When: June 20, 2009
Time: 9:45 am - 12:00 pm
Location: Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, Vallejo, CA
Where: 1001 Fairgrounds Drive (Please meet in front of the metal detectors by the main entrance.)
Contact: Melissa Gonzalez, In Defense of Animals. Melissa@idausa.org, 707.981.7701
Comments: Please join us in support of the elephants suffering at Six Flags. All materials will be provided.
Six Flags keepers use force and physical punishment to train and maintain dominance over the elephants and make them do unnatural tricks and give elephant rides. Six Flags handlers use bullhooks, fireplace poker-shaped devices with a sharp steel hook at the end, to stab, hook and hit the elephants in sensitive parts of the body. (Although elephant skin appears tough, it is so delicate that an elephant can feel the pain of an insect bite).
In public, keepers will prod the elephants lightly, in private, keepers have been witnessed forcefully stabbing the hook in the soft tissue behind the ears, inside the mouth, around the anus, and in tender spots under the chin.
No room to roam
Six Flags crams elephants – who naturally walk 10 miles or more a day – into small spaces that cause them to develop arthritis and foot disease.
Since 1995, nine elephants (including two full-term calves) have died at this park from causes that include: severe arthritis and feet so infected they bled and oozed pus; massive infection from a dead calf decomposing in the mother’s womb, and an elephant herpes infection in a 2-year old baby elephant who was taken prematurely from his mother.
