PETA has just learned of the death of Tai<\/strong>, an elephant who was taken from her natural home as a young calf and forced to appear in films and TV shows, including Westworld<\/em> and Water for Elephants<\/em>. She was beaten with weapons called bullhooks and electrically shocked by Hollywood animal exhibitors Kari and Gary Johnson of Have Trunk Will Travel (HTWT), as this video shows<\/strong><\/a>. Now, to stop Tai\u2019s abusers from having the last word, PETA has released an obituary written from her perspective looking back on a life of misery.<\/p>\n \u201c[They] poked, prodded, and punished me with sharp, metal weapons \u2026 to keep me from harming a hair on Reese Witherspoon\u2019s head,\u201d it reads. \u201cThere was finally hope when CGI started replacing live animals, but HBO\u2019s Westworld<\/em> deserves a special shout-out for forcing me onto yet another set, even though a CGI tiger was created for the same episode. That\u2019s right\u2014HBO exploited a real elephant to depict a robot one.\u201d<\/p>\n For years, HTWT carted Tai and other elephants around the country, forcing them to perform tricks and give rides under the threat of violent punishment. Kari even acknowledged under oath that her company had chained elephants for more than 12 hours a day<\/strong>. When California banned the use of bullhooks, the Johnsons moved their operation to Texas and rebranded it as \u201cThe Preserve,\u201d where Tai\u2019s friends now still languish. \u201cIn lieu of flowers,\u201d readers are urged to call for an end to the use of real wild animals in Hollywood.<\/p>\n PETA\u2014whose motto reads, in part, that \u201canimals are not ours to use for entertainment\u201d\u2014opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org<\/strong><\/a> or follow the group on Twitter<\/strong><\/a>, Facebook<\/strong><\/a>, or Instagram<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n Tai\u2019s obituary follows.<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n I died at the age of 53 after leading a miserable life that I never chose for myself. That\u2019s Hollywood for animals like me.<\/p>\n My time \u201cin the biz\u201d began in 1978 after I was taken from my mother in Asia and eventually sold to Kari and Gary Johnson\u2014owners of Have Trunk Will Travel (HTWT), an elephant supplier for movies and TV shows.<\/p>\n W.C. Fields said never to work with animals. Trust me\u2014the feeling\u2019s mutual. I could\u2019ve enjoyed living out my years with my family in nature, but instead I got a one-way ticket to a life of exploitation. Where was the Screen Actors Guild when I was being trucked to and from film sets, chained and standing in my own waste, or trucked around to state fairs when film jobs were scarce?<\/p>\n The Johnsons poked, prodded, and punished me with sharp, metal weapons\u2014whatever it took to create the illusion that I was theirs to control and to keep me from harming a hair on Reese Witherspoon\u2019s head.<\/p>\n I was hoping someone would catch all this on camera, and they finally did<\/a>, but it didn\u2019t faze the industry. My suffering went ignored for years.<\/p>\n There was finally hope when CGI started replacing live animals, but HBO\u2019s Westworld<\/em> deserves a special shout-out for forcing me onto yet another set, even though a CGI tiger was created for the same episode. That\u2019s right\u2014HBO exploited a real elephant to depict a robot one.<\/p>\n In lieu of flowers, send e-mails, tweets, voicemails\u2014do anything you can to urge production companies never to use real wild animals. I\u2019m survived by Kitty, Rosie, and Becky, who are still trapped at the HTWT hellhole, and I know they\u2019d appreciate your help. You know us elephants\u2014we never forget.<\/p>\n The post Elephant Used in \u2018Westworld\u2019 Dies; Read PETA\u2019s Obituary for Tai<\/a> appeared first on PETA<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on Blog \u2013 PETA<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" PETA has just learned of the death of Tai, an elephant who was taken from her natural home as a young calf and forced to appear in films and TV shows, including Westworld and Water for Elephants. She was beaten with weapons called bullhooks and electrically shocked by Hollywood animal exhibitors Kari and Gary Johnson… Read more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n The post Elephant Used in \u2018Westworld\u2019 Dies; Read PETA\u2019s Obituary for Tai<\/a> appeared first on PETA<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":708,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18588,3409,5645],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162505"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/708"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162505"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":162506,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162505\/revisions\/162506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}