stardust circus elephants

Let me say from the start that as a kid I loved circuses. I would thrill to "Captain Schulz in the Cage of Death" with his lions, and I got a lot of childish pleasure out of watching Abu, Jumbo and Johora as they swept around the ring with pretty girls riding on their necks.

As i got older however I began to think about the animals. Were those lions, end product of millions of years of evolution, put on earth for the purpose of jumping through hoops? Did those elephants evolve simply so that I could see them dancing on their back legs? In fact, I began to question the whole concept of keeping animals in captivity, something which caused me a whole lot of heart ache because I loved zoos and still do.

Eventually I came to the belief that it is O.K. to keep animals in captivity provided we can give them as natural a life as possible. In zoos, that means enough room, the proper facilities (trees for climbers; pools for swimmers etc.) a suitable mate or mates, a suitable diet and their privacy when they require it. (Some zoos are good at this, some are not.)

Circuses, with the best will in the world, can't provide the necessary conditions.
I'm not saying that circus people deliberately neglect their animals; that would be stupid. Many of them probably love their animals, but with their itinerant lifestyle, they just can't provide properly for the animals needs.
 
Unfortunately there is nothing that can be done to help these animals. I am neutral on this, however would rather see an elephant in a large enclosure than a circus. I was speaking with shane Lennon a while back and he said the day they don't have their animals is the day their circus shutsdown so what can you do about it.
 
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If Shane Lennon says that his circus will shut down if he has to get rid of animals, then perhaps it should.

There are plenty of other circuses that don't use animals for entertainment, and they are doing very well.
 
alright then......

loving an animal doesn't automatically mean you know whats best for it.

elephants love water. they need water. in india most mahouts wash their elephants twice daily. its considered a very important factor in maintaining elephant health.

lions and tigers are large carnivores. keeping them in captivity means that you must cage them for human safety. their natural behaviour is severly restricted as their main obsession, hunting, is entirely removed from the equation. thus for large carnovores, especially anti-social ones such as tigers, enclosure design alone plays potentially the biggest factor in supplying behavioral enrichment.

like humans, primates are super-intellegent social animals. they require a level of stimulus that is exceptionally high. they usually form large family groups and become bored exceptionally easily. due to the complex social structures they develop they require space and flexibility to be able to live a stress-free lifestyle. being in small bareen cages offers them none of this. deny them a large amount of space and objucts to occupy their inquisative brains and they become highly stressed and often aggressive.

due to the transient nature of circus', they will never be able to provide this to any of their animals. place on top of this the finacial issues most suffer and it all makes for a bunch of highly stressed, unhappy animals who often don't even have their basic medical and dietry requirements catered for let alone their mental and physical health.

and i'm not even going to begin going into the occupational health and safety issue for both humans and animals when you start demanding a stressed, bored and often elderly creature perform a dangerous and unnatural task.

so kyja, thats my reason for hating circus' with exotic animals. and the fact that these backwards enterprises still exists is a testament to how living in a nostalgic fantasy-land the families that own them are. warrented or not, the idea that circus' are cruel to animals is the consensus of public opinion. couple with that the massive success of human-only circus' and you would think that these business' in question would be smart enough to see the direction they should be heading in. instead, they have been reluctant to change, continued to depend largely on their animals, exploited them mercilessly and thus are now admittedly faced with teh prospect that the day their last elephant dies is the day the lot of them end up on the dole.

and don't i relish the day that happens.

and will that be the unavoidable result of unfair public attitudes or just an example of pathetic business management?

and lastly kyja,

everyone here on the forum has a pretty passionate about animals. some are in the zoo profession, others aspire to be and others care for them for business. but one thing we all are, is fairly knowledgable about them. most of us have been to these and other circus' and seen for ourselves the conditions the animals that live there are kept in. if we find it unacceptable, then we have a damn good reason to.

there is absolutely no excuse for not providing an animal clean drinking water at all times. no excuse to not provide them with adequate shelter and absolutely no reason to deny them medical care. no matter how much you "love" them.

so to be frank, you coming along and calling us stupid, without articulating a single valid counter argument is to me, absolutely @#$&ing offensive.

so please, either go read some books or piss off back to your scrappy tent. because clearly, you wouldn't know the first thing about caring for animals.
 
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Wow, Patrick, when I become prime minister you will be my head speech writer.

Signed,

Kevin (Whoops....I mean "Ara")
 
How & why would circus lions need to know what hunting is, when they are brought up in an environment where it does not exist?

I suggest you stop trying to over power your self with reasons when clearly some do not even fit in with the category.

Why even make a statement about lions being brought up in the wild to hunt for prey, when the lions in the circus are not brought up in the wild, therefore are not exposed to hunting and do not know what it is.

Yes in the past there has been cases where animals have been treated badly, and those circuses do not exist or either the animals have been taken away from them.

At least every town the circuses visit, they are inspected to make sure they are treating the animals correctly and are living up to the standards of keeping them animals.

I can understand some points you are trying to make, but you need to understand the animals don’t know any other life besides the circus, and it is all normal to them. They don’t know any different.

PS. I think it is rather childish to judge people because of their lifestyle & telling me to go back to my ‘scrappy tent’.
 
