‘Elephant’ puts exotic pet problem on display
“The Elephant in the Living Room” is a documentary about the runaway, unregulated trade in deadly exotic animals which turn up, time and again, the hands of the irresponsible.
Sometimes – often – tragedy follows. Other times, these abandoned critters become everybody else’s problem as gators, snakes and the like are released by ignoramuses too dim to see how their impulse to buy something that was going to grow big enough to eat them was going to end.
The focus of Michael Webber’s film is an Ohio public safety officer, Tim Harrison, who has dealt with exotics run wild for decades.
“You don’t have to go to India to see a tiger,” he shrugs. “You can go to any town, USA.”
The film says there are at least 15,000 big cats – cougars, lions, tigers – kept by private owners across America.
Most states don’t regulate the importation, sale or ownership of these animals. You have to license your dog, but in most states, not your tiger.
“Elephant” follows Harrison on calls and his efforts to place animals that he’s come across whose owners can no longer take care of them.
He’s stalking a cougar that people have seen in the wilds of Ohio. Somebody raised it and let it go, not that they told anybody they did this.
We follow wildlife officers on python hunts in the Everglades. They even try to place those with private owners, a lost cause. There are thousands of them, ditched by owners in a habitat where they have no natural predators.
“It’s not a python problem,” an officer says. “It’s a people problem.”
We sneak into auctions and sales of these animals, places that don’t want cameras. If the people doing the selling – and one or two are interviewed on camera – thought they weren’t doing something wrong, they probably wouldn’t mind. They vent about government interference and “animal rights nuts.”
In between an overabundance of news reports about this elephant or tiger incident or that one, the film also follows a disabled truck driver in rural Ohio who has been keeping lions for years in tiny cages on his ramshackle farm.
Harrison is there the day that Terry Brumfield, not the sharpest tack, discovers that one of his lions has just had cubs.
“The Elephant in the Living Room” is damning, but also very sad. These stories, as Harrison points out, never have a happy ending.
In the film’s sternest indictment, he profiles the typical owners of a predator – on disability of some sort, filling a void in their lives, incapable of thinking past “How much is that tiger in the window?” and seeing the tragedy of keeping a huge wild animal in a tiny cage or the danger they’re putting themselves and others in.