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There's a blog that I read on a fairly regular basis, "Kidnapping, Murder, and Mayhem". He tends to post a nice mix of entertaining modern crime stories (often the sort where the thug realized too late that the little old lady had a .38 in her purse - I love those!), as well as historic crime accounts.
His post for March 3rd deals with an outbreak of elephants from the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus being poisoned, and associated threats being made against zoo elephants. This all took place in November of 1941, with the first batch of elephants being poisoned in Atlanta, GA on November 5th, and a subsequent poisoning a few days later in Macon, GA. Eleven elephants died altogether. There's an allegation that threats were made to poison the elephants at the National Zoo as well, but that's only on the strength of a statement by the president of the circus, not the police.
Something that's overlooked in the post, (and, one assumes, in the source material) is that the Disney movie "Dumbo" was released only 13 days prior to the first poisonings. It was doing quite well at the box office, and was in fact Disney's first movie to turn a profit, IIRC. It seems difficult to me to imagine that it wouldn't be a natural, well-nigh unavoidable association for someone writing a news article about circus elephants, but the past, as has oft been observed, sees things differently than the present.
It was less than a year later, in August of 1942, that Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey also suffered a fire to their animal tents in Cleveland, which killed a number of elephants, along with other animals. Most investigators of the time believed that to have been an accident. The circus had been set up close by the train tracks, and it was believed that an ember from a passing train had started the fire. (As a personal aside, I once rode in an open-topped car on a holiday excursion train being pulled by a steam engine, and at least once, and IIRC twice, we got showered with burning embers. Using my personal experience as a yardstick, I'm surprised that most of the country didn't burn down repeatedly during the Age of Steam.)
In July of 1944, when the RBBB big top burned in Hartford, CT, killing 167 people, in what was commonly held, although never proven, to have been an act of arson, the menagerie fire came under scrutiny again, as perhaps forming part of a pattern. So far as I know, nothing came of that.
It's pure speculation on my part, but I tend to wonder whether Dumbo played a part in motivating the elephant poisoner, and whether the subsequent menagerie fire might have been related. The elephant herd in Dumbo, apart from Dumbo and his mother, were not at all nice people. I first saw that at the age of about five or so, and the scenes where Dumbo was being tormented by the grownup elephants, and (far worse) where his mother was taken away from him and chained up were quite frightening to me. What if someone with emotional issues from past mistreatment saw Dumbo, and reacted to it, and found some sort of vicarious revenge in killing the elephants? It's all rampant speculation on my part, but I do tend to wonder.
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