Lucy the elephant at the Edmonton Valley Zoo, in Edmonton, in March, 2023. Lucy was born in Sri Lanka in 1975 and has lived at the zoo since she was two.JASON FRANSON/The Canadian Press
The Latvian film Flow, which recently won the Academy Award for best animated feature, is a charming, engrossing delight.
I couldn’t bear to finish it.
Without a word of dialogue, Flow follows the plight of a black cat living its best feline life when a catastrophic climate event sends it into harrowing circumstances. I, the owner of a black cat I deeply love, could not stand to see this – yes, fictional, animated – cat in peril.
Even with everything horrible that is happening in the world, there is something about witnessing the suffering of animals, particularly from human causes, that sticks hard.
Consider the recent outcry when a U.S. influencer snatched a baby wombat from its mother in Australia. I read about this video, but could not stand to watch it. And so it was with some trepidation that I screened the new documentary Lucy: The Stolen Lives of Elephants, now playing in Toronto, ahead of its broadcast on the Documentary Channel next month. (My cat’s name, incidentally, happens to be Lucy.)
The film centres on the lone elephant at the Edmonton Valley Zoo. Lucy was born in Sri Lanka in 1975 and has lived at the zoo since she was two. She has been alone since her herd mate was sent to another facility to breed, about 17 years ago. Advocates have been fighting to have her sent to an animal refuge.
“Lucy’s been in the news for years,” filmmaker Fern Levitt told me. “Why aren’t we screaming to get her sanctuary? All of us?”
Ms. Levitt, who I interviewed in 2016 about her documentary Sled Dogs, told me she never wanted to make another animal documentary – too hard on her heart.
What changed her mind? Someone sent her a photo of Lucy, alone in her enclosure in Edmonton, with fake trees painted on the wall. The Toronto filmmaker felt compelled to act.
“Canada’s supposed to be a progressive, humane country and these elephants are like prisoners,” Ms. Levitt told me from Edmonton this week, where she was screening Lucy publicly for the first time. “They are prisoners.”
Experts have repeatedly said it’s not safe for Lucy to be transferred to a sanctuary. In the film, after Cher (!) tweets about Lucy’s plight, the superstar’s foundation funds an independent assessment. (The late TV game show host Bob Barker was also a Lucy advocate.) The result is not unanimous, but the ultimate conclusion is that Lucy is not well enough to survive the transport.
The zoo, owned by the City of Edmonton, did not participate in the documentary and did not agree to an interview with The Globe, but sent a statement. It said that for more than 47 years, zoo staff have worked tirelessly to give Lucy, now 49, the best care. “We make every decision in Lucy’s best interest. If we could safely move her, we would try.” With the majority of experts saying there is a significant risk of her dying in transit, it continued, the zoo is choosing to err on the side of caution “as any reasonable and prudent caretaker should.”
The documentary also offers a critical look at the African Lion Safari in Ontario. It did not participate in the film, and did not respond to a query from The Globe. It has served a notice of libel to Ms. Levitt, the CBC and other funders.
One particularly wrenching scene in Lucy occurs at neither of these institutions, but at a zoo in Texas, where an elephant gives birth, with her feet tied up in ropes, surrounded by human zookeepers. This is intercut with an elephant birth in the wild, mother and calf surrounded by other elephants.
Ms. Levitt told me another story that did not make it into the film. A mother and her calf were being separated, the calf having been sold to another zoo. The mother, desperate, performed all the tricks the zoo had made her do: standing on her hind legs, clapping – her way of begging her human overseers not to take her baby. Of course, they took her calf anyway.
“We take them away so we can put them on display? So someone can look at them?” Ms. Levitt said to me.
Why are humans still doing this?
Bill S-15, known as the Jane Goodall Bill, would have prohibited the captivity of elephants and great apes in Canada for entertainment, with exceptions for animals currently in captivity. Its third reading in the Senate was completed in late December. But Parliament, of course, was prorogued in January, and an election is nigh.
I forced myself to watch the rest of Flow, hoping for some sort of happy ending. The passage of this kind of animal-rights law would be a form of a real-life happy ending. Even if it’s too late for Lucy.