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2. ENDANGERED SPECIES – IN ABUNDANCE

2.2   Education and Conservation

As we have already seen, the modern circus was almost strangled at birth by those who condemned it as the work of the devil. It was only by portraying the menagerie as educational and marrying it off to the circus that the 'Zoological Institute' and similarly dubious enterprises were able to pacify the pious wrath of the American puritans. Although this amounted to the most blatant and systematic of all circus deceptions, it was also the most triumphant and enduring. Indeed, it is ironic that precisely the same justification is being used today, this time to deflect the criticism of those who are opposed to the display of exotic species under the big top.

Because of a burgeoning public concern for nature conservation in recent years, the more astute and affluent circuses - like their counterparts in the oceanarium trade - recognise that they must alter their image if they are to stay in business. The lesson may be as illusory as the brightly coloured facades to the menagerie which depict animals roaming free in a pristine natural habitat, but the circus would still have us believe that there is no anomaly in confining animals which are on the verge of extinction to cramped beast wagons or training them to perform feeble-minded tricks in the arena. With the perfidious clout of today's public relations experts and image consultants, such degrading spectacles are now portrayed not only as 'education', but even 'conservation', the circus menagerie becoming a modern Noah's Ark, striving to rescue animals from impending doom. The more sober facts - that the Noah's Ark may be a rat and disease-infested prison whose inmates can literally be driven insane by their captivity, that some rare animals are bred to such abundant excess that they must either be put down or sold-off as "models" for scientific research, are studiously exorcised from the illusion. Says David Hancocks, director of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum: "The people who operated the travelling menageries, wild beast shows and circuses soon learned that aggressive promotion and media hype can be an effective substitute for a poor show. Building on the image of 'nature red in tooth and claw,' tigers were billed as man-eating monsters, elephants as gargantuan deformities, gorillas as devilish freaks. The entire picture of wildlife was distorted beyond recognition." Those myths, says Hancocks, still prevail. "Each and every day wild animals are being subjected to deprived environments. The fact that this occurs merely so that people can see tigers riding on horses under pink spotlights, or laugh at chimpanzees dressed as senile tramps, or watch an elephant in a yellow tutu stand on its hind legs, or see a bear on a motorcycle - the fact that these imbecilic and useless actions are considered to be a justification for such exploitation adds an especially tasteless irony." It may also reflect, by way of the circus' much-coveted traditions, the extent to which rabid anthropocentrism afflicts the human race, the spoilt child amongst species, and how this utilitarian view of creation is bequeathed to future generations. Circus, menagerie, zoo and dolphinarium managers routinely insist that the public has the right to see captive exotic species, almost as though it were a God-given prerogative. Yet only recently has the cause of pure entertainment in the animal show given way under pressure to the manifestly dubious claim of education of the young.

As the charity Animal Aid points out: "It is often stated in defence of circuses that they are of educational benefit to children, who might otherwise never see these animals. But what exactly do we teach our children about animals through a visit to the circus? All a child can see is the size, shape and colour of the animals. Their behaviour patterns, social interaction, intelligence, hunting instinct, maternal instinct, sibling behaviour, food gathering patterns and all the facets of animal behaviour that makes a species so unique and interesting, are not apparent in circus animals." Nor, one might add, are they apparent in the dream-machine promotional techniques of the circus, the typically garish Italian-style circus posters, for example, depicting ferocious gorillas in the mould of King Kong and snarling polar bears which seem to be on the verge of pawing a sultry and scantily dressed model. Yet the circus, with the survival of the performing animal at stake, clings ever-more tenaciously to the subterfuge of education.

British circus czar Gerry Cottle, forever asserting that his animals are only "performing natural extensions of their normal existence in the wild," seemed to have received divine benediction for that point of view when Canon John Morris, apparently at Cottle's behest, bestowed his blessing upon the animals at a Christmas 1988 service held under the big top at Battersea. "I discovered to my horror that they needed it," writes journalist Tessa Dahl who attended the spectacle. Yet surely no irony was intended when the prayer for the animals was read out, echoing through the arena:

Creatures of the home and woodland.
Jungle and sea,
We would ask for God's protection
Wher'er you be.
When men in their greed oppress you
We will ask the Lord to bless you
And a loving hand caress you,
Making you free.

"As the little band played its rousing music, animals were carted on and off in cages or boxes," Tessa Dahl reported. "Lions were forced through a steel tunnel, assistants banging sticks against the bars to hurry them along. They looked mangy, with pathetic soulful eyes. Otto Vohringer cracked his whip and they jumped through hoops. We watched three Himalayan black bears being led out of tiny cages by a girl in Cossack dress. The bears had thick leather muzzles and chains around their necks. The baby bear was clawing at his muzzle, desperately trying to pull it off. The 'natural extension' of their existence was then demonstrated as the bears drove out of the ring in a car." Next on the programme was Jan and her Nile Crocodiles. They were "dragged out of a coffin-like casket for Jan to dance around while the ringmaster told of the dangers. The largest crocodile endured Jan's head in his mouth once his sleepy jaws had been prised open, and Jan's body pressed seductively against his. The act complete, he was carted out in his box, with his tail hanging out of the back." Though the adults in her party were "devastated," writes Dahl, the children were "enthralled", and it was this that disturbed her most of all. Surely it is "wrong to bring children up with the notion that animals are there to be used and dominated by humans," she concluded. "They are creatures with their own dignity, they should not be parodied and forced into this ignoble pursuit. How can we start expecting our youth to have a different attitude towards the natural world when this is their holiday entertainment?" The elephants, she continued, "paraded in and climbed resignedly onto each other's backs, limbs straining, eyes watering. 'I'm sure they're crying,' said my neighbour. I think he was right. They suffered indignity and so did we watching them."

