Elephant Sissy is now 54 years old.
She is one of the most famous survivors in Texas.
In 1981, when she was 13 years old, she spent 36 hours clinging to the top of a tree trunk and treading water as a deadly flood inundated the zoo in Gainesville, Texas.
Now, half a century after she first arrived in Texas as “Sis Flagg” from Thailand, she is the star baby elephant at the petting zoo at Six Flags Over Texas, and she is finally happy again, playing and frolicking in her habitat home. The Tennessee sanctuary.
This month marked another breakthrough for Sissy, traumatized by the flood at Frank Buck Zoo, then left alone in a cage, chained and often beaten during wandering trips to other zoos. After killing a keeper in Gainesville, she was labeled a rabid elephant.
Finally, she found peace at the elephant sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee, south of Nashville.
For the first time in a long time, she recently allowed her keepers to spray her with a fire hose.
Until this month, she’d had a hard time bathing herself. But she didn’t let the keepers spray her with water.
No doubt it had something to do with the October 1981 flood in Gainesville, when the young elephant – then named Gerry II – grabbed a tree downstream and lifted herself 15 feet off the ground, waiting for the flood waters to receded.
“I knew Sisi was dangerous,” said Carol Buckley, the sanctuary’s founder, in an interview when the elephants arrived there in 2000. “But I also thought she was a sweetheart who needed to know that someone understood her.”
At the time, Buckley described Sissy as a victim of trauma and an abused elephant “that everyone had written off.”
It took Sissy 22 years to get the keeper to get her down.
The sanctuary wrote on Twitter June 9: “Sissy previously showed signs of fear of water. The keepers are pleased that she is so willing to participate in bathing in a calm manner.”
She shared her home with a young African elephant rescuer, Nosey, who was seized by animal control officers after 29 years with the traveling Liebel Family Circus. They ate breakfast together and grazed on the fence line, a spokeswoman for the sanctuary said.
“She now has the opportunity to spend the rest of her life in retirement, having thrived and grown in confidence for the last 22 years,” said Ashley Dehnke, a spokeswoman for the sanctuary.
The 1981 flood was actually the third time Sissy survived in Gainesville, where she grew up alone, without parents or playmates, beyond the Six Flags Zoo.
For a day or so, zookeeper Vince Reynolds thought she had been washed away and drowned.
Then, “I softly heard her trumpet,” he told the Star-Telegram. “I don’t really know how she survived. She was exhausted.”
She’s a happy old woman now.
