Circuses Are No Fun for Animals

Circuses Are No Fun for Animals

by RaeLeann Smith

As a circus specialist with the animal rights organization PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), RaeLeann Smith works to educate people about the cruelty involved in circuses and other animal acts and meets with legislators to develop ordinances that protect animals used for entertainment. She is currently working to promote legislation in Chicago that would be the strongest elephant protection law in the United States. As a guest writer for Advocacy for Animals this week, Smith discusses the abusive treatment of elephants and other animals in circuses.

Recently, four zebras and three horses escaped from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Colorado and ran loose near a busy interstate highway for 30 minutes. This harrowing incident is just the latest in a long series of escapes and rampages that illustrate the dangers that animals in circuses pose to both themselves and the public. Transporting wild animals from town to town is inherently stressful for these animals, as it requires that they be separated from their families and social groups and intensively confined or chained for extended periods of time. It’s no surprise that many animals try to escape.

The modern circus traces its history to the Roman Circus Maximus, an elongated U-shaped arena constructed in a long narrow valley between two of Rome’s seven hills. In the arena, both aristocrats and commoners attended chariot races, equestrian events, and, later, wild-animal displays. Although the events staged in the Circus Maximus began as fairly benign popular entertainment, they became increasingly violent spectacles. Little attention was paid to those injured or killed during these events—slaves and animals—because they were “nonpersons” according to Roman law.

The modern circus arose in the early 19th century, beginning with equestrian and acrobatic acts. A circus first claimed to have tamed wild animals in 1820. In 1851 George Bailey added a menagerie, including elephants, to his show. Flying trapeze artists, clowns, and a live orchestra rounded out the fledgling circus. In 1871 a human “freak” show was added.

Although human freak shows have nearly disappeared, animal circuses otherwise continue relatively unchanged. Animals in circuses are still deprived of their basic needs to exercise, roam, socialize, forage, and play. Signs of their mental anguish include a plethora of stereotypical behaviors, such as swaying, pacing, bar-biting, and self-mutilating. Sometimes these animals lash out, injuring and killing trainers, caretakers, and members of the public. They are transported up to 50 weeks a year in stifling, cramped, and dirty trailers and train cars and are forced to perform confusing and physically challenging tricks, such as standing on their heads, riding bicycles, or jumping through rings of fire. In the wild, these animals would be ranging long distances and enjoying rich social lives.

Animal Abuse

The harsh treatment of animals in circuses has spawned protests by humane societies and animal rights groups, which have focused on abusive training and handling practices, the constant confinement endured by the animals, and the dangers that animal circuses pose to the public.

Training methods for animals used in circuses involve varying degrees of punishment and deprivation. Animals perform not because they want to but because they’re afraid not to. In the United States, no government agency monitors animal training sessions.

Former Ringling animal crew employees Archele Hundley and Bob Tom contacted PETA independently after witnessing what they described as routine animal abuse in the circus, including a 30-minute beating of an elephant in Tulsa, Okla., that left the animal screaming and bleeding profusely from her wounds. Hundley and Tom reported that elephants are chained whenever they are out of public view and are forced to perform while sick or injured. They also reported that horses are grabbed by the throat, stabbed with pitchforks, punched in the face, given painful “lip twists,” and whipped. Other Ringling whistleblowers have confirmed these abuses.

PETA obtained undercover video footage of the Carson & Barnes Circus that shows elephant trainer Tim Frisco beating elephants with a sharp metal training device called a “bullhook” during a training session. The animals cry out in pain. Frisco tells other trainers, “Hurt ’em. Make ’em scream.” Frisco also warns other trainers to avoid beating the elephants in public view. Undercover video footage of animal training at various other facilities has revealed the widespread use of abusive techniques, including beating elephants with bullhooks and shocking them with electric prods, striking big cats with whips and sticks and dragging them by heavy chains tied around their necks, smacking and prodding bears with long poles, and kicking chimpanzees and beating them with riding crops.

Animals used in circuses may travel thousands of miles a year during extreme weather conditions. They are confined to boxcars and trailers and have no access to basic necessities, such as food, water, and veterinary care. Some elephants spend most of their lives in shackles. One study of traveling circuses reported on an elephant who was forced to spend up to 96 percent of her time in chains. Tigers and lions usually live and travel in cages that are four feet high, seven feet long, and seven feet wide, with two big cats crammed into a single cage. Big cats, bears, and primates are forced to eat, drink, sleep, defecate, and urinate in the same cramped cages.

Constant travel, forced inactivity, and long hours standing on hard surfaces in their own waste lead to serious health problems and early death in captive elephants. At least 25 elephants with Ringling have died since 1992, including four babies. Circuses routinely tear unweaned baby elephants from their mothers to be trained and sent on the road.

Escapes and Attacks

There have been hundreds of incidents involving animal attacks and escapes from animal circuses, often resulting in property damage, injuries, and death for both humans and animals.

Perhaps the most dramatic animal attack involved Tyke, an elephant traveling with Circus International in Honolulu in 1994. In an hour-long episode, Tyke killed her trainer and caused injuries to more than a dozen people. Police fired 87 bullets into Tyke before finally killing her. This was not the first time that Tyke had acted out; she had previously caused $10,000 in damage during a Shrine Circus performance in Altoona, Pa., and attacked a trainer in North Dakota, breaking two of his ribs.

Other attacks by elephants, big cats, primates, and bears are common but haven’t received as much media attention because they are rarely videotaped. Many circuses, including Ringling, do not allow video cameras in the arena. In order to avoid publicity, circuses are often quick to settle lawsuits that allege injuries.

