Author’s Preface
"The exhibiting of trained animals I abhor. What an amount of suffering and cruel punishment the poor creatures have to endure in order to give a few moments of pleasure to men devoid of all thought and feeling."
~ Albert Schweitzer ~
Depicting lions and elephants roaming free in an almost pristine wilderness, a brightly-coloured facade acts as the public entrance to Knie's circus menagerie. Paradoxically, it also conceals from first view, cramped and barred animal wagons. It is here perhaps, in this vivid gateway of naive and exotic scenery, that one can perceive the very quintessence of the circus and its customary appendage, the travelling zoo.
The fascination that the circus evokes is, after all, part of an age-old tradition of sensation, stirring showmanship, and above all, illusion. There is the big top with its flying banners and flags, the arena where lion-tamers, conjurers, acrobats, clowns and jugglers test their skills before a spellbound and often rapturous audience. And there is the circus menagerie where visitors can come face to face with some of the most exotic and endangered animals in the world, from snow leopards to elephants, from rhinos to chimpanzees and orang-utans.
Realising that many of these animals will never be released from their cages - except perhaps to enter the circus ring - does the facade of the menagerie represent a Potemkin-like front of deliberate deceit or merely an innocuous juggling of reality to entrance the public? Are the animals as happy in their captivity as the circus would have us believe, or is this too no more than a conjuring trick, part of its professional vocation as being the grand master of illusion? What lies beyond this radiant facade, which seems to confer upon the menagerie a sublime sense of innocence, a bond of human empathy and friendship with the animal kingdom?
A visit to the zoo, it has been said, can tell us more about ourselves than about the animals we encounter locked into cages. In its essence perhaps, this idea sees the cage bars as representing the great divide between humanity and nature, a two-way mirror reflecting mutual imprisonment. Wandering casually around the typical circus menagerie, one can observe humans reacting to the animals beyond the bars in a multitude of different ways. Streaked with sweat, there are fathers who have come equipped with video cameras to record their family outing for posterity, encouraging the children to pose before a cage of fluffy and mischievous tiger cubs. There is a group of young girls taking an elephant ride, squealing in nervous excitement as the friendly lumbering giant lurches around the compound ringed by circus caravans. Standing on her pushchair with bright, excited eyes there is a toddler dangling a plush monkey toy in front of a cage of rhesus monkeys, trying to evoke some response from the nervously indifferent animals. Nearby, there's a gang of unruly schoolboys mocking the animals through the bars, pulling faces and mimicking the noises of the jungle. But at the other end of the menagerie, under the strong noonday sun, two young children are looking pensively into a cage of panthers and leopards that are panting from thirst and heat exhaustion as they lie on the aluminium floors of their barred wagons. Plaintively, and with devastating innocence, one of the children complains to his mother: "But they don't have any room to live!" Such disparate and often starkly polarised reactions are symptomatic of the controversy which is beginning to rock the very foundations of what the circus claims to be one of its oldest traditions: the travelling animal show. It is for this reason alone that circus illusion has become an ever more precious commodity, ingeniously employed to blunt and deflect burgeoning public criticism over animal abuse in the menagerie.
Writes circus historian Marian Murray: "Exaggeration is the very spirit of the circus, and certain circus men seem to have tried to outdo each other in mendacity." From the notorious dolphin dealer who claims to have "lost the least dolphins in the country", to the Italian circus whose menagerie features "the biggest and most ferocious gorilla in the world", from "The Greatest Show on Earth," to "the most modern dolphinarium in Europe," it is in this passion for rhetoric, hyperbole, and superlatives that one can perceive something altogether more sinister and contrived than mere showmanship. It is not only that the steel bars of the cages emphasise and even reinforce the separation between human and animal, or that the whip-wielding animal tamer serves to perpetuate the myth of human supremacy over nature. Lurking behind all the tinsel and glitter is a deliberate and systematic attempt to camouflage the cruelty and deprivation that the wild circus animal and dolphin must face in captivity. Yet the illusion of the circus and dolphinarium is today nowhere more evident than in their much-vaunted claim to be playing a vital role in education. Ice-skating polar bears, dolphins singing a squeaky rendition of "Happy Birthday", a snow leopard frozen into a begging posture while balancing on a revolving discotheque ball under multi-coloured spotlights; given the brashness and gall that is an inherent part of the circus tradition, perhaps one shouldn't be overly astonished that such degrading spectacles are now routinely portrayed as "natural behaviour". In this respect, there could hardly be a better motto for today's circus impresario than a line found in Lewis Carrol's Alice Through the Looking Glass: "It's as large as life and twice as natural!"