Understandably, sometimes the rose-tinted veil wears perilously thin, even for children. In April 1988, the Daily Mail published a letter from a 16-year old girl who had just returned from a school holiday in Russia and a visit to the Moscow State Circus: "Several people walked out crying," she wrote, "after seeing them whip the horses around the face to make them walk on their hind legs and hitting them to make them fall over. The bears had be dragged in, as they obviously didn't want to perform and they looked so sad walking on their hind legs." While such incidents undoubtedly serve to dispel the illusion of the circus as an educational institution, ironically, even a seriously-conducted organised tour through the circus menagerie might achieve the same effect.

In a beast wagon at Switzerland's Circus Olympia, for example, in a filth-spattered cage measuring just 3x2m, there are two adult chimpanzees, their bodies tense, rocking deliriously to and fro, their faces often buried in the straw. At other times, they seem to stare into nothingness with grotesque, contorted faces, or frantically smear their own excrement across the walls of the wagon. There is no label attached to the bars which confirms their identity or origin, least of all the fact that the chimpanzee is actually the closest living relative of homo sapiens, sharing 99.8% of human genes, even its blood compatible with ours. So-called 'Pre-Convention' Appendix I animals, there is nothing to protect them except an inadequate and dilatorily applied animal welfare law. Their brothers and sisters in the wild are decreasing rapidly, the result of human encroachment, poaching by animal dealers and trophy hunters, a long history of exploitation in biomedical research, and an enduring demand by zoo and circus menageries which gives life to a quietly thriving black market. During capture, almost invariably the infant or juvenile chimpanzee will first of all see its mother and any other defending adult shot down before its eyes, the killing/capture ratio reported to be between 5:1 and 9:1. Yet few casual visitors to this menagerie would even begin to suspect that the chimpanzee is actually a native of the dense forests and open woodlands of west and central equatorial Africa. Much of their life - sometimes spanning 50 years - is spent in the trees, where they sleep and obtain the fruits that constitute the bulk of their diet. A sleeping nest is built each night and a resting platform may be built during the day. The great exuberance and versatility which makes the chimpanzee so popular with animal trainers and the public is, if anything, even more apparent in the wild, with individuals fashioning improvised tools and displaying a profound ingenuity in solving the problems that confront them. Although classified as a single species, Pan troglodytes, there is as much variation among chimpanzees as among races of humans. As the infant chimp grows, it begins to explore the world, riding on its mother's back as she travels. The young chimpanzee will remain under adult - primarily maternal - supervision for years, during which time it acquires the knowledge that will allow it to become fully integrated into a complex social system. Deprived of all of this in captivity, aberrant behaviour becomes virtually inevitable, including an inability to foster offspring or care for them.

Formerly the star of the dear departed Chimp's Tea Party, a favourite for children on a day's outing to the zoo, chimpanzees at the circus are still dressed in human clothing. Infants, clad appealingly in toddler's blue or pink are carried around the audience before the show commences to sit in laps, cling to necks, posing for a cute and memorable photograph for an additional fee. This is not nursery school however, but work, and the chimpanzee child is given sound raps over the knuckles or pinched hard if he misbehaves. Juvenile individuals later undergo rigorous training to perfect 'their own' circus act - riding small motorbikes or monocycles, acting as clowns, rickshaw drivers and performing diverse tumbling and gymnastic feats. Cruelty is all too often just a fact of life. Because they are only manageable as performing circus animals when young, the chimps soon outlive their usefulness. Though often castrated, males become vicious and unpredictable as they grow older and females, because of the swelling of their genital organs when on heat, are regarded as ugly. It is thus that adult individuals are confined for the remainder of their lives to the menagerie cage as display animals, or are sold-off to a zoo or vivisection laboratory.

