Last Chain On Billie: How One Extraordinary Elephant Escaped the Big Top

Amazon.com Price: $16.99 (as of 09/11/2019 16:11 PST- Details)

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Description

Left in the wild, Billie the elephant would have spent her life surrounded by her circle of relatives, free to wander the jungles of Asia. As an alternative, she used to be captured as a baby and shipped to The us where she arrived in the mid 1950s, long before circus and zoo-goers worried about animal living conditions. Billie spent her first years confined in a tiny zoo yard giving rides to children. At 19, she used to be sold and groomed for life in the circus. Billie mastered difficult stunts: she could balance on her hind legs, walk on her front legs and perform one-foot handstands. For twenty-three years she dazzled audiences, but she lived a lifetime of neglect and abuse. As years passed, Billie rebelled. When she attacked and injured her trainer, a federal inspector ordered her taken off the road. For a decade she languished in a dusty barn. In any case, fate intervened. The U.S. Department of Agriculture removed Billie and fifteen other elephants as a part of the largest elephant rescue in American history. Billie wound up at a sanctuary for performing elephants in Tennessee at 45, but she thundered with anxiety in her new environment and refused to let any person cast off a chain still clamped around her leg. Last Chain on Billie charts the growing movement to rescue performing elephants from lives of misery, and tells the story of how one emotionally damaged elephant overcame her past and learned to believe humans again.

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