Joyce at 6 Flags, Great Adventure, N.J.
Joyce, an African elephant, has languished at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey for the past 15 years. She’s exhibited as part of the Six Flags “Wild Safari Experience,” a ludicrous misnomer. Elephants are not here for our entertainment, and a life of captivity and exhibition is inherently cruel. It is especially devastating to elephants, who are by nature complex, intelligent, self-aware, intensely emotional and highly social. It’s a life sentence for an innocent being to serve in what is essentially an empty prison cell.
By paying for and attending the “Wild Safari Experience,” one tacitly endorses the practices to which Joyce and the other Six Flags “wild animals” are subjected. Before choosing to participate, you should be aware of the conditions she now must endure likely for the remainder of her life.
Briefly, Joyce was captured in Zimbabwe as a young calf after witnessing her entire family and herd being slaughtered. She was shipped to the United States (the conditions of which are virtually universally terrible) and sold to and shuffled between various circuses. For nearly 20 years, Joyce was trained and forced to perform wholly unnatural, highly undignified tricks, travel in cramped trailers, and live in parking lots and arena backrooms. Circus elephants are typically trained to comply through cruel methods designed to inflict maximum pain and ensure compliance through learned fear of punishment, causing great trauma and stress. If we shared the details, most readers would stop reading.
Joyce is “free to roam” on approximately 1.1 acres - which is roughly 700,000 times smaller than her natural home range in the wild. The enclosure has been described as “small and barren,” with limited enrichment in close proximity to the park’s roller coasters. This can be stressful for elephants due to their great sensitivity to vibrations, which they use to communicate with each other and register with their feet. Joyce spends much of the cold New Jersey winters locked inside the barn, which is, of course, anything but conducive to the health and well-being of an African elephant. It’s a ghastly existence in which she will live for the duration unless she is released to a reputable elephant sanctuary (of which there are three in the US), which would change and improve her life quite dramatically.
Six Flags makes repeated references to the educational benefits of its wild safari. But we’re teaching our children and others that Joyce and the other Six Flags animals are here for our entertainment. And we’re also reinforcing the perverse notion that confining elephants to a severely deficient “range” adjacent to an amusement park in some way reflects its natural environment and behavior.
To learn more about Joyce’s plight, World Animal Protection has on its site an excellent section devoted to Joyce, which includes information on what you can do to help her.
