CHICAGO––The Elephant Sanctuary at Hohenwald, Tennessee, in late December 2005 expects to receive nine female elephants from the Hawthorn Corporation of Richmond, Illinois. The move will put John Cuneo, 74, out of the elephant training and rental business after 48 years.

Cuneo started the Hawthorn Corporation as a traveling circus in 1957. Later Cuneo found a more profitable business niche in leasing animals to other circuses and boarding exotic animals.

Cuneo agreed in March 2004 to settle 47 alleged Animal Welfare Act violations by divesting of his 16 elephants by August 2004. The divestiture was repeatedly delayed by disputes over where to send them.

Cuneo sent the Elephant Sanctuary a female elephant named Delhi in 2003, and two females, Lota and Misty, in 2004.

Cuneo acquired Lota, a longtime activist cause celebre, from the Milwaukee County Zoo in 1990. Lota died from tuberculosis in February 2005, only four months after her arrival at the Elephant Sanctuary. Her death reminded activists and news media that the Occupational Safety & Health Administration in August 1996 fined Hawthorn $37,000 for failing to properly protect workers from the risk of tuberculosis, after a Hawthorn elephant named Joyce died from TB in Las Vegas while leased to the Circus Vargas.

The Elephant Sanctuary had expected to receive all 12 of the elephants who remained with Cuneo at Lota’s death. The sanctuary built a $3 million facility to house them, raising half the money from 40,000 supporters to match the remainder, put up by the Texas-based Harold Simmons Foundation.

However, amid the critical publicity that followed Lota’s death, Cuneo won USDA permission to send three females to the Endangered Ark Foundation in Hugo, Oklahoma, founded by the late Carson & Barnes Circus owner D.R. Miller in 1993.

Miller died in 1999. The Endangered Ark Foundation is now headed by his daughter, Barbara Byrd, 59. Her husband, two daughters, and her daughters’ husbands, all involved with the circus, form the rest of the board of directors.

PETA and In Defense of Animals opposed sending the elephants to the Endangered Ark Foundation. PETA sought a court order to block the deal, but in June 2005 U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman ruled in Hugo, Oklahoma that PETA had no standing to pursue the case.