Circus elephant won’t forget nighttime collision with SUV
Circus elephant won’t forget collision with SUV
BY the associated press
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Published: November 6, 2009
ENID — A runaway elephant hit by a sport utility vehicle Wednesday night blended in with the roadway and couldn’t be seen until the last second, the driver said Thursday.
Circus workers prepare to load an elephant onto a tractor-trailer Wednesday night to return it to the Garfield County Fairgrounds in Enid. Photo by Billy Hefton, Enid News & Eagle/AP
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"Didn’t have time to hit the brakes,” driver
Bill Carpenter said Thursday. "At the very last second I said ‘elephant!’”
Carpenter, 68, said he swerved his sport utility vehicle and ended up sideswiping the 29-year-old female Asian elephant on
U.S. 81 in Enid.
"So help me Hannah, had I hit that elephant, not swerved, it would have knocked it off its legs, and it would have landed right on top of us,” he said. "We’d have been history.”
The couple, who own a wheat farm, were not injured. But the 8-foot, 4,500-pound elephant, identified as Kamba by the animal protection group
In Defense of Animals, was being examined Thursday for a broken tusk and a leg wound. A local veterinarian said the elephant appeared to have escaped major injury.
"I thought, ‘This can’t be happening,’” Carpenter said. "Out here you could hit a deer or a cow, but this can’t be happening. The good Lord was with us.”
The elephant’s tusk punched through the side of the SUV, tearing up sheet metal, he said.
After the vehicle sideswiped the elephant, Carpenter’s wife, Deena, flagged down some people and used their cell phone to call police.
"The dispatcher didn’t believe her,” Carpenter said.
Enid veterinarian
Dwight Olson said the elephant was hiding in some bushes just off the highway when he arrived shortly after the accident. Handlers from the circus were able to calm her down, and Olson cleaned the leg wound and gave her some painkiller. The elephant was taken Thursday to the veterinary school at
Oklahoma State University in Stillwater for a follow-up exam.
"I don’t believe there’s a broken bone, but I don’t have an X-ray room big enough to examine it,” Olson said.
The elephant had escaped from the Family Fun Circus at the
Garfield County Fairgrounds earlier Wednesday after something spooked her while she was being loaded into a truck with another elephant, Olson said.
A booking agent for the circus,
Rachael Bellman, said she was unaware of the incident, and a telephone message left with circus officials wasn’t immediately returned.
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