Today I heard something on the news that really made me smile (how often does that happen?) and I would like to share it with you!

In Switzerland we have a national circus – the Zirkus Knie. Zirkus Knie has been around since 1919 and has always been run by the Knie family – who are very well-known here – you could say that they are the nearest thing to royalty that exist in Switzerland. Everybody here grows up going to the circus – infact my husband still likes to go every year.

For the month of May the circus is always by the lake shore in Zürich.

Last night after the last performances and a hot weekend the circus was being packed up (in a thunderstorm I might add) to go on tour, when one of the older elephants, a female called Sabu, decided to go for a stroll.

Quite how she got away I don’t know, but I do know that she walked along the lakeshore till she came to a bathing area – where she took a nice cool swim (rather sensibly after such a hot day. I guess she had probably spent a few hours thinking how nice that would be). Then she walked through the arboretum and headed towards the city centre. She made it to the main train station and was starting to double back, when after an hour or so she agreed to go home with her keeper.

What I loved about this story was firstly, how nice it was that the elephant got to enjoy herself and secondly, the way the Swiss police behaved. Now bear in mind that the police officers had probably all seen this very elephant performing at close quarters several times before. Despite being armed and escorting her at fairly close distances, the comment from the police was that ‘she was behaving herself and not causing any trouble to the public, so we did not intervene’. They watched and waited until Sabu’s trainer, who was alongside her most of the way, coaxed her to co-operate and walked her back to the circus.

No-one hurt, no shooting the elephant, just a lot of happy Zürich people this morning when they heard the story.

I’m sure it wasn’t quite such a stress-free experience as I make it sound here, but I guess that in many countries Sabu would have been shot pretty quickly.

If anyone wants to see Sabu take a walk again, the elephants are all strolling through the old town of Basel next weekend.

Have a good week,

Helen

This entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 10:08 am and is filed under Places. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.