Tag Archives: elephant

Only In Sri Lanka: A State Funeral For An Elephant.

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by Anura Guruge
on March 14, 2022

Click to ENLARGE. From ‘Google News’.
Prior posts about Temple Elephants on my old ‘nhlife’ blog.

Just a tad incongruous, but that is par for the course for Sri Lanka.

This elephant & I are the same age. So, I am fairly sure that I have met him & seen him. I was a fairly regular visitor to the ‘Temple of the Tooth‘ in Kandy when I lived in Ceylon, i.e., 1953 — 1967. I also visited in 1981 & watched the sacred ‘procession’ where he would have been the star.

I like elephants. I like Sri Lankan elephants.

As you can see from image 2 I am not fond of how some of these Temple Elephants get treated despite our supposed reverence for them.

Study the TOP LEFT thumbnail photo on image 1 (above). We have a young girl WORSHIPPING the dead elephant! Suffice to say stuff like that does NOT sit well with us. Everything in perspective.

These are trying times in Sri Lanka. So, a state funeral for an elephant would be a distraction. The government is savvy. They know the populace over whom they hold sway. If you can con them off with a state funeral for an elephant, why not?

‘Topsy’, The Indian Elephant, Electrocuted With 6,600 Volts, In 1903, In New York, While Being Filmed (With Thomas Edison Complicit).

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by Anura Guruge
on July 13, 2021

Click to ENLARGE & read here. Click here to access ‘Wikipedia‘ entry.
This the book that told me about ‘Topsy’. Click image to access Amazon listing.

IF I had heard about this horrific execution of an elephant previously, it had not registered. I knew about the horses & dogs that had been electrocuted in the ‘AC/DC‘ wars to prove that AC will kill whereas DC was safe (though this was (& is) not the case). The electrocution of this ‘poor’ elephant (though it is SAID she killed three trainers) was news to I. I heard about it, with shock, this morning, while listening to “Tom McNichol’s” ‘AC/DC’ book (shown above). WOW.

The book also details in extremely gory details the dozens of innocent dogs that were horribly tortured & killed by the DC camp — Thomas Edison behind all of animal cruelty from the start! Yes, it all led to the development of the AC-powered ‘electric chair’. But, Edison’s DC scheme failed in the end. The AC won the day (though the book outlines how DC is making a comeback).

Watch the movies. Some of the FIRST to have been made — with a camera invented by Edison. That part is cool.