Inhabiting yet another bare cage in a circus beast wagon, this time in the Italian Circo Italiano, alias Medrano, there is a male and female lowland gorilla, a species that was once the big game hunter's dream. Once again, the inherent discrepancy between the wild gorilla and its counterpart in the circus cage is all too apparent. Rising at sunrise, wild gorillas, often in permanent and gregarious social groups of between five and twenty individuals, spend their days leisurely feeding, resting and sleeping. Rarely remaining more than one day in a single place they'll travel up to 5 kilometres between dawn and dusk, uttering soft grunts as they move along to help them keep in touch with one another in the dense undergrowth. Towards nightfall, each gorilla builds itself a nest, either on the ground or in a tree, infants snuggling up to their mothers to sleep. The first intrepid jungle explorers portrayed the gorilla as a ferocious and unpredictable beast who attacked humans without the slightest provocation. Although the gorilla is the largest of the anthropoid apes, adult males with their striking grey or silver backs attaining a height of 6 feet or about 2 meters, the creature is actually shy and peaceful, a vegetarian who subsists on a variety of bark, leaves, roots and fruits. Yet the myth of the fearsome gorilla still persists to this very day in the "educational" world of the circus. Medrano, for example, portrays its male gorilla as "the largest in the world", its posters depicting a ferocious King Kong, a swooning abducted woman clasped in one of its giant hands. According to Pier Lorenzo Florio of TRAFFIC, "Medrano pretends that its current female gorilla was born in the circus and that its mother died during delivery, but this is probably just fantasy. It is far more likely that the gorillas came in as contraband in 1980, just as Italy joined CITES."

In the same wagon, behind a flimsy partition, there is a single orang-utan, or "person of the forest of Malay," a creature which first appeared in an English menagerie in 1784, advertised as an "Oriental Satyr". Condemned to life-imprisonment in a typically bare circus cage, its living conditions in captivity have not appreciably changed since then, despite the fact that study of the species in its natural environment has revealed much more about its needs and its way of life. A long-armed arboreal ape, covered with flowing red hair, the orang-utan lives in the forests of north Sumatra and Borneo. Unlike other species of monkey or ape, they are solitary animals, with up to four individuals inhabiting each square kilometre of forest canopy. They spend their days feeding, roaming from tree to tree, rarely, if ever, touching the ground. At night, like chimps and gorillas, they construct sleeping nests by breaking branches and weaving them together.

"The elegant trainer Billy Wilson Smart and his charming wife Ingrid present their three splendid Indian elephants, Bully, Quato and Ongeli who can both crawl and form astonishing pyramids." So declared the press kit of the 14th Festival International du Cirque in Monte Carlo in January 1989. This annual 5-day gathering is regarded as being the most prestigious event in the circus world, with clowns, acrobats, jugglers, trapeze artists and animal tamers competing for much-coveted golden awards, presented at a glittering ceremony presided over by avid circus fans Prince Rainier and his daughter, Princess Stephanie. Perhaps the event can best be summed-up by a comment, expressed with an American twang, that I overheard at the Festival during the intermission: "You couldn't wish for anything more at Monte Carlo. Oh, it really is the best time of the year! You have glamour, royalty, sex, even exotic animals!"

More than any other single animal, it is undoubtedly the great grey elephant with its small curious eyes, its fan-like ears and its giant pad-like feet, which is most traditionally associated with the circus world. Just as traditionally, when not performing in the ring, circus elephants are kept almost permanently fettered, chained to the ground by one foreleg and one hind leg so that social interaction between the animals invariably becomes crippled. Walking through the elephant tent of the menagerie, under the passive and attentive gaze of these sagacious creatures, it is unnerving to think that as infants, many of the wild-caught African elephants have seen their mothers, sisters, fathers and brothers, shot dead in front of them. Despite their bulk, elephants are agile and even nimble on their feet, able to move virtually without a sound, walking on the tips of their toes. The trunk, besides being used to give themselves frequent dust and water baths, is also a keen olfactory organ, capable of detecting unerringly even supposedly odourless poisons. Gregarious animals with complex social rules and recognisable customs, in the wild, often in herds of between 25 to 30 individuals, elephants will roam through the jungle or bush feeding from a wide selection of grasses, fruit and nuts. Other females in the herd, called aunties by the Burmese, assist a mother before and during the birth of the young. The animals also possess pronounced personalities and such complex emotions that once in captivity, deprived of the intricate social customs of the herd, they become prone to neurosis, and can be driven insane. Writes Ivan T. Sanderson, author of The Dynasty of Abu: "They have been known to cry from sheer frustration; to commit 'mercy killing' on an incurably ill member of their herd; to help - by lifting and supporting - a wounded or ill member of the herd; to rescue captured members of the herd; and to rescue humans from other elephants or from natural or man-made disasters."

Still billed as an electrifying attraction in the majority of circuses is the wildcat, from the most exotic species such as the Bengal and Siberian tiger and the Himalayan snow leopard, to the puma, jaguar and of course that dethroned king of the jungle, the lion. Once again, the bare menagerie cage characterises their existence when not performing or training in the arena. Though they are often seen crammed together in the beast wagon, apart from the lion, most wildcats are essentially solitary animals in the wild. While in the circus cage they must make do with no more than one or two square metres, in their natural habitat the individual tiger, depending on availability of prey, inhabits a range of anywhere between 60 and 500 square kilometres. Of the eight races of tiger - living in diverse habitats from temperate oak forests to dry thorn scrub, from humid rain forests and mangrove swamps, to the snowy Manchurian spruce forests - six are threatened with extinction. Only about 12 Javan tigers remain, no more than 110 Siberian tigers still survive in the Soviet Far East, and the Chinese tiger is already thought to be extinct. Even in India, commonly regarded as the traditional home of the tiger, only about 4000 remain alive.

