Tyke Elephant Outlaw

On 20 August 1994, during a Circus International performance at the Neal S. Blaisdell Center in Honolulu, an African elephant named Tyke broke out of the ring; her trainer Allen Campbell was killed, her groomer badly hurt, and after roughly an hour loose in the streets she was shot dead by police. Stefan Moore and Susan Lambert’s documentary treats this not as a horror story but as the release of something that had been building for years. They set out how the animal, brought from Mozambique, was hauled from town to town, chained for as much as twenty-two hours a day and beaten into submission, and how she had already bolted once in Pennsylvania and attacked an employee in North Dakota. Former trainers, circus insiders, witnesses and animal rights campaigners all get their turn. Tyke became a rallying point worldwide, and Hawaii eventually banned wild animal acts.