The Disney classic, Dumbo (1941), is based on a children’s story written by Helen Aberson in 1939. Following the live action version made by the famous director Tim Burton, the true story of the flesh and blood elephant in which basa gives us a more real and stark view of how much we have advanced in terms of animal rights.
According to the BBC documentary Attenborough and the Giant Elephant (2017), the story begins in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia, in Africa) in 1862, when hunters captured a small 2 and a half-year-old elephant after killing its mother. They named him “Jumbo,” which means “hello” in Swahili.
Jumbo’s journey took him to Paris, and a few years later to London, where Asian elephants were abundant but African ones were a rarity. However, Jumbo was very ill and it was thought that he would not live long. That was until Matthew Scott, a difficult figure to judge, came into his life.
Scott cared for Jumbo throughout that time, even sleeping in his cage for months, creating an important bond between caregiver and elephant. Due to his social nature, the elephant formed an attachment to Scott, which became indispensable to both Jumbo and the zoo owners.
London loved Jumbo, “the friendly elephant”: children walked on his back and people gave him cakes and gave Scott coins to get close to the pachyderm. However, Jumbo’s behavior changed during his adolescence: he destroyed the cellar where he was being held captive, and Scott found no other solution to calm him down than to give him whiskey to drink.
Over the next decade, Scott and Jumbo became celebrities, while the good caretaker demanded more and more money as he knew he was indispensable for the show to continue. Scott kept the animal’s whiskey intake a secret, which, combined with the cakes, must have seriously damaged its teeth and digestive system, according to later forensic investigations.
Jumbo travels to America
The owners of the London Zoo decided to sell Jumbo to American businessman PT Barnum, creator of modern traveling freak shows, before his erratic behavior caused a greater tragedy. Jumbo was received with great joy in the United States, and was used along with 20 other examples to show the “solidity” of the recently inaugurated Brooklyn Bridge in New York.
But Jumbo’s celebrity status was even stronger, and constant train tours, from city to city, allowed him to come into contact with other elephants, which improved his behavior and perhaps allowed him to spend some happy years.
The story comes to an end one day in 1885, when Barnum’s traveling circus arrived in Saint Thomas, in . The story the businessman told was that one night, when they were preparing to put the animals in their cages, a small elephant named Tom Thumb was walking along the train tracks, without noticing that a locomotive was heading at full speed towards him. It is said that Jumbo protected the baby with his body and died instantly.
However, true stories were not Barnum’s forte. According to the documentary, the businessman invented that story to continue profiting from Jumbo after his death. In reality, the elephant was hit by a locomotive while the other animals were boarding another train, but the heroic tone would actually be the last in a series of lies and deceptions that hid the sad treatment that the animals in Barnum’s circus received.
The constant walking on his back probably also damaged his joints. According to the researchers, the elephant’s skeleton looked like that of a much older specimen, and was actually 24 years old, while the life expectancy of an African elephant in the wild can be close to 70 years.
Barnum had paid the equivalent of 200,000 euros today for Jumbo, so he was determined to squeeze out his investment, even after the animal died. He sold his skeleton and had a group of taxidermists preserve his body. They found one last surprise in the stomach: 300 coins that Jumbo had sucked through his trunk.
Today, the word “jumbo” is synonymous with something gigantic, thanks in large part to the gigantic vision (and lack of ethics) of animal keepers. Helen Aberson changed the elephant’s name to “Dumbo” to make it more appealing to children (dumb means “dumb”), but few know that the story began on a sad day when a little elephant was separated from its mother and brought to Western “civilization.”