Similarly, the powerful spotted cat known as the leopard or panther inhabits semi-deserts, rain forests and mountains up to the snow line, the individual animal often wandering far and wide in search of prey. Unlike other big cats, leopards are also proficient climbers, and in the wild they can often be seen while at rest draped rather precariously high-up along the branch of a tree.

The ritual justification of the circus for keeping lions in the menagerie cage is that even in the wild the animals spend some 20 hours a day at rest, either sleeping, dozing, or sitting. While it is true that lions typically lead a leisurely life when prey is plentiful, they must still hunt to survive and this, on average, entails walking 8 kilometres a day for up to 3 hours, the pride's territory extending between 40 and 400 square kilometres. Their favourite habitat, savanna sparsely covered with thorn scrub and acacia trees, may also be regarded as being somewhat more stimulating than the naked menagerie cage with its aluminium floor covered with sawdust. Unlike the solitary habits of the other great wildcats, lions are gregarious, forming prides of up to 35 individuals that have a complex social organisation, with lionesses raising the young and hunting cooperatively. Venerated in the Middle East in ancient times as an animal god because of its loud roar, strength, and majestic beauty, the lion is now extinct over a large part of its former range, which stretched through Iran to India and over much of Africa. Only about 175 Asian lions still survive in the wild, they are already extinct in North Africa, and are only found in larger numbers south of the Sahara.

Victims of poaching and a habitat constantly shrinking through human over-population and encroachment, other great and exotic beasts are also to be found in the circus ring and menagerie, including the rhinoceros, the polar bear, the Himalayan brown bear and even the world's most famous endangered species, the giant panda. Though animal acts are alien to Chinese circus culture, pandas have been seen in some shows. On one occasion, for example, the Shanghai Circus featured a trumpet-blowing panda reclining in a gilded cart being towed around the arena by an Alsatian dog. Then in November 1988, a circus tour of Australia by the giant panda Wei Wei, organised by the New Zealand impresario Christopher Cambridge, was abruptly cancelled when the government imposed an import ban. Wei Wei's repertoire includes motorbike riding, blowing a trumpet and eating with a knife and fork.

The black rhino population has declined from 65,000 in 1970, to 13,500 today, while the Sumatran, Javan and great Indian rhinos together probably number fewer than 2000. Similarly, there are thought to be less than 3000 Southern white rhinos still to be found in their natural habitat in Africa and according to IUCN, the Northern white rhino - with only 15 still surviving in a national park in Zaire - is the most endangered animal in the world. Grazing animals, rhinos inhabit open plains, sparse thorn scrub, savannas, thickets and dry forests, as well as mountain forests and moorlands at high altitudes. In the circus however, they must content themselves with a beast wagon in which they are scarcely able turn around in, and if they're lucky, a small improvised enclosure set-up on the grounds of each venue. Paraded under the spotlights under the big top, circuses like Knie have even been known to feature rhinos galloping around the arena with tigers on their backs, the animals portrayed as being "no longer enemies, but partners." Rather more mundanely, "the magnificent African rhinoceros" of the Italian Stefano Nones Orfei "can even hold out his foot as if to shake hands." Even the amphibious hippopotamus, which in the wild is often found in groups of 6 to 15 animals, spending the day wallowing lazily in muddy water, can be found in the circus menagerie, often - as in the case of the Italian Datrix Togni Circus - without so much as a tub of water to bathe in.

Perhaps because the crocodile is not quite as endearing as the typical "Noah's Ark" animal, their welfare in the circus is afforded even less consideration. For most of their lives they are quite literally stored in minuscule covered tanks or boxes, often with their mouths taped up. Yet to the sensation-hungry circus manager, they provide the audience with the thrill of the untamed ferocious jungle beast, the most "spectacular" trick being for the trainer to place his head between the animal's toothy jaws. In promotional blurb for the Monte Carlo Circus Festival, for example, Karah Khawak of Poland was portrayed as "the only person apart from his brother to learn the fantastic secret of how to hypnotise these enormous saurians only a few centimetres away from the spectators." The audience's safety however - including that of Prince Rainier and his entourage who suddenly found themselves face to face with daunting reptilian fangs - was ensured by the discreet use of wire-like bands to clamp the animals' mouths tightly shut.

Also on the programme at Monte Carlo were the "farmyard animals" of Ewgeni Schmarlowski of the USSR, a supposedly comical repertoire that featured a donkey, fox, raven and monkey, and numerous mink, chickens and ducks. "His brand-new finale," announced the press office, "will not fail to intrigue all the ladies in the audience who dream of owning a mink coat." After Schmarlowski's trained monkey dutifully terrified a certain dour lady in the audience - obviously the Russian's assistant - by jumping into her lap, she was invited into the ring, and, behind a dressing-screen, was invited to don a mink coat as recompense. Just as she was admiring her new attire, Schmarlowski fired-off a shot from a pistol, at which point the coat disintegrated into scores of live mink running frantically across the arena. Such treatment might explain why so many replacement animals were to be found under canvas in Schmarlowski's corner of the menagerie tent, housed in minuscule green metal boxes to enable him to travel the world with his show. The fox was confined to a wire mesh cage with a bare wire floor, less than 0.5m square.

