The circus is in town. As I type, it starts tomorrow. I’m pretty sure it’s been 30 years since I’ve been.
The most recent time I can definitely remember attending a circus was in Oxford, sometime after my parents divorced but before Mom and Jenny moved to Florida, which almost certainly puts it in 1983. Mom took us to Circus Vargas on what used to be a vacant lot of red clay, on the south side of Highway 78 right where Coleman Rd. intersects. (Trade Day used to set up there too, remember?)
Other than that, I can remember going a couple of times to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, in either Birmingham or Atlanta. I remember going at least once with my friend Edwin, who walked around perpetually looking up so he could see out from underneath the always-too-long bangs he had.
Mostly, I remember feeling like everyone was having a better time than I was. It was too loud, and it seemed like I was looking in the wrong place maybe a third of the time. It was also at the circus that I cultivated a lifelong loathing of cotton candy. I did like the guys riding the motorcycles around in the small round cage. That was cool.
Given that I was rather ambivalent about them in the first place, I never spent a lot of my adulthood thinking about circuses. Started in earnest about five months ago, I’d say.
Think with me for a moment about circuses that use megafauna, like elephants and big cats. Think about how they operate. New city every week? Something like that? They travel by train. The circus web pages are full of PR these days, making sure you understand just how carefully they look after the animals.
Whatever else is said, there are two unimpeachable facts about the lives of large circus animals:
- No matter how much they’re “exercised” and “stimulated,” they are still wild animals, accustomed to and instinctually wired for ranges of many square miles, who spend almost all of their time in boxcars and small pens.
- They do not do tricks to delight you or to please themselves. They do tricks because they are perpetually frightened of what will happen to them if they don’t.
Folks, circuses hurt elephants. Baby elephants are broken, then trained with pain, restraint, and denial to spin in circles and sit on their stools for you.
Ringling Bros. had a real problem when it became illegal to take Asian elephants from the wild. They solved it with a private elephant farm—the Center for Elephant Conservation. Click that link for a video showing you an idyllic vision of pachydermic paradise. Then watch this one:
Watch the video closely. Think about what you see. Even realizing it’s a piece of propaganda with an unabashed point of view, how much of that video are you prepared to call BS on? Hey, guess what? You could throw out 75% of it and I’d still be horrified. How about you?
Want to see these “performers” waiting in the wings? Want to see what happens to them right before they come out to delight you?
That’s too many different people in too many different places hitting elephants with bullhooks to convince me that it’s anything but systemic. These are not isolated incidents, strung together to misrepresent what goes on. This is just the way it is. This is how the concept of “circus elephant” works. Are you all right with that?
Inexplicably, Ringling Bros. takes care to tell you specifically that the Asian elephant is one of the most intelligent animals in the world. Do you think these animals are aware of their plights? Do you think they miss their mothers? I do.
And to me, that makes all of this unconscionable.
This “classic” concept of a traveling circus using megafauna is something we need to send into the sunset. Just as we no longer send traveling shows all over featuring people with birth defects, we need to relegate this vision of the circus to history. We need to say “we know better than this.”
There are many circuses that do not use wild animals. Actually, the aforementioned Circus Vargas is one. Circus Vargas has been without animals since 2010. The contemporary circus, of which perhaps Cirque de Soleil is the most prominent example, is a marvelous concept.
Something I hope to convey throughout this series is the idea that because we are the only species with a truly sophisticated concept of morality, we have a special responsibility to deliver it.
If I can reasonably conclude that a circus elephant understands what’s happening to her, and I believe I can, then how can I look in her eyes and hurt her for my amusement?
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