The Cruelty of Animal Circuses

I don't know about you, but I've always been turned off by animal circuses.

When I was a kid, I was taken to the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus. Even at that age, I remember getting upset about the lion act: they were whipped, yelled at, and shoved around with chairs by Mr. Beatty just to get them to respond and make blood-curdling roars. As an adult, I watched Ringling Brothers circus animals perform, and got the same queasy feelings. But it would be many years before I became involved with animal advocacy, and so I just filed away my discomfort, thinking that I was overly sensitive and that circus animals were probably happy campers. But that was the last animal circus I attended. I discovered not long after that the animal-free (except for the willing human variety) Cirque du Soleil was much more fun to watch. And with every passing year, there are more animal-free circuses to choose from.

Now, after I've finally educated myself about (hu)man's inhumanity to animals-and it's a long, sad history-I realized that my uncomfortable feelings at the circus were actually justified; that, in fact, circus animals lead very difficult, unnatural, and painful lives.

A circus is probably coming to your area sometime this year. Why? Because the public likes to see performing animas-especially exotic animals-and if they happen to be beaten to make them perform, hey, they're "just" animals, after all (as if humans weren't). The tragedy is that people either don't realize or don't care about the abuse that goes on behind the scenes, which is carefully hidden from them in the glitzy, colorful performance arena.