Katherine Kersten: Cop's insight on elephants makes council forget bad idea

Last Friday, Minneapolis City Council Member Ralph Remington was on his animal rights soapbox, declaring at the council meeting that banning elephant rides was a moral imperative. As inspired orators often do, Remington reached for a prop -- an elephant guide, or bull hook -- and waved the supposed instrument of punishment about.

But Remington has an adversary who knows bull hook bull when he hears it. He's the circus cop: Sgt. Tim Davison of the Minneapolis Police Department, a Shriner who has represented the Zuhrah Shrine in circus-related negotiations.

The bull hook is not an implement of torture, as some suggest, he says. "In fact, it mimics a mother elephant's trunk as she guides a young elephant."

Davison isn't just an armchair elephant expert. Circus blood has run in his family for generations.

Davison's father, also a Minneapolis cop, took his three boys to every circus within 100 miles. "I was well into elementary school before I knew that it was unusual to have friends who owned elephants, who walked on high wires or who were shot from cannons," said Davison.

As a teen, he spent hours hanging out with circus elephants, fascinated by the magnificent animals' size, strength and intelligence. Later, he followed his brother, who became a unicyclist and juggler, into circus life. He presented elephants in performance, and cleaned and fed them -- no small job, he says, given that they retain only half of what they eat.

"For five years, my life revolved around a shovel," he laughs.

Davison scratches his head at anti-circus activists, who claim that people like him routinely mistreat animals. "Most of them haven't gotten close enough to an elephant to smell it," he says. "They only know what other activists tell them."

In September, Davison represented the Shriners when the City Council narrowly defeated Remington's move to ban exotic animal circuses. Instead, they decided to increase inspections and regulations.

Timing was fortuitous. Davison invited all the council members to educate themselves by attending the Shrine Circus, which rolled into town in October, a few weeks later. "I offered them each a backstage pass, so they could talk to anyone, see whatever they wanted."

Not one council member showed up, he says. (Council Member Paul Ostrow had earlier visited a circus with Davison.)

"I concluded that they wanted to regulate something they didn't know anything about," said Davison.

Then last Wednesday, two days before the scheduled vote on the final regulations, Council Member Cam Gordon introduced new language that would prohibit "direct contact" between animals and "the public." It passed unanimously in committee. Davison thought little of it, he says. "It sounded like just not having people back in the areas where animals are housed, which we've never done."

Fortunately, he says, he got a call from a sharp-eyed reporter. Doesn't this mean no more elephant rides -- or pony rides, for that matter?

Davison believed he'd been hoodwinked. He thought the Shrine and the city had a deal. Gordon wanted to have "a ban without a ban," he says. "He wanted to get in through the back door what he couldn't get through the front door."

Gordon could not be reached for comment.

"It was a mistake," said Ostrow, who successfully moved to strike the language about "direct contact" at the council's meeting on Friday. "We were under the impression from staff that the rides were rare or nonexistent."

Is Davison in a funk over the City Council's attempt to hyper-regulate the circus?

For now, he says, he's pleased that the Shriners can continue to give elephant rides to kids. Maybe some will grow up to love elephants as he does.