Tyke (1974 – August 20, 1994) was a female circus elephant who on August 20, 1994, in Honolulu, Hawaii, killed her trainer, Allen Campbell, and gored her groomer Dallas Beckwith causing severe injuries during a Circus International performance before hundreds of horrified spectators at the Neal Blaisdell Center. Tyke then bolted from the arena and ran through downtown streets of Kakaako for more than thirty minutes. Police fired 86 shots at Tyke, who eventually collapsed from the wounds onto a blue car and died.

Since she was performing at the time, the majority of Tyke's attack was caught on tape including the famous video image of the African elephant attacking publicist Steve Hirano outside of the event. Video footage is available from PETA.

According to PETA, this wasn't the first time Tyke had gotten loose and run out of control. Tyke had been involved in three other incidents before:

In the aftermath, Tyke became the poster elephant of circus tragedies and a symbol for animal rights. Dozens of lawsuits were filed against the city, the state, the circus and Tyke's owner, John Cuneo Jr. and his Hawthorn Corp. Honolulu trial lawyer William Fenton Sink successfully sued Cuneo on behalf of numerous plaintiffs, including young children, who suffered psychological injuries after witnessing Tyke's killing. The suits were settled out of court and the amounts were never made public. Based on Mr. Sink's work in the Tyke case, Animal Rights Hawaii renamed its prestigious Order of the Innocent award to The William Fenton Sink Award for Defense of Animals in honor of his work.

Elephants are large land mammals in two extant genera of the family Elephantidae: Elephas and Loxodonta, with the third genus Mammuthus extinct. Three living species of elephant are recognized: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant and the Indian or Asian elephant; although some group the two African species into one and some researchers also postulate the existence of a fourth species in West Africa. All other species and genera of Elephantidae are extinct. Most have been extinct since the last ice age, although dwarf forms of mammoths might have survived as late as 2,000 BCE. Elephants and other Elephantidae were once classified with other thick-skinned animals in a now invalid order, Pachydermata.

Elephants are the largest living land animals on Earth today. The elephant's gestation period is 22 months, the longest of any land animal. At birth, an elephant calf typically weighs 105 kilograms (230 lb). They typically live for 50 to 70 years, but the oldest recorded elephant lived for 82 years. The largest elephant ever recorded was shot in Angola in 1955. This male weighed about 10,900 kg (24,000 lb), with a shoulder height of 3.96 metres (13.0 ft), 1 metre (3.3 ft) taller than the average male African elephant. The smallest elephants, about the size of a calf or a large pig, were a prehistoric species that lived on the island of Crete during the Pleistocene epoch.