Who will send in the Clowns?

A day or two ago, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus had its last show. After 146 years of preforming to millions of people – the show is no more. That circus and its various reincarnations had, as one commentator said, been around longer than had baseball. For at least some of those millions of people who saw the circus at least once - it is the end of an era. For some of us romantics - there is one less place to run away to. For the thousands of people who made at least part of their living through the circus – they will earn less money next year. For the relatively small number of people who worked at the circus full time, they have not only lost their jobs – they have lost a way of life.  While there are a lot of reasons why the show closed after struggling for years to survive financially – it is still, in many ways, sad.

 

There are a lot of people who are celebrating the closing of the circus. All of those people who moaned about the cruelty towards the animals, how unfair it was to cage animals so that both city and country folk could pay money to be both afraid and amused at the antics of animals doing things/tricks that were unnatural to them. The great wail of anguish that arose whenever people thought of fierce jungle cats bowing to the authority and power of the man with the chair and the whip; of the obscenity of some great bear dancing or pretending to wrestle his trainer; of elephants walking /moving in time to some unheard beat – only to stand on a far too small platform; of horses endlessly cantering around a sawdust covered circle while their riders danced on and off their backs and the dogs – small breeds usually- sometimes wearing silly customs, doing tricks for little rewards. The very existence of such animal acts proves that mankind still believes that we have the right to use our power to dominate other animals regardless of those animals’ innate intelligence or nobility. All such acts are proof that we have a long way to go in demonstrating that our humanity extends to all beings.

 

While I am sympathetic to those lofty concerns that drive people to quietly boycott or loudly protest such things as circuses, I find the duplicity somewhat troublesome. At the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto and at countless hundreds of small and large town fall fairs around the country, animals are put on display; some like the fancy chickens are placed in small cages and left there for hours so that the folks can admire and be amused, while the larger animals such as horses are required to prance, jump and pull heavy weights at their owner’s’ command. At dog shows, the over bred, over-washed and manicured “man’s best friends” are paraded around – and are required to be perfectly and unnaturally behaved.

 

I am not sure who one should feel sorrier for. The lion that spends his life confined to small cages and when let out it is obliged to jump through hoops of fire, or the dog that is so well bred that it is almost guaranteed to health problem in what should be its healthy middle years. Both animals have been bred and trained for our pleasure and all too frequently to prove that we can at least control something in our lives.

 

The circus may be a form of entertainment that has passed its time. Its end may be a sign that we as a species are more aware of our obligations to other beings. But I am not too sure if the closing of a world famous circus is proof of anything except that we have found other ways to get our pleasure and to demonstrate our control. At best it is an incredibly small victory that means little in terms of how the animals we say that we love are treated. At worst it is just pretend. The big money makers in the growing pet industry will on one hand help with the celebrations and other hand rake in even more cash.