Although somewhat slow and clumsy at first sight, all except the very heaviest of bears climb trees and are agile in moving over rocks and ice, leaving a human-like footprint on soft ground. Most are also innate wanderers, subsisting on a varied diet which includes fish, insects, fruits and honey. They tend to live alone except during courtship, and hibernate during winter. If cornered or attacked, they can become one of the most dangerous of all animals, as many a circus trainer has discovered to his great cost. In India, it is not uncommon to come across dancing bears in the streets. The World Society for the Protection of Animals reports that the immature animals are caught in the Himalayas; their teeth and claws are extracted and a hole is drilled through the upper palate and a rope inserted by which the bear is led and restrained. Training the bear to jig or dance is accomplished by the use of hot coals, a similar technique employed by other travelling showmen, including the Gypsies of western Europe. Writes Rodney Manser, in his 1987 book Circus: "The major part of the training consisted of getting the bears to rear up at the sound of a tambourine and to stay up while it continued to be played. This was achieved by pulling the bear up onto its hind legs and then letting its forepaws down onto scalding metal trays. At the instant the forepaws touched the metal the tambourine would sound. The bear's automatic reflex obviously being to rear away from the source of pain, it would rear up on its hind legs. This process was repeated until the bear firmly associated the sound of the tambourine with searing pain to its forepaws should they be placed down - so whenever it heard the tambourine it would rear up and stay up until the music stopped."

Polar bears, once numerous around the north pole, migrate over vast distances, sometimes even swimming many miles. No more than 12,000 still survive, their numbers having declined drastically since the 1920's due to human exploitation. When hunting, they are known to rub snow on their black noses so as to make their dazzling white camouflage complete. Normally 2 or 3 cubs are born in a litter, hairless, blind and scarcely bigger than guinea pigs. The mother bear encourages her young to use ice slopes as toboggan runs to help them gain strength. The cubs slide down on their bellies, legs spreadeagled, with mother catching them at the bottom in her paws. Once in captivity, most polar bears are simply driven insane. Zoo Check reports that 12 out of 20 polar bears in Britain show signs of mental illness. At Bristol, embarrassed Zoo officials have even been obliged to hide the polar bear Misha - who spent a decade in a Chipperfield circus beast wagon - because the animal had become too deranged even for the public gaze. Ursula Böttcher of East Germany remains the leading exponent of polar bear dressage in Europe, the Circus Fans' Association describing her act as "awe-inspiringly impressive," with a "sensational new trick" that features one of the animals "standing over Miss Böttcher who is lying on the ground - head to head". Hardly educational perhaps, and at first glance, not even particularly sensational, yet with the unpredictable bear, there is scarcely any warning of an impending attack. But it is the brown bear of Europe and Asia that is the most common occupant of menageries on this side of the Atlantic, and in the arena they can often still be seen riding motorbikes, roller-skating, playing football and even ice-hockey.

In what was portrayed as "The Peace of the Jungle," the Clubb Chipperfield organisation, vying for a golden award, presented a combined exotic animal routine at the International Circus Festival of Monte Carlo in January 1989. According to Prince Rainier's press office, the act, masterminded "with infinite patience" by impresario Jim Clubb and trainers Luis and Marcia Palacios, featured tigers, lionesses, leopards, bears, and a solitary wolf and striped hyena. In the ring, they would form "splendid pyramids and a marvellous tableau in which the numerous wild beasts stand up majestically on their stools." In actual fact, the two Himalayan brown bears were never once taken out of their beast wagon during the prestigious five-day gathering at the jet-set capital of Europe. The reason, according to one of Clubb's animal handlers, was because the bears "are too unpredictable. We're after the golden award and they can mess up the whole show." Similarly, the only exercise that the distraught and cowering wolf and hyena experienced during their five-day sojourn on the gold and concrete coast was to be prodded into the arena to pose under the multicoloured spotlights, clearly intimidated by the presence of their "jungle friends." Small wonder then, that the wolf and hyena - both roaming pack animals in the wild - and the two bears, all displayed typical stereotypic behaviour in their wagon, pacing up and down, and biting and sucking the bars of the cage. Though the distinction between the working and non-working menagerie animal is constantly emphasised by those who wish to justify their continuing use in the circus, the bare, cramped cage remains the habitat even for the performing animal for at least 20 hours of every day. In the case of Clubb Chipperfield's animals at Monte Carlo, this meant a cage size of 4 square metres per species for the wolf, the two bears and a pair of tigers, 5 square metres for three leopards, and 6 square metres for two lionesses and another pair of tigers.

