Free At Last
Here’s the Mule’s review of Carol Bradley’s Last Chain On Bill: How One Extraordinary Elephant Escaped The Big Top.
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Carol Bradley’s Last Chain on Billie: How One Extraordinary Elephant Escaped The Big Top tells a tale from America’s not-so-distant past, an era when traveling circuses were splashy entertainment in small towns and sprawling cities and elephants trained to do tricks were a main attraction.
It was a time well before the animal rights movement, wildlife sanctuaries and heightened awareness of the cruel practices of too many trainers � not just of elephants, but of dogs, horses and big cats also caged to ride the circus circuit.
Taking center stage is a female Asian elephant named Billie, a resilient animal that endures decades of confinement, neglect, travel in the freezing cold and blazing heat and pain, all to make a buck for circus owners and the trainers who force Billie and other elephants to learn tricks that wreck their ponderous bodies.
Bradley shows the underbelly of the circus world and zoos that used to trade animals in a symbiotic relationship linked by money. However, she paints a word picture that isn’t just black and white, but includes the nuanced shades of gray � the good-hearted trainers who love their animals, but still subject them to captivity and treatment that seem so cruel by today’s standards.
That’s the strength of this book. Bradley is clearly on the side of the angels, but she refrains from hammering the reader with incessant preaching. And she doesn’t judge the human characters of her story by today’s standards in the retroactive and damning style of less gifted writers.
Bradley doesn’t take cheap shots. With a reporter’s impartial eye and neutral tone, she gets out of the way of her story and lets the facts speak the truth. Along the way, the reader is treated to rich sidebars about the capture and training of elephants as beasts of burden and the strong bond some elephants developed with their trainers
Ultimately, Billie’s tale is one of redemption and freedom. After decades as a circus performer, burdened by the label of being dangerous, she is rescued to live out her years in a sanctuary. Old habits learned in captivity die hard, though, and Billie clings to the past she had to live for far too long � one last chain before she could become truly free.
The author provided a copy of this book in return for an honest review.
