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.
