Don't Think about Elephants: Reece v. City of Edmonton
![handle is hein.journals/unblj63 and id is 159 raw text is: DON'T THINK ABOUT ELEPHANTS:
REECE V. CITY OF EDMONTON'
Katie Sykes* and Vaughan Black**
- Okay, here's me planting an idea in your head. say to you,
Don't think about elephants. What are you thinking about?
- Elephants.2
INTRODUCTION
Lucy is a 36-year-old female Asian elephant who lives at the Edmonton Valley Zoo,3
owned by the City of Edmonton. Once, when she was a baby, she was free. She was
born in Sri Lanka and captured there in 1975 as an orphan less than a year old.4 She
was acquired by the Edmonton Valley Zoo in 1977, and she has been confined there
ever since. She is the only elephant in the zoo, and she is the northernmost elephant
housed alone in North America.
* J.S.D. candidate at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University; Killam Scholar. This research
was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada
Graduate Scholarship.
** Of the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University; 2012 Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, North
American Center for Transborder Studies, Arizona State University.
'Reece et at v Edmonton (City), 2011 ABCA 238, affirming Reece v Edmonton (City), 2010 ABQB 538
[Reece (QB)], leave to appeal to SCC refused, 34454 (April 26, 2012). Our thanks to Sheila Wildeman
for proposing the title of this comment.
2 This dialogue is from Inception (Warner Bros, 2010), a science-fiction film about spies who enter their
targets' subconscious minds to extract information from them. The example - sometimes don't think of
a pink elephant - is often used both by cognitive scientists and in popular discourse to illustrate that the
paradox of trying to suppress thought; the inevitable result of hearing the instruction is to disobey it, since
it cannot be processed without elephants entering the addressee's mind.
3 Lucy News, City of Edmonton web site, online:
http://www.edmonton.ca/attractions-recreation/attractions/edmonton-valley zoo/lucy-news.aspx
(accessed November 14, 2011).
4 Debi Zimmerman, One Veterinarian's Search for the Truth in the 'Lucy the Elephant' Debate (30 June
2009) at 4 (report online at http://www.savelucy.ca/expert-opinions).
5 Ibid.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/unblj63&div=15&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Don't Think about Elephants: Reece v. City of Edmonton
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