While she and I are on the same "animal-protection" page, she has hectored me mercilessly, challenged me, infuriated me with her relentless pursuit of the truth as she sees it.
She's good at hectoring and getting to truth because she's a lawyer, and the truth is her name's not Rowan Morrison. That's her Internet and sometimes activist name, taken from a character in the 1973 movie "The Wicker Man." In reality, she's Marianne Bessey, a Nebraska native who moved here in 1983 and earned an undergraduate degree at Penn and a law degree at Temple. She works for a Center City law firm that knows of her avocation, but she doesn't send "elephant e-mails" on her business account and asks "animal" people to use her cell phone rather than her business line.
A few hours before an interview session we had set up, by coincidence the Philadelphia Zoo announced that it would not breed exiled elephants Kallie and Bette, now residing at the International Conservation Center, about 80 miles east of Pittsburgh.
The Friends of Philly Zoo Elephants, founded by Bessey and a regular presence outside the zoo's gates, immediately fired an e-mail blast crowing of partial victory, because it had claimed all along that the elephants were too old to breed. The victory was only partial because Bessey, and others, want the elephants moved to permanent refuge, either at Tennessee's Elephant Sanctuary - where former Philly Zoo elephant Dulary happily resides - or to California's Performing Animal Welfare Society.