It is perhaps all the more ironic then that Jim Clubb is chairman of the Association of Circus Proprietors of Great Britain (ACP) and its animals sub-committee, which introduced a revised code of conduct early in 1988, ostensibly aimed at improving the welfare and living conditions of captive circus animals. Says ACP Secretary Malcolm Clay: "This association is recognised by Central and Local Government as being responsible for the conduct of the Circus business in this country. It imposes on its members very strict standards of animal welfare, including veterinary inspections, exercise areas etc. Because of this, certain of the large Circuses refuse to join and are content to trade at the very minimal levels required by law." Despite such self-regulatory and self-policing measures typically conducted with great fanfare, it is all the more curious that in an interview with an American television crew in Monte Carlo, Clubb heaped praise upon one of the most notorious of British circuses where his mixed exotic animal act had previously appeared to great acclaim. At the Blackpool Tower Circus, owned by First Leisure Corporation, animals are consigned for the five months of every season to a dimly-lit cellar, deprived of fresh air, sunlight and physical exercise. A 1987 report by two independent veterinarians, Bill Jordan, formerly a consultant to several international zoos, and Dr M. Woodford, an elephant specialist, concluded that no animal should be kept in underground accommodation. They stated: "In spite of the recent expenditure of 15,000 pounds on 'improvements' to the animal accommodation we do not consider that the premises are suitable for the humane maintenance of captive, large, wild animals. They are, in fact, barely adequate for domestic animals which can be exercised outside." They found two twelve-year old elephants housed in an area measuring 12x4m, the animals taken out for exercise only twice a week. Because "they are never allowed into the exercising area," the vets concluded, "partly because they refuse to go past the lions to get into this area, and partly because it is barely big enough for them to enter and turn around, the accommodation provided for elephants is inadequate." The show's eight lions were accommodated in a row of cubicles, and although provided with an "exercise cage", Jordan and Woodford noted that it was "hemmed in by tall buildings and it is doubtful if the sun ever penetrates that far." They concluded that "the mauling of the trainer which took place on the 18th July, after our visit, supports the contention that there are too many lions performing in too small an area."

Jordan and Woodford reserved some of their harshest criticism for the deplorable living conditions of the Pygmy hippopotamus: "This animal is kept alone in a small L-shaped enclosure measuring 6mx4m in which there is a water tank just large enough for it to clamber into. To get into the tank it has to climb up 4 or 5 steps and then drop into the water. This is a tropical species which normally lives in small groups and so it must suffer from being kept underground, alone, in artificial light for 5 months. The staff admitted that this animal is kept as a gimmick as it does not perform in the ring. . . We question the morality in exhibiting an IUCN Red Book vulnerable species for entertainment purposes. . ."

Lancashire County Council, following a subsequent inspection, unanimously condemned the animals' living quarters, though because Blackpool Tower is privately owned, their hands were tied. Unexpectedly, it was then that the Chairman of First Leisure Corporation, Lord Delfont - admitting that he was bowing to public pressure - announced that there would be no more animals in the Tower Circus when the current contract with impresario Peter Jay expires in 1990. Lady Delfont also played a leading role in opposition to the Tower's circus animals. "She said 'close the damn zoo or I will divorce you' - what choice was I left with?" asked the besieged Lord. A hastily formed association, the Blackpool Tower Support Group, its ranks and influence swelled by members of the ACP and the Circus Fans' Association, then promptly set about undermining the decision, launching a petition drive in a bid to have it overturned. Publicity material states that "as a member of the Association of Circus Proprietors, the Tower circus is subject to regular inspections by internationally famous TV zoo vets David Taylor and Andrew Greenwood. The animals are cared for and housed subject to their rigorous guide-lines." Indeed, the Blackpool Tower Support Group quoted Taylor - whose veterinary escapades formed the basis for the popular BBC television series One by One - in support of their petition and publicity-drive: "In my experience, animals in the circus are very healthy, certainly as healthy as animals in zoos and safari parks. Circus animals have no occupational diseases. They have more personal care and attention from their keepers and trainers. . . The animals in the circuses operated by members of the Association of Circus Proprietors are certainly kept healthy, using the most up-to-date veterinary equipment. . . based on my knowledge of animal behaviour in the wild and captivity and on medical evidence, I would say they are pretty content with their lot." Incredibly, the Circus Fans' petition went on to claim that the Blackpool Tower elephants "have their own living area and pen where they can roam freely," and that the "only basis for proper animal training is patience and respect and a rapport between animals and their trainer. They enjoy working with people - it is of therapeutic value as it provides them with something interesting to do and prevents them getting bored." David Taylor however - evidently seething that his name had been dragged into the controversy - declared: "I have never inspected the Blackpool Tower Circus premises." He went on to complain in the press that "I haven't been to the Blackpool Tower Circus for 18 years. They have taken my remarks, which referred to circuses in general, and quoted them completely out of context. They are distorting and falsifying the facts. . . There are some animals which should never be kept in circuses." What is beyond dispute, however, is that Andrew Greenwood - who shares the famous veterinary consultancy with Taylor in West Yorkshire - is the official vet for Blackpool Tower Circus. Also beyond dispute is the fact that Greenwood has expressed his satisfaction with animal-keeping standards at the Circus, stating in one instance that the wildcat cages are "large and airy, even though they have no access to direct sunlight."

