Do you plan on taking the family out for some fun at the circus this year? For your one hour of enjoyment the animals involved spend a lifetime of torture, cruelty and early painful deaths.
To force wild animals to perform confusing acts, trainers use whips, muzzles, electric prods and bullhooks. In their real homes, these animals would be free to raise their families, forage for food and play together. Just like us. Instead, the circus forces them to perform night after night, for 48 to 50 weeks every year. Between acts, elephants are kept chained and tigers are “stored” in cages covered in waste, with barely enough room to take one step. Ringling has also invented a “unicorn” by reportedly mutilating a baby goat – surgically moving his horns to the center of his forehead.
Think that the circus is a great place to check out endangered species? Circuses have claimed for decades that exhibiting endangered Asian elephants will inspire their protection. Yet in 2000, poachers killed more than 60 free-roaming female elephants so that their babies could be collected and sold to the entertainment industry. The still-nursing elephants, all under the age of 3, refused to abandon their dead mothers, even attempting to nurse from their corpses. And it gets much worse.
It’s time for all of us to stop patronizing animal circuses – and to demand that the animal performers be sent to sanctuaries, where they can live out their lives in peace and dignity.
Jody Shuger
Mukilteo
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