By Howard Chua-Eoan
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Ringling Brothers recognized that the country’s mood shift meant that the circus couldn’t do business as usual
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thick skin. But it clearly kept them in line. The Greatest Show on Earth was effectively worn down by a relatively low-key but tenacious campaign led in part by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which focused on getting city councils and municipalities to ban not just performing elephants but also the use of bullhooks—as Los Angeles and Oakland in California and Palm Beach and Miami Beach Counties in Florida did, all large markets. Furthermore, pieces in newspapers such as the Washington Post described how newborn elephants were allegedly maltreated. The fiction of human-animal harmony frittered away. Explaining Feld’s decision on Mar. 5, spokesman Stephen Payne said the country had undergone a “mood shift” regarding the ethics of performing animals. The marketplace had changed as a result of transformed public opinion, and it was no longer sound business practice to go on with the show, at least as originally envisioned. (Feld, which is privately held, will not divulge the financial effect the controversy has had on its operations.)
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The Elephants Take A Bow
Circuses and elephants have been inseparable in the American imagination for nearly 150 years. Together they contributed a word to the English language—jumbo, now synonymous with anything big, potentially unwieldy, perhaps dangerous, but with some possibly gigantic payoff. Jumbo was an enormous African elephant that P.T. Barnum bought from the London Zoo in 1882 and shipped to the U.S. to become the star of his circus. America became obsessed with Jumbo, a behemoth who was paraded out for audiences willing to pay for the amusement. After that, elephants became fixtures of any respectable American circus. Although Jumbo died in an 1885 railway accident, we continue to see his shadow in jumbo jets, Jumbotrons, and jumbo mortgages. On Mar. 5, the historic association between circus and elephant was abrogated when the Feld family, which owns Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus—the century-old merger of two rivals—announced that it would phase out its 13 performing Asiatic elephants by the beginning of 2018. They will join 28 pachyderms already resident at the Feld family-owned Center for Elephant Conservation in Florida. The Felds, who bought the circus in 1967 before selling it to Mattel and buying it back in 1982, had withstood more than a decade of legal challenges from animal rights groups that leveled charges of cruelty against the circus and its trainers. Just last year, Feld Entertainment won a $15.75 million settlement with humane societies in a case involving a former elephant trainer described by a federal court as being “essentially a paid plaintiff ” against the circus. Those legal wins weren’t enough to assure final victory. One of my first assignments as a journalist in New York City in the 1980s was to cover the amazing amble that the Ringling Bros. elephants took whenever they came to town: The public-relations stunt saw trainers escorting the huge animals from Madison Square Garden up the avenues of Manhattan to Central Park, where they’d pose for news photographers. Even though the skyscrapers towered over them, the elephants were the masters of the city. That appearance, though, was a deception. They were not even the masters of themselves. What more and more people saw as the years went by—and as I jotted down in my notes that day—was the use of bullhooks. To keep the elephants marching in single file up to the park, trainers whacked them with the ugly metal talons. No elephant cried out when the bullhook was used, and at the time I wondered how much of the claw could actually get under the elephants’