In view of David Taylor's more general comments in applauding the standards of animal welfare in the circus, it is perhaps all the more interesting to note that in his book Zoo Vet, he remarks: "Although many circus animals are trained without cruelty, there are still a few terrible black spots. You will find them in the smaller, tatty circuses and menageries if you can penetrate the closed, suspicious, obstructive world behind the scenes. It is a world skilled in repelling outsiders and deceiving humane society inspectors and, most important, able to move on if trouble is brewing. At first hand I have seen bears encouraged to move from travelling box to circus ring by flaming newspapers being thrust underneath them, and I have heard the regular, sickening thuds as a chained African elephant was beaten systematically with bamboo rods by two keepers to break it by literally torturing it until it collapsed. The most repellent feature of the process was the calm clinical way in which the keepers administered the beating. It was a job, just like grooming, which called for a repetitive movement for long periods of time: no anger, no emotion, just a boring job of beating. Of course, when the police arrived the men were indeed grooming the elephant. Bamboo rods applied with all a man's might across the rib-cage of an elephant leave no marks." Taylor continues: "At another circus I watched an act purporting to be a chimpanzees' tea party where the animals were not just as good as gold, they were almost automatons. The audience marvelled at the obedience of the little apes and smiled as the trainer fondled their hairy heads. It was all in the fondling. The man showed me his thumb-nail, which had been allowed to grow long and then filed to a vicious point. It was strong and horny, and he used it with cruel skill to gouge and twist the sensitive flaps of the chimpanzees' ears. It was really a display of brutal sleight-of-hand carried on in full view of the public. I was to find that this method of controlling chimps by their delicate ears was commonplace in the world of chimpanzee training; even mature specimens were subdued by the agony of a quickly applied hold."

Though many creatures to be found in circus beast wagons are currently listed as under threat or in danger of extinction, they are known to the zoo and circus fraternity as the "Noah's Ark" species not because the menagerie truly believes its own spiel about playing a vital role in conservation, but because it is these varieties of animals which are believed to be the crowd-pullers, those depicted in the colourful and comfortingly naive pictures in children's story books or those incarnated into Disney-like characters, anthropomorphised, endowed with human personalities, human desires and human vices. That may seem a marginal improvement on anthropocentrism, but the catch is that in the circus business, one has never cancelled out the other. Indeed, whether by accident or design, the anthropomorphised Noah's Ark animal is merely the projected illusion for public consumption; behind that warm image there is the hard reality of a circus manager trying to turn a profit, and an animal tamer who is under the stress of an ever-looming deadline to have his new and ever more spectacular act ready for public presentation. Such creatures may be portrayed by the circus dream machine as coming straight off Noah's Ark, but the fact is that for the sake of expedience, an animal, however endangered, is not only systematically deprived of its freedom and its innate dignity, but also the wild environment that gave it birth and shaped its very character and spirit.

Jim Clubb is part-owner and managing director of Clubb-Chipperfield, an ambitious enterprise that specialises in training exotic animals not only for the circus arena, but also for television and film advertising, the famous ESSO tiger being a prime example. A former wild animal trainer himself, Clubb gained a prestigious company name when he married Sally Chipperfield and for several years he toured with the Sally Chipperfield Circus. But with image-consciousness becoming ever more imperative in recent years, Clubb distances himself from the often scandal-afflicted Chipperfield dynasty, reputed to be one of the largest exotic animal-dealing concerns in the world. "My wife is a Chipperfield but we are completely different from the other Chipperfield Circus. I originally worked for Chipperfield's but I have run my own business for the last 10 years. But we are completely different - it's very important you say that. There are three Chipperfield's you see. There's my company, there's Chipperfield Enterprises which is the circus belonging to my wife's father, and then there is his brother Jimmy Chipperfield who has all the big safari parks. But I would say that we are probably one of the leading animal suppliers in the world now of trained circus acts." Echoing the almost identical sentiments of his contemporaries in the circus world, Clubb insists on the ecological credibility of his animal shows: "Let's put it this way, we are not taking animals from the wild. That is quite ridiculous. When everyone was saying that the tiger is in danger of extinction, we were breeding tigers at a rate of 50 a year. But the danger of putting captive bred animals into the wild is that they can't hunt properly and they become potential man-eaters. The problem is that the animal is dying-out in the wild but it's not dying-out in captivity. Nevertheless we believe that we educate people into how beautiful and intelligent these animals are - that's our conservation message." It is a message that Clubb also promotes vigorously in the circus press. Apart from publicising "James Clubb's pigs with baboon jockeys", recent advertisements have also touted the Clubb-Chipperfield organisation as "Breeders of Endangered Species of carnivores - tigers, leopards, jaguars, rare black jaguars, and, even rarer, striped hyenas." They are "the only striped hyenas in any circus in the world!" the advertisement continues breathlessly, adding that the enterprise owns and trains 250 animals of 50 different species. Similarly, Clubb's star attraction, 'Doutschka' is billed as "the only snow leopard in any circus in the world!"

