It’s an old joke, but it is easy to tell.<\/p>\n
All you have to do is say “I wish I had enough money to buy an elephant.”<\/p>\n
Then wait for the inevitable response: “An elephant? Why would you want an elephant?”<\/p>\n
Then you can finish off with “Oh, I don’t actually want an elephant! I just wish I had that much money.”<\/p>\n
I haven’t told the joke for a few years, but I used to when I was younger. Then, I became curious. How much money would<\/em> you need to buy an elephant? Fortunately, I had an opportunity to find out. I knew a woman who had grown up with a trad circus when they still had animal acts. (While animal-based circus still exist in Australia, the strong trend over the past 20 or 30 years is to be animal-free.) One day, maybe ten years ago, I was chatting to her, and decided to ask.<\/p>\n She explained it wasn’t as simple as that. You couldn’t just go around buying elephants whenever you wanted one. There was no market for them. You couldn’t just get one without a lot of infrastructure to keep them. You couldn’t just wave money at people and expect to receive one.<\/p>\n Yeah, yeah. I pushed past all that. Remember, I didn’t actually want an elephant. I just wish I knew what they were worth. After quite a long time of toing and froing and conceding that any estimate was meaningless, we settled on a figure of “around a million dollars”.<\/p>\n There’s been a bit of controversy, the last few days, about an elephant called Saigon. Saigon is apparently the last circus elephant in Australia, and has now retired. Animals Australia<\/a> are calling<\/a> for Saigon to be put in an “appropriate facility”, while Perry Bros Circus<\/a> are arguing that the elephant is best kept with the family that raised her<\/a>.<\/p>\n I don’t have an opinion on the matter. I am no expert on elephants and what makes them happy. I don’t know whether it is more humane to keep the elephant in the situation it has grown up with, or to separate her so she can be in an (ideally) larger facility and a more stable situation. I don’t know if you can introduce an old elephant to stay with other elephants or not. I do know that both sides of the argument seem to be using emotion and rhetoric more than facts and science, so I find their arguments unpersuasive.<\/p>\n However, I did learn something from the Perry’s web-site. In 2008, Perry’s was offered $2 million for two elephants, both at or near retirement age. They declined the offer, claiming the elephant was a beloved pet and not for sale.<\/p>\n So, just like I was told, elephants are worth something like a million dollars each. <\/p>\n And, just like I was told, money can’t just buy elephants.<\/p>\n I wish I had enough money to buy a tonne of gold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I wish I had enough money to buy an elephant… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[36,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-circus-skills","category-thoughts-from-the-shower"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1152"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1155,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152\/revisions\/1155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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