In part 1 of this continuing series, I covered how 35-year-old Nosey, the Amazing Elephant, was stolen from her owners by a power-hungry local dog catcher in Alabama with backing from the fringe extremists from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
Imagine what you would feel like if your beloved animal was ripped out of your arms and shipped off to a concentration camp to die alone. Imagine how Nosey the elephant feels? For the past 34 years, they are all she has ever known. Nosey was stolen by a corrupt small Alabama town with no experience with elephants just 5 days after the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspected Nosey and her transport and found it to be just fine.
Elephants never forget. Torn away from the only family she’s ever known, Nosey is slowing pining away and dying at the facility she was illegally shipped too.
Joining Alabama dog catcher Kim Carpenter in stealing Nosey is local attorney Callie Waldrep. Waldrep has no experience or education in elephants either. In fact, she’s such a sub-par attorney, that after two years, she still can’t even successfully bring the 82-year-old former local Animal Shelter Director to trial on charges of animal cruelty. Let alone the whole idea of prosecuting an 82-year-old woman for animal cruelty. Just who is Callie Waldrep to even have an opinion on the care and condition of an elephant?
Locals in Alabama were so unprepared when they stole Nosey that they had no place to house her and no trailer to transport her on. Instead, they used a horse trailer that was not inspected and permitted to ship elephants, and shipped her over state lines into Tennessee without the required federal permit.
Waldrep wants you to think she’s concerned about Nosey’s health and condition, yet at the same time, she has sentenced Nosey to death by having her shipped to a disease-ridden sanctuary with a long controversial history of dead animals. The facility in Hohenwald, Tennessee is so disease infested that eight administrative employees contracted tuberculosis in 2009.
The Tennessee Elephant Sanctuary (TES) is particularly notorious for their treatment of an elephant named Bunny that they allowed to lie in her own waste exposed to the elements slowing dying for 12 days.
Nosey is now distressed, stressed out, losing weight and freezing in the cold Tennessee weather. Nosey has spent all her winters living in warm and sunny Florida as fitting as an African elephant. She has never been subjected to such cold temperatures in her life.
Testifying against the Liebel family is self-employed elephant “expert” Margaret Whitaker from Texas who has moved from job to job in recent years after botching the horrifically cruel transport of the Toronto elephants in 2013 to the animal rights run PAWS sanctuary in California. The very same sanctuary that abandoned them to potentially die in a wildfire just two years later. Whitaker testified that she has never met Nosey in person and was judging her care and condition off of photographs alone. Whitaker also admitted that she also has attempted to buy Nosey in the past, giving a bias to her testimony.
Nosey now appears to have been seriously injured and is losing weight under TES’s care which is typical of the elephants who have died at TES.
Pictures posted of Nosey at TES appear to show that she has not had a bath since her arrival, her feet are filthy, she appears to be injured in her back leg, and right eye.
TES claims, “Nosey chipped the tip of her right tusk while moving around in the barn,” however the pictures of her appear to show her missing almost half of one of her tusks.
In 34 years of living with the Liebel family she has never injured a tusk at any time, but less than 2 weeks in the care of TES and she has now shattered one of them?
Why aren’t more people suspicious of these activist run sanctuaries? Additionally, photos appear to show her right eye swollen almost closed, with suspicious marks on her face and head. The activists who have custody of her claim she is “calm and unfazed” by shattering off half a tusk that she’s had her entire life. Would you be calm and unfazed if you shattered a major tooth in half?
What has happened to Nosey is ultimately part of the larger animal rights war against elephants and the humans who own them. The Ringling Circus is already destroyed and gone. SeaWorld is on the ropes and laying off employees. Now, lawyers are suing Tim Commerford in Connecticut in order to steal his three elephants claiming he’s enslaving them against their will.
Animal rights activists claim it’s cruel that Nosey doesn’t live with her own family, what they don’t tell you is that Nosey’s family is dead. She has no family other than the Liebels. Nosey’s family was slaughtered by poachers when she was a baby. If you would like to see Nosey survive and return to the family she loves, please help the Liebels by donating to their legal defense fund.
Katharine Dokken is a Contributing Writer at The Cavalry Group and the author of two new books, including The Art of Terror: Inside the Animal Rights Movement, available on Amazon. Follow Katharine and The Cavalry Group on Twitter: @KatharineDokken @TheCavalryGroup