Circus Bans


New Trends

Circuses that use animals have been struggling with falling attendance rates and public disillusionment as people learn more about wild animals and their complex physical and emotional needs. Many of the smaller animal circuses have merged or gone out of business. The trend in circus entertainment has been shifting away from the use of animals, as evidenced by the hugely successful Cirque du Soleil. This Montreal-based circus, founded by two street performers in 1984, features only human performers and now has as many as 15 shows running simultaneously around the world. With attendance at animal circuses dwindling, smaller, nonanimal circuses have proliferated, including the New Pickle Circus, the Imperial Circus of China, the Hiccup Circus, and the Flying High Circus.

Images: Elephant led with bullhook–courtesy PETA; elephants in chains–courtesy PETA.

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Books We Like

Rose-tinted Menagerie coverThe Rose-Tinted Menagerie
William Johnson (1994)

The Rose-Tinted Menagerie, published in 1990, is a history of the training and use of animals as performers and servants, and the picture it paints is not amusing, nor is it flattering to humankind. (The title refers to the common view of circuses and menageries as harmless, innocent fun, seen through “rose-tinted glasses.”) In the first chapter, “The Blood-Red Menagerie: The Circus in Ancient History,” Johnson informs the reader that, before circuses with “performing” animals were developed during the Roman Empire, the equally rich culture of Egypt as early as 2500 B.C. counted jugglers and acrobats among its troupes of entertainers. Egyptians kept animals as pets and used them in hunting. But, “Egyptian aristocracy … regarded many creatures from the cat to the crocodile as sacred, [and] there were no performing animals as such. It was necessary that a far more mechanistic culture, one almost contemptuous of nature, would invent the idea of the performing wild beast, quite simply because from its very inception, its basis was to ridicule and demean the innate character of the animal.” That culture was Rome circa 329 B.C. and later, when public celebrations such as inaugurations and the dedication of the Colosseum called for the bloody slaughter of thousands of wild animals before cheering (or, sometimes, sickened) audiences.

In addition to these mass killings, Rome was treated to bear-baiting and gladiator contests against animals. Some animals were saved from slaughter and were trained through merciless beating to perform tricks. There were tightrope-walking elephants and dancing bears. These feats might seem harmless or amusing and even today are performed to the delight of unreflecting audiences. But through Johnson’s explanations, readers learn the often brutal tricks of “training” animals; it becomes clear that these exercises involve domination, humiliation, and pain, and any pleasure one might take in seeing a chimpanzee ride a bicycle should evaporate.

In subsequent chapters Johnson continues the history of the circus into modern times and branches out into considerations of dolphin shows, traveling menageries, and other venues using animals as entertainment. Exposing the practices of these businesses also involves dealing with where the animals come from; thus, a chapter on the trade in endangered species exposes loopholes in international law, and other chapters give the lie to the idea that seeing animals performing in a circus or captive in a zoo has “educational” benefits. The chapter “Justice Undone” shows how the law lets down circus and other performing animals needing protection from cruel treatment like that revealed in later chapters on circus training methods and international dolphin and whale capture.

Because The Rose-Tinted Menagerie (whose full text is available online at has not been updated since its publication, discussions of the law may now be inaccurate, but circuses, zoos, and commercial dolphin and whale shows continue to thrive, and the principle remains the same. As one reviewer said, “The animal show is, literally, a dramatization of our superiority over the animal kingdom, an enactment of little parables of mastery and servitude.”

—L. Murray


42 Replies to “Circuses Are No Fun for Animals”

  1. I have no problem with animals being are humble servants. I actually feel that an animals being a servant is a happy animal. When animals are abused it is wrong servatude and abuse are two very different things. Animal abuse is wrong, but I also feel that animals should serve us in captivity.

  2. I find that a little chilling. “Animals should serve us in captivity.” You may feel that a servant animal is a happy animal, but what is the evidence that animals agree with you? Unfortunately, the animals are not consulted, and they have no power to make their wishes known beyond, for example, eventually running mad and trampling onlookers.

  3. What ! Dorthia my goat has no problem making her wishes and desires known. No, I’m not only referring to circusses. I have lived with many animals all of my life and I find it easy to know what they want. Dorthia always lets me know just what she wants. If she wants new hay she cries (baas) and stands by her hay rack. If she wants me to put her blanket on she’ll cry and I’ll go out and put it on. She likes to pick wich blanket she wants to wear. If she wants grain she baas and looks at the grain barrel. If she wants alfalfa she’ll put her foot on here purple feeder and baas for me to come. If she wants to sleep in the house for the night she opens the back door trots in and opens my bedroom door ( I have the straight knobs so she can open them) and hops on my bed and goes to sleep . If I’m not in bed by nine o clock she comes out and baas at the top of her lungs until I go to bed with her. If any of my friends sleep over they have to sleep on the couches becuase she gets mad if they sleep in my room. Wich leads me to wander who serves who .

  4. Well you have a very well trained goat, and probably good intentions of taking care of that goat for NON-monetary gain. The only reason animals are ever put in harms way is for money and when people are driven by money, they’ll do just about anything & hurt just about anyone. Your goat communicates & you respond, that’s how they learn. The circus owners do not respond to the wishes of the animals they enslave, therefore it’s irrelevant. My kids have never been to, nor will they ever go to a circus. It’s cruelty, plain & simple. They’ve never ridden the little horses that are strapped to wood & walked in circles at the fair… none of it, because if those animals had their way, they’d be free, not tied to anything forced to entertain so thier human owners could reep the rewards. Just plain pitiful.

  5. I enjoy circusses I go every year. To watch the animals do tricks. Animals are just dumb they are our slaves after all Natