Stu Bykofsky: As circus elephants take center ring, rights activist takes center stage

ROWAN MORRISON is the best friend elephants ever had in Philadelphia.

After a three-week trip to Zimbabwe in 1996, she came back besotted by pachyderms, the world's largest land creatures - social, intelligent and abused in circuses and zoos, Morrison says.

"I just got a tremendous respect for their complexity: the profound matriarchal society, the protectiveness of the mothers over the babies, the playfulness, the intelligence were truly astonishing," she says.

You may have seen her outside Rittenhouse Square, or the Gallery, or the zoo, or the Spectrum, sometimes in an elephant costume, always with signs and flyers drawing attention to the plight of her adored elephants.

While she and I are on the same "animal-protection" page, she has hectored me mercilessly, challenged me, infuriated me with her relentless pursuit of the truth as she sees it.

She's good at hectoring and getting to truth because she's a lawyer, and the truth is her name's not Rowan Morrison. That's her Internet and sometimes activist name, taken from a character in the 1973 movie "The Wicker Man." In reality, she's Marianne Bessey, a Nebraska native who moved here in 1983 and earned an undergraduate degree at Penn and a law degree at Temple. She works for a Center City law firm that knows of her avocation, but she doesn't send "elephant e-mails" on her business account and asks "animal" people to use her cell phone rather than her business line.

A few hours before an interview session we had set up, by coincidence the Philadelphia Zoo announced that it would not breed exiled elephants Kallie and Bette, now residing at the International Conservation Center, about 80 miles east of Pittsburgh.

The Friends of Philly Zoo Elephants, founded by Bessey and a regular presence outside the zoo's gates, immediately fired an e-mail blast crowing of partial victory, because it had claimed all along that the elephants were too old to breed. The victory was only partial because Bessey, and others, want the elephants moved to permanent refuge, either at Tennessee's Elephant Sanctuary - where former Philly Zoo elephant Dulary happily resides - or to California's Performing Animal Welfare Society.

If you are going to the Ringling Bros. circus, opening Wednesday at the Wachovia Center (and Bessey hopes you aren't), you may see her outside the arena distributing literature about how circus elephants are abused in training and in the miserable lives they lead in circus captivity. Ringling says that that's a pack of lies, and a recent federal lawsuit against the circus was thrown out - on a technicality, Bessey insists. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has an informative Web site, www.circuses.com, filled with charges against America's best-known circus.

With supporters, usually just a handful, the 5-foot-9, 48-year-old lawyer/activist/vegetarian suffers insults and taunts from some passers-by - usually teenagers with testosterone levels higher than their IQs - as she holds up signs and passes out literature.

Bessey has more things she could be doing that would be more fun - like playing with the three rescue dogs she lives with in Lansdowne (and that's all she will reveal about her private life). She hopes that some parents will read the literature and next time think twice about bringing their children to the circus to, in effect, support misery inflicted upon elephants.

She first was spurred into action in 2002 when she read about "Ringling Brothers circus dragging the baby elephants from the mothers so brutally it actually left lesions on the babies," she says. Elephant mothers and babies have unusually strong bonds, and the circus was cited for using excessive force by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which supervises (not that closely, alas) circuses.

I ask her reaction when people tell her and other animal-activists that they are wasting their time.

"Anybody who does any kind of volunteer work hears that," she says flatly. "It doesn't matter if you are helping animals or homeless people overseas, there will always be someone who will criticize."

Her ultimate goal is to free all animals from all circuses and all elephants from zoos.

Circuses are "outdated entertainment," training techniques are "brutal" and in the circus environment there's no way for the animals to achieve their basic minimum needs, she says.

To some, the idea of animals' "needs" is laughable, and animal-advocates often are laughed at.

When I see that, I remember the words of Mahatma Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

E-mail stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/byko.