When Jenny was a kid and Shirley was in her early twenties, two elephants who had both been stolen from the wild and carried kilometers from their actual home briefly crossed paths in a circus. Shirley then assumed the role of Jenny’s mother in the circus before they were torn apart in two different ways.
Over the years, Jenny faced a great lot of suffering while evading her trainers and appearing in the circus. She was eventually taken to the Hawthorn Corporation in Illinois for breeding reasons, where she sustained a ᴛᴇʀʀɪʙʟᴇ injury that left her walking for many years with a limp.
After being considered “useless” as a performer, the abandoned elephant was returned to the circus for two more years before being granted the all-clear to retire in 1996 at the Tennessee Elephant Sanctuary. Despite having wounds all over her body and a weak rear foot, Jenny made it to the refuge, and she soon got used to her new way of life. Another elephant arrived at the sanctuary about three years later, and Jenny seemed eager to meet her.
People in the sanctuary were perplexed as to what caused this encounter between the two elephants to be so intense because they assumed it to be nothing more than a simple greeting when a resident welcomed the newcomer. The two elephants, however, experienced an emotional reunion since Jenny immediately realized that Shirley, the newcomer, was the elephant she had first encountered more than twenty years ago when she was a young circus performer.
When Shirley first arrived at the Tennessee Elephant Sanctuary, she already had her own scars and stories of ᴠɪᴏʟᴇɴᴄᴇ that she had endured through the years. She overcame injuries from burns and a near drowning while traveling to the Lewis Brothers, ʟᴏsᴛ part of an ear in a circus act, ᴅᴀᴍᴀɢᴇd her hind leg in a ғɪɢʜᴛ with another elephant, and survived a car ᴀᴄᴄɪᴅᴇɴᴛ that ᴋɪʟʟed two other elephants. She was eventually able to retire to the sanctuary in 1999 after a separation of almost 24 years, but more importantly, she met someone very special. They were very ᴄʟᴏsᴇ until the day Jenny ᴅɪᴇᴅ.