Wow... BREATHE... In through the nose, out through the mouth. I DID NOT say the circus would shutdown if they lost the animals.... I said they wouldn't give them up until the day they were (the owners) ready to stop travelling... difference.. So much anger in here... some one turn on a fan
 
I can understand some points you are trying to make said:
Let me make this point to you, just because these animals dont know any other life outside the circus does not make "it right" for them to live this way of life, many of these animals would live in very large areas in the wild state and not confined to a very small yard and having to "think" about real things in there lives like hunting for food, choosing mates, raising young and defending terrioty, they lead a real life.
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I do agree Mr Mark. I am not totally anti circus I do feel that they provide many kids that wouldn't normally have the oppurtunity to see animals with that chance but 10 and a half months on the road a year with a minimum enclosure of 600 square metres for eles and just 20 for cats is not that great. I have applied for a circus licence (Please spare me patrick...) I had to do this as it is the only possible way to show my animals. They will only be away from base for a max of twenty days a year. but I didn't feel there was enough room involved and have made arrangements for considerably larger than recommended enclosures (even though they will be in there for a far shorter time (one is ten times the minimum requirements for monkeys). I think laws need to be tougher on circuses but can't say I wasnt to ban them fully... If it wasn't for Ashton's circus bringing Perry Bros elephants to town I wouldn't have fallen in love with elephants... an encounter there affected me for life. But there is no possible way that circuses can be inspected everywhere they setup. How do I know? One i DPI head office for NSW is here and so are two of the only four animal welfare inspectors they have so to say that those four folks can travel everywhere with the circuses, go to all of the zoos, wildlife parks, properties with EI, or any livestock, monitor camles farms and everything there is just not enough time. As for RSPCA Inspectors... they have **** all useless powers when it comes to this anyway...
Sorry if some bits don't make sense or aren't right or whatever... 18 hour days taking it out of me... be october already
 
MARK said:
just because these animals dont know any other life outside the circus does not make "it right" for them to live this way of life
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exactly what i was about to say mark.

kyja said:
How & why would circus lions need to know what hunting is, when they are brought up in an environment where it does not exist?
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i never said a thing about expecting circus' to allow their carnivores to hunt!! this is a zoo forum, obviously i''m pro-zoo. do lions hunt in zoos?
my point, that i thought i articulated reasonably clearly, is that since keeping carnoivores in captivity removes their main activity (hunting), that the enclosure design is a massive influence on the mental state and health of the animal. like in circus', zoo tigers can't be provided with prey, but they are provided with larger naturalistic enclosures with enrichment items to keep them active and busy. my point is, that by the very nature of a circus, none of their animals can be provided with an enriching environment becuse the enclosures are all temporary and designed to be transportable.

oh, and so which tent is it?
 
I am not from any circus but I absolutely love the animals there amazing. I dont really see that there is any specific or right way to raise these animals, but it just really depends on how the owner wants to raise them I guess.
 
but i sincerely doubt the animals love you back.

see its one thing to "love" animals, its another to understand animals. most people, like you..... don't understand them. in fact the whole world is full of people that claim they love their animals but don't necessarily do whats best for them. they love them on their own conditions and think they care for them but are too ignorant to really know what that means.

my advice to you is, if you really love animals, then show a real interest in them and read books about them. a good start would be a $200 encylopedia of mammals. a proper one, for grown-ups. and read, read, read, read read......read the whole damn thing from front to back.

then go overseas and see where elephants really come from.

maybe then you'll start to understand them, what they are about, why they are here on the planet, and by that i mean their evolution, and then realise just how innapropriate it is that we keep them in circus'.
 
Well lets just start with one thing glyn im not a carnie!!!! Secondly i know how you feel about circuses and thats fine everyone has to have a opinion. now i have been in cicuses my whole life this is what i do this is how i earn a living. now lets all get one thing straight these animals all get a vet check once a month, now if there was a problem with these animals why didnt the veteniarians say anything. im sure that the owners have paper work for this. Now lastly there is a beautiful set of circus elephants at one Australias most popular zoos And thats Australia zoo. i no that still the owner of those elephants is still there carer at that zoo....
 
and circus boys' response doesn't take into account the psychological neglect.

i'm not going to get into pointing fingers at particular circus' for particular cases of physical neglect, because i for one can't prove that here or now. suffice to say however that there are an aweful lot of cases of circus' owners being prosecuted for animal cruelty in australia and overseas but at the same time i have little doubt there are other animals that would get the all-clear from vetinarians.

still as i said. it doesn't take into account the psychological neglet of the animals. if you really did grow up in a circus "circus-boy" then you know very well the techniques that are used to train lions and elephants to perform their tricks. but it doesn't make it right. i'm sure you have seen an aweful lot that your not necessarily prepared to divulge to us because it compromises your counter argument.

this argument will, i'm afraid, continue to go around in circles because just like the unfortunate animals that live in the circus you, circus boy are conditioned to that way of life. so your just as blind to it as the elephant or lion that performs when it doesn't want to, even though it is in fact strong enough to kill the person demanding it of them.
 
Anyone can make up their own mind on how they want to raise these animals, and to say that the animals don’t love their keeper’s back is wrong. Recent studies show that circus animals do enjoy performing and are happy living this way. Sure, every persons opinion is different but at the end of the day you have to accept reality and this is the way some people choose to raise their animals! So don’t expect all the animal circuses to close down or give away their animals simply because animal activists think less of them!
 
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