a public challenge. It is an established zoological fact that elephants do not breed in captivity, he counted. Maybe Fulpar suspected Barnum had found out the truth about the baby Asian elephant. Or maybe Barnum was simply calling Fulpar's bluff. Regardless, Fulpar quietly withdrew his first American-born claim. When Topsie was born, she would have weighed about 200 pounds and stood about three feet. She would have consumed as much as three gallons of milk a day and increased her weight by as much as 30 pounds a week. Her quick growth most likely inspired her name. From a famous book, in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Miss Ophelia asked the young slave Topsie, Do you know who made you? Nobody as I know on, she replies, spect I grove, don't think anybody ever made me. It's not unreasonable to speculate that the book's popularity and her spect I grove come back inspired the phrase to grow like Topsie. Fulpar named the baby elephant Topsie because she grew quickly and at her death she was 10 feet high and measured nearly 20 feet from trunk to tail. Life for elephants in American circuses in the late 19th century is not that much different from how they live today. Topsie lived a peripatatic life, travelling on foot by train coast to coast with elephants who were strangers. Prolonged periods of chained boredom were alleviated only by short periods of intense activity. She was forced to behave in ways that had no meaning to her, but the paying audience was entertained by the silly tricks. Humans do not, of course, perform in the wild. They have to be trained. This can be done with positive reinforcement, including praise and reward, or with blows and jabs from the bullhook, or it can involve both, which was Topsie's case. She was trained by Fulpar's son, Adi Fulpar, who abused her and by Moses F. Thompson, a young African-American man who treated her more kindly. In 1902, Topsie was involved with two fateful incidents. First, James Fielding-Blount, a drunkard who attached himself to what became the Fulpar and Sel's brother's circus, teased the sleeping, resting elephants. He had a glass of whiskey and was smoking a cigar. When he reached Topsie, his glass was empty, but he still teased her with it. He threw sand in her face because she did not pay him much attention. Then he stabbed his lit cigar into her extremely sensitive trunk. This was too much for Topsie. She wrapped her trunk around his waist, held him high up in the air, and threw him to the ground, crushing him with her body and killing him. The second incident occurred some days later. Elephants were being unloaded from a train and were waiting to walk on to the next location. Topsie was approached by a Louis de Dereau, a local young man who had a stick that he started to use against her. She seized him around the waist, hoisted him into the air, and threw him to the ground. She raised her right foot to crush him, but was stalked by a circus worker. Dereau survived. But the sequence of events that led to Topsie's murder had been set in motion. The four-pound sales brother circus knew that they could no longer keep Topsie. Later that day, they announced she'd been sold, so eventually became the property of Frederick Thompson and Elmer Skip Dundee. A year earlier at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, Thompson and Dundee operated a virtual ride called A Trip to the Moon, which featured an airship called Luna. In late 1902, they were establishing Luna Park on Coney Island, which included moving the popular trip to the moon ride down the boardwalk to a new location in time for the spring opening. Thompson and Dundee brought Topsie and assigned a handyman, Frederick Whitey Alt, to supervise her. Whitey was a drunkard who abused Topsie as she dragged the moon ride along the boardwalk and helped to build Luna Park. He was arrested twice for beating Topsie. Topsie and Dundee realized that with Luna Park's opening only months away, they had to maintain positive relationships with residents, police and the press. This meant they had to resolve the related problems of Whitey and Topsie, who would only follow Whitey's instructions. Thompson and Dundee knew they could fire Whitey, but what about Topsie? Although far from an everyday occurrence, dangerous elephants were regularly killed by zoos and circuses. This included those who experienced must, the period of condition involving aggressive behavior. Hiding behind the glamour of entertainment, circus owners killed elephants when they became dangerous. They poisoned, shot, strangled and hanged them. Examples included Barnum and Bailey Circus, which killed five elephants during a recent European tour, and another on board a docked ship in New York in March 1902. Later that year, a keeper at the Central Park Zoo killed an elephant with poison bran. Press reports about these incidents appeared not to upset public opinion or aroused the concerns of the American society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Thompson and Dundee found themselves in similar circumstances with Topsie. They would have recalled that the Buffalo Expo was the first event of its kind to make full use of electricity, including electric lighting, and featured a failed attempt to electrocute an elephant named Jumbo II. The Expo occurred after the so-called War of Currents had ended. The War of Currents was the battle fought for about ten years in late 1880s between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. They each wanted the electricity that their companies generated, direct current and alternating current respectively, to fuel America's growing industrial empire. In 1887, in an attempt to discredit Westinghouse and his preference for alternating current, Edison electrocuted 44 dogs, two calves, and one horse to prove AC was more dangerous than DC. The press were invited to watch these experiments. Even though he opposed capital punishment, Edison also secretly paid for the electric chair to be built for the state of New York to demonstrate that AC was deadlier than DC. He believed if he could show the danger of AC, only then he would be able to win the War of Currents and empower Americans with DC. Ironically, by the time of the Buffalo Expo, both Edison and Westinghouse had lost control of their businesses. An alternating current had become the way in which electricity was delivered throughout the USA. Thompson and Dundee decided they had to kill Topsy and use it as an opportunity to attract as much attention as possible to Luna Park's opening. But how could they kill her publicly? Shooting Topsy was not an option since it was impossible to find an elephant gun in the country. The ASPCA stopped them from hanging her, partly because they were concerned with it becoming a public spectacle. It was agreed that only invited people could attend Topsy's execution. An audience of at least 800 people and 100 photographers witnessed Topsy's murder. The War of Currents is often cited as the reason why Topsy was electrocuted. The claim is made that Edison wanted to show AC, which Westinghouse preferred, was so dangerous it could even kill an elephant. But the War of Currents was over by the time of Topsy's killing in 1903. Besides, neither AC nor DC is necessarily more dangerous than the other, which was understood at that time. Topsy was electrocuted because she was typecast as a villain in a much larger drama playing itself out on the human stage. She became collateral damage in the War of Currents, even though it was largely over. She was a wild animal whose potential for dangerous behavior could never be controlled through no fault of her own. Yes, you can take wild animals out of the wild and believe they can be tamed. But you cannot take the wild out of a wild animal and make them tame. It will be reassuring to believe that the poisoning and electrocution of elephants no longer happens, but this is not the case. For example, more than 80 elephants were poisoned after poachers used cyanide to poison a water hole in Zimbabwe's Hwangi National Park in 2013. The London-based NGO Elephant Family reports schools of endangered Asian elephants are electrocuted and killed by low hanging power lines each year in India. The Edison Moving Picture Company made the film electrocuting an elephant to capture a dramatic moment in the development of America's industrial manufacturing empire. It showed the power control we have over the natural world. Experiencing spectacle conspired with power and profit. Her dramatic death was captured on film, whereas poachers, for example, tried to keep their murderous activities hidden from public sight. Topsy, of course, never asked to be captured or to be forcibly relocated to another continent or to be kept by people who did not understand her needs. She never asked to be beaten or abused in the mistaken belief that doing so would give her keepers power and control over her. And yet that was her fate. Topsy killed out of fear and retaliation and she paid for it dramatically with her life.