Chris Krenger, public relations manager of one of the most respected circuses in Europe, Circus Knie of Switzerland, claims that "there is no doubt that the circus plays an important role in ecological education," because the performing and menagerie animal "provides people with the impetus to donate money to endangered species when seeing these animals face to face." David Hancocks, on the other hand, believes that animals in captivity have had a profoundly detrimental effect upon people's understanding and appreciation of wildlife. "In truth it must be recognised that many commonly held attitudes towards wild animals have grown from public contact with captive wildlife," he declares. "The use of the word 'monkey' in the English language is an illuminating example. The English had no natural contact with monkeys, and learned of them only from the aberrant behaviours of psychotic specimens in deprived environments; today the word monkey is used as a verb to illustrate grotesque actions, or as a noun synonymous with a mischievous child. Our concepts of many other wild animals are also distortions fostered by the conditions of menageries in circuses. . . To compound and extend these attitudes by exhibiting animals as 'freaks' in a circus is a serious threat and insult against wildlife conservation. It is impossible to excite the interest of the public in conserving bears and elephants when they are presented as mere curiosities under multi-coloured floodlights against the background of a show band. . . The fact that circuses are doing a disservice to the cause of wildlife conservation, and are actually helping to add confusion and delay to progress in this area by their methods of exhibition, is therefore a matter of urgent importance and is a particularly insidious danger."

Natural Behaviour

Though afforded an increasingly high profile as part of an aggressive and ingenious sales pitch to put critics on the defensive, one should not underestimate the support that the concept of the educational circus animal has found among active circus fans, government inspectors and some influential zoologists and ethologists. At centre stage of this new public relations strategy is the claim that the exotic animal performing in the arena displays nothing but the most natural of behaviour, fully in tune with its own innate instincts. To proponents of this view, even the most bizarre forms of animal dressage can now be justified as being "mere extensions" of an animal's natural behaviour, almost as though the trainer, far from exerting a coercive influence, actually plays nothing but the most passive and incidental of roles. Examples of such dressage are legion and if they appear to drag not only the animal but also science into the theatre of the absurd, then that must be a testament to the circus' unrivalled proficiency in spinning the most potent and compelling of illusions. Accordingly, even the archetypal "boxing kangaroo" - which only a few seasons ago also appeared at Peter Jay's CPA-approved Blackpool Tower - is portrayed as being true to its own natural instincts. More extreme styles of dressage, too preposterous even for the most ardent circus fan to justify in terms of "natural behaviour" are rarely condemned but greeted with a telling and uncomfortable silence: the ice-skating polar bears starring in a circus in the Ukraine, for example, the muzzled animals also riding a sledge, performing acrobatics, and dancing the waltz; or the "great musical and comical spectacular" of Spain's Toronto Travelling Circus, which features chimpanzees dressed as matadors, the terrified animals entertaining the holiday crowds by desperately trying to escape the charging bull in the arena.

Yet even the more mundane wild animal acts seem to stretch the idea of "natural behaviour" far beyond the bounds of credibility. The undisputed star of one of Clubb-Chipperfield's wildcat shows, for example, is a single snow leopard, one of Earth's most endangered species, with only about 250 - 500 surviving in the wild. But second-generation captive-bred in Helsinki zoo, this exquisite animal, like many others, will never return to its natural habitat. Indeed, what some ethologists have denounced as a "degrading spectacle" is vigorously defended by Jim Clubb in the belief that a display of the snow leopard's 'natural behaviour' in the circus arena not only provides the public with entertainment but also 'ecological education'. "We only train the animals to do natural things, not unnatural things," Clubb asserts. "I mean they naturally jump, they can naturally sit, or when they walk the double ropes in the air they would walk along the branch of a tree in exactly the same manner. So everything we teach them to do is only an extension of what they would naturally do in the wild. We are simply exploiting their natural abilities." But in the final analysis, as Clubb himself admits, it is the bottom line that counts: "We're in this business because we love it, but the only way we can keep these animals is to make money from them through public exhibition."

Similarly, Emil Smith, trainer and presenter of the Clubb-Chipperfield show, denies that his act is either degrading to the wildcats, or that his showmanship exhibits an archaic human supremacy over the animal kingdom. "Jumping, climbing, walking a pole - these are just slight variations of what the animal naturally does in the wild," comes the pat reply, as though he's been asked the question for the millionth time. In 1987, the act, which also features jaguars and African leopards, was put on tour throughout Europe, with Clubb having negotiated lucrative seasonal engagements in what are regarded as some of the best continental circuses, including Krone in Germany and Knie in Switzerland. To the sound of the Knie brass band playing the "Pink Panther," and "Jesus Christ Superstar," the climax of the act features the cats jumping onto glittering discotheque balls, and balancing themselves in a begging position as the silver globes revolve under the spotlights. In all honesty, could this be described as 'natural behaviour'? Says ethologist, government inspector and circus fan Dr Thomas Althaus: "This has to be put into perspective. For the animal, it doesn't care if it stands on a rock or a mirror. It jumps on that thing, it sits upright and it jumps down. That's its behaviour and there's absolutely nothing unnatural about it. The effect that is being added by use of the mirrors is just show. It's a way of presenting the beauty of the animal and the people are thrilled. They may be less attractive on a rock."

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