Tiki the Elephant

This is kind of cool. If you drive to the Wild Safari Animal Park in Winston, Oregon (the SW part of the state), and pay $20, you can get your car washed by an elephant named Tiki.
http://www.nrtoday.com/article/20090324/NEWS/903249952/1063

And if you have $750, you can have a wedding at Wild Safari Park, with Tiki the Elephant serving as your ring-bearer -- cool picture of Tiki at this website
http://www.wildlifesafari.org/event_hosting.asp

I'm not sure of how Tiki earned her name - she was born in 1970, at the tail-end of the original Poly-Pop era. I guess there were too many Jumbos at that time.

Next step ..... train the elephants in the use of a cocktail shaker ... it would be really cool to drink a mai-tai made by Tiki the elephant.

Vern

Sorry, I don't want to be rude, but enslaving animals to make some dollars is not pretty or cool. Why would anyone want a picture of your wedding with a beautiful but sad looking leopard with a chain... Animal liberation now!

The cheetah doesn't look sad to me, more like privileged. It doesn't look like the company makes the animals do things they don't enjoy doing and the income that it generates I'm sure goes to support the whole enterprise, including animals who are not able to work weddings, etc.

I'm all for that too! Even cooler than having a mai-tai served by an elephant named Tiki, would be to have such a mai-tai be served entirely in a wild setting - with no fences or anything like that. Of course, I will likely have to wait a long time before the elephant's natural mixology skills progress to that point on their own -- but I can certainly dream!

As to elephants being traumatized at weddings - it could be worse - we could be forcing them to wear horrendous looking bridesmaid gowns too.