Step Right Up and Witness Cruelty ......?

Step Right Up and Witness Cruelty under the Big Top: The Circus Exposed

Every day in America people enter the arena of cruelty. They think the circus is family fun, with animals performing tricks at the snap of the trainer’s fingers. However, circus promoters don’t want you to see the cruel treatment these animals receive. The idea that it is thrilling to watch wild animals coerced into acting like clumsy humans, or funny and entertaining to see powerful beasts reduced to cringing cowards by a whip cracking trainer, is barbaric and ethically wrong.

Circus promoters claim they only use positive reinforcements and rewards to train the animals the reality is that animals don’t stand on their heads, balance on balls or jump through rings of fire naturally. So, the trainers must force them to perform the confusing and humiliating tricks with the use of shock collars, electric prods and bull hooks, a sharp metal hook with spikes at the end, a brutal way of dominance. “Sink that [bull] hook into ‘em when you hear ‘em scream, then you know you got their attention,” says Tim Frisco a Carson & Barnes elephant trainer.

Elephants are chained by one or both front and hind legs during training sessions, transporting, and often between shows. Inadequate exercise and prolonged standing in wet, unsanitary conditions may lead to foot rot and other painful foot conditions. Baby elephants are kept isolated and tied with ropes at their front and back legs. Rope burns may develop as they strain against their restraints. The sting of a whip causes lingering and intense pain. Circuses often use electric prods and smaller handheld devices that are easily concealed from the audience, a jolt of electricity to remind the animal who is in charge. Sticks, axe handles, baseball bats and bull hooks are weapons they use to hit and beat restrained animals in order to break them of their spirit and show them "who's boss." And, cigarette lighters are used to burn the paws of tigers and other big cats to force them to stand on their hind legs.

Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus say “[their] performances let you see the unique relationship between animals and humans, and help you appreciate the need to protect wildlife for future generations.” Exactly what “unique relationship” are they referring to? The one where these humans force animals by beating and abusing them to dance in tutu’s and ride bicycles. How, is killing free roaming mother elephants to steal there babies “protecting the wildlife“? The still nursing babies refuse to leave their dead mothers, even trying to suckle from their lifeless corpus; they are then sold to the entertainment industry to live their life as slaves to humans. Watching wild animals perform unnatural acts doesn’t teach anyone about conservation. Instead, it teaches that it’s alright to enslave these wild animals and force them to do tricks for our entertainment.

It goes beyond the brutal training and thievery. These animals undergo mental and physical stress and pain, showing signs of head bobbing, swaying and self-mutilation. When the “show” is over for the night, the animals are forced into railcars and hauled as unimportant cargo, usually 50 weeks out of a year. Their lives are spent in small filthy cages. Elephants legs are shackled without enough room to step backwards. They are transported from one strange place to another and then thrown out as disposable wildlife when they are too old to perform or are disobedient, ending their tortured life as roadside attractions, in animal laboratories or sold to people to hunt them, and then display their head on the wall.

Circus promoters say that a circus without performing animals isn’t a circus at all, they are the ones who make the money off the public that remains ignorant to the realities of the animals lives just beyond the big top. The majority of people would no longer enjoy this barbaric form of entertainment when they realize this is what really happens to the animals and that every ticket purchased funds animal cruelty. Circuses that use animals use violence. There is no other way to make a wild animal perform the same difficult and confusing tricks and routines on command, hundreds of times a year.

Circuses exploit animals and have no place in a compassionate society. It is time for all of us to stop patronizing animal circuses and to demand the animals be sent to sanctuaries where they can live out their lives in dignity.

Will You SAY NO to ANIMAL CRUELTY by FORGOING the CIRCUS?