Though little more than an elaborate conjuring trick, the educational justification for the circus menagerie's continuing existence not only turns reality on its head, but also turns a spellbound and gullible audience into clowns. Even some respected scientists insist that there is "a certain something" in seeing a wild animal in the flesh that allegedly cannot be reproduced by any other means, a rather vague and decidedly unscientific term coined by Dr Margaret Klinowska to justify the continuing exploitation of dolphins in captivity in her review of the industry on behalf of the British government in 1985.
Yet not content with merely depicting itself as educational, the circus menagerie has also jumped on the conservation bandwagon, claiming that its efforts in captive breeding will ultimately help save endangered species from extinction. But like all circus illusions, this one too is both tenuous and contradictory and does not bear-up to further scrutiny. Indeed, wary of potential public interest in the release of their animals into the wild, circus owners and their animal trainers are the first to admit to the impracticalities of re-introduction, partly on the grounds that their animals have lost their natural instincts - though they hasten to add that the creatures retain enough of their innate wildness to be 'educational' in the ring. Rather, the circus seems to be idly mimicking the current fad of the world's high-tech zoos which, while paying only lip service to the cause of protecting natural habitats, have devised a kind of Thousand Year Reich of animal conservation, intending to "keep species on ice" for the millennium it will take until the Earth's human population declines and pressure eases on the environment. With characteristic opportunism, the circus gratefully shadows the footsteps of such consummate futility, their beast wagons holding some of the most endangered species in the world, ostensibly to be conserved for the dim and distant future. For the most part, they will be only too literally conserved, like vacuum-packed meat in the supermarket or pickled organs in the laboratory. Deprived of their natural instincts and the habitat which, teeming with influences, shaped their very character and existence both as unique species and unique individuals, many are destined to become no more than bizarre parodies of their former selves, spiritually dead, tamed, broken, their wild knowledge lost forever.
Asian elephants, Bengal tigers, lowland gorillas, Himalayan bears, Pygmy hippos - these are just some of the creatures who must endure a life-time of captivity in chains or behind bars, inhabiting an environment characterised by deprivation, starkness, emptiness. Small wonder then, that many creatures are driven to insanity in this "Noah's Ark" of the circus. Though showmen and impresarios prefer to term them the "ambassadors of the animal kingdom", sadly, they are often no more than ailing, unwilling emissaries of a dying world. Indeed, the whips, muzzles, chains, electric prods, and other tools used in the circus are constant reminders that these animals are being forced to perform for their human audience. And in this respect the performing circus animal is at the mercy not only of the master who wields the whip but also the public who, distracted by the glittering show, either overlooks or ignores its plight.
Though every sub-species tiger is on the endangered species list, in the circus, bred to excess, they are often worth more dead than alive. Those cuddly and delightfully mischievous newborn cubs, star attractions of the menagerie, all too soon grow-up and become an unwanted burden that must somehow be disposed of - to a disreputable animal dealer perhaps, some down-at-heel travelling show, a research laboratory or even restaurants or food wholesalers who specialise in exotics meats. Other species may often fare little better; the elephants of the Chipperfield circus dynasty, for example, which in 1986 were chained in a pitch-black container in the hold of a ship for several months, while on a problem-plagued 40,000 km journey around the world; or the Russian performing bears who must spend most of their lives confined to a cage a metre square, their psychological terror and aggression blunted by the habitual use of drugs. These are the bitter realities of today's animal ghettoes, and although some children still dream of running away to the circus, perhaps many of the animals forced to perform in the arena dream of running away from the big top. Yet in all this misery there are vast profits at stake, not only at the circus and dolphinarium turnstile, but also in animal dealing. Dealers like the notorious Walter Sensen of West Germany, for instance, continue to line their own pockets by trafficking in endangered species such as Asian elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees and Commerson dolphins.
Notwithstanding the subterfuge that the industry has constructed out of education and conservation, the exploitation of animals in the circus menagerie and dolphinarium is actually characterised by a profound human ignorance of wildlife and ecology, not to mention the same chronic human psychosis which is inexorably turning a green planet into a desert - our belief in our own supremacy as a species, and the conviction that all of creation has been put exclusively at our disposal. "What has the elephant done, what crime has the elephant committed that it should be kept in chains?" asks elephant specialist Dr. Fred Kurt, yet few scientists dare to ask such ultimately pertinent questions. Steeped as it is in utilitarian anthropocentrism, the law does little to prevent the systematic abuse of the performing animal. In its own circus-like contortions to marry-off economic pragmatism with "ethical considerations" it has unwittingly contrived to further the myth of the content and happy animal prisoner. It is thus that under the existing legal regime, those vested with a responsibility to ensure the protection of menagerie animals are more likely to give the circus manager the benefit of the doubt rather than the animals themselves. Furthermore, a legislative process that does little more than to legitimise the crime also reduces us to bicker about pool sizes and what constitutes authentic education under the big top or valid conservation in the beast wagon, when in actual fact we should be agreeing on a fundamental bill of rights for the animal nation.
A tropical paradise, pristine beaches of white coral sands, palm trees, crystal waters, a blue infinite horizon, and a school of jumping, playing dolphins. Alluring and iridescent scenes like this act as the backdrop to many a concrete dolphin pool reeking of chlorine. Much has been said, written and sung of the relationship between two of the most highly evolved life forms on the planet, one inhabiting land, the other sea. Yet today, in a society where nothing is sacred, this also includes the dolphin which in countless marine circuses around the world has been reduced to a perpetually-smiling clown coerced to perform a tedious repertoire of stunts to entertain the public. For the oceanarium manager the frozen smile of the captive dolphin is a happy illusion. More than any other single contrived ruse in his own tedious repertoire of deceit, it is that endearing, irresistible dolphin smile which so conveniently serves to camouflage misery and pitiless exploitation. It camouflages the fact that once in human hands, even the bubbling ebullient dolphin can be turned into a suicidal manic depressive; it helps to conceal the brutal capture of the animals in the wild, where, for every individual destined to live in the "synthetic sea water" of the oceanarium tank, many others may perish, including mothers and nursing calfs; finally, it also tends to allay the suspicion, felt by many, that the dolphin pool is actually nothing more than a bare, concrete jail. The harsh discipline and the relentless clockwork routine that the captives must face also seems to bear a striking resemblance to human prison camps designed to break, punish and degrade their inmates. As former whale and dolphin trainer Doug Cartlidge points out, "deprivation of food plus solitary confinement in reduced areas is still being used in the discipline and training of cetacea." Yet 'Flipper Inc.' is a billion-dollar enterprise; in recent years, notwithstanding greater public concern for animal rights, performing dolphins have been discovered languishing in hotel swimming pools, in primitive travelling circuses, and even in nightclubs to add - what should we say? - a certain exotic something to a strip-tease revue.
During the course of my investigation into the international dolphin trade, which I first embarked upon in 1985, the most incriminating and lurid evidence was provided by former dolphin trainers who once represented such enterprises as Conny Gasser's Travelling Flipper Show, Don Robinson's Flamingo Land in Yorkshire, Windsor Safari Park founded by circus baron Billy Smart, and the most infamous of all, Bruno Lienhardt's Liechtenstein-registered postbox company, the International Dolphin Show. In sixteen years, these few trainers alone have had the first-hand knowledge of 62 dolphins dying in captivity.
One particular episode illustrates how the rose-tinted veil conceals such deaths and misery from the public. In 1972, Debbie Steele, who now works with the mentally-handicapped in London, was an assistant dolphin-trainer at Jean Tiebor's Porthcawl dolphinarium in South Wales. On the date in question, the 2.74m deep pool contained three dolphins, two large females and a younger, smaller individual named Baby Tara. With a packed house and Harlech Television cameras recording the show, image became of such paramount importance that not even a stricken, mortally-wounded dolphin was permitted to disrupt the happy, smiling illusion. "There were about 500 people in the audience and the television cameras were there," recounts Debbie Steele. "During the show, we suddenly realised that the two females had stopped performing and we saw them swimming very fast around the pool and both of them ramming the baby. The baby went to one side, all wobbly and obviously in distress, and I rushed towards the pool ready to dive in and pick her up but the boss stopped me and said 'no, we must make it look like it's part of the show.' So I got into a wet suit double-quick, came around the side of the pool, presented myself to the audience, dived in, and held-up the baby to the surface of the water so she could breathe. She was still alive then, wiggling and twitching a bit and breathing in gasps. Then I swam her into the holding pen and there she died while the show went on. For the next 20 minutes I was treading-water, holding her up and pretending she was still alive. When the last person in the audience had left and the television crew had dismantled their equipment, they finally fished me out, and then the body of Baby Tara which they laid out on the side of the pool. No one in the audience had realised a thing, and I was seething at the deceit of it all and the part that they'd made me play in it. I quit there and then."
No doubt today's impresario in the dolphin trade will describe such abuse as a thing of the past, but the public has been fobbed off with the same routine patter since cruelty was first condemned in the circus, menagerie and dolphinarium. Indeed, the "thing of the past" is perhaps the most enduring of all brightly-coloured circus illusions. Yet the figment of the happy performing animal in the circus is not quite as old as the much-cherished tradition itself. Indeed, when the circus menagerie began its life almost two thousand years ago, it was not rose-tinted at all, but blood-red.
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