After 145 years, Ringling Bros. is retiring its elephants
That’s a long time to keep the mega-mammals dancing and standing on their heads
Stating the obvious: Elephants are wild animals, weighing thousands of pounds. They aren’t naturally disposed to standing on their heads, “dancing” on their hind legs, or walking in a circle, linked trunk-to-tail with their fellow pachyderms. Nor are they suited to three-day-long train rides or the anti-social conditions that humans have imposed on them — separation from their young, say, or confinement in chains.
And, yet, circuses around the world have demanded these things of elephants for two centuries.
That’s changing. But why — given the above — did it take so long?
This week, 11 elephants from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will head to an animal sanctuary in Florida, where they’ll retire from performing.
The circus, which built its reputation on performing elephants, including the famous Jumbo, has showcased the animals for 145 years. But in 2015 it announced it would stop using elephants in its shows by 2018, after decades of protest from animal rights advocates and a series of investigations exposed abuse. Now, it’s decided to retire its herd two years early, largely because a battery of municipal ordinances around the country have made elephant performances illegal. It’s just become too much of a hassle for the circus, in other words.
“Ringling Bros. is pulling elephants off the road because of failing financial returns from a public that lost a taste for abusive elephant acts long ago and legislatures that are banning them on the grounds of cruelty,” said Katie Arth, a spokesperson for PETA.
That the public has lost its taste comes courtesy of animal rights advocates who first started focusing on circuses in the mid-1980s. A former Hollywood animal trainer named Pat Derby launched the Performing Animal Welfare Society, or PAWS, and established an animal sanctuary for retired exotic animals, including elephants, in northern California.
The group’s launch, and the attention it got, began stoking conversations in the US about the ethics of exploiting wild animals for entertainment. The Humane Society of the United States, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and PETA soon joined with PAWS, pushing for reforms and triggering protests. Ringling Bros., the biggest and best-known American circus, soon had activists staking out its circuses. (They protested up to the end — at this past weekend’s final performances in Providence, R.I., and Wilkes-Barre, Pa.)
“PAWS was one of the first to document elephant abuse in circuses and raise concern about the treatment of performing wild animals,” said the group’s director of science, research and advocacy, Catherine Doyle. “Those concerns continued to grow as more animal protection organizations increasingly focused on this area.”
In the early 1990s, the US Department of Agriculture, perhaps responding to the increased attention, starting fining circuses, including Ringling, more regularly for animal abuse under the Animal Welfare Act. (The law passed in 1966 and was extended to performance animals in 1970.) PETA began documenting the agency’s actions in 1990 and has calculated 150 violations against Ringling for animal abuse, mostly involving elephants.
In the last 25 years, PETA says, 35 elephants, including five babies, have died in Ringling care. (Elephants, by the way, have accomplished something akin to revenge: PAWS documented at least 10 human deaths at circuses, by trampling or other elephant rage, between 1985 and 1995.)
In 2011, the agriculture department imposed a $270,000 fine — the biggest ever of its kind — under a settlement agreement with Ringling for violations of the AWA.
“This settlement sends a direct message to the public and to those who exhibit animals that USDA will take all necessary steps to protect animals regulated under the Animal Welfare Act,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, at the time.
As the agency was training its eye on Ringling and other circuses, cities began to do the same. At least 50 cities have banned wild animals in public displays or the use of bullhooks, the three-foot sticks with sharp metal tips that have been used by elephant trainers in Asia for centuries. (Four states are currently considering statewide bullhook bans.)
Most of these municipalities’ bans have had widespread support from a public that has increasingly started to see performances of wild animals as cruel, bizarre, Victorian-era relics. Or as Wayne Pacelle, head of the Humane Society described them, “outdated spectacles.”
Much of the credit, Pacelle and others have said, goes to circuses such as Cirque du Soleil, which have proved that human-focused events under the big top are just as thrilling.
“The sad fact is that tigers and elephants and their wild wild brethren simply aren’t entertaining,” wrote one reviewer for the Albany Times Union in 2011, adding, “Those big, sad lumberers are as placid as a pond and about as interesting to watch.”
Now, at Ringling circuses anyway, no one will have to.
