By Katherine Applegate
At age 8, I left my first visit to the circus with a soon-to-be-dead chameleon (sold alongside the cotton candy and funny hats) and an enduring case of coulrophobia (fear of clowns).
But there was something else I took away from the experience: a feeling of pity, tinged with guilt, about the tigers and elephants I’d watched perform in an overlit circle of sawdust.
Not so long ago, I wrote a novel inspired by the true story of a western lowland gorilla named Ivan, who spent 27 years stuck in a dismal cage in the middle of a shopping mall. As I researched his bizarre saga, I was struck by our species’ tortured, glacially slow learning curve when it comes to the care of captive wild animals. How hard was it, really, to figure out that plucking a wild animal from central Africa and depositing him in a Tacoma, Wash., mall might not be such a hot idea?
Apparently, just about as hard as it’s been to decide that socially complex, remarkably intelligent animals like elephants might not be all that thrilled about the whole circus thing.
When I was a child, going to a circus with wild animal acts was a rite of passage. These days, it’s an act of complicit cruelty. These days, we know about the shackles, the calves torn from their mothers, the bullhooks and the beatings. We know about the socially complex lives of elephants: how they communicate, how they bond, how they even seem to grieve. We have ethologists in the field and activists on the ground to thank for that knowledge.
As a species, we can at times be dimwitted and cruel. But we’re also capable of learning. As Alana Feld, executive vice president of Ringling parent company Feld Entertainment, delicately put it, “There’s been a mood shift among our consumers.”
There’s still plenty to do. Many more circuses and roadside attractions continue to abuse animals in ways both shocking and all-too-familiar. Ringling hasn’t addressed what they plan to do about the tigers, camels and other animals they continue to exploit, nor have they adequately explained why it will take three years to free their performing elephants.
And they may never own up to the generations of clown phobics they’ve spawned.
What do we lose without wild animal acts at the circus? Absolutely nothing, except the opportunity to be haunted and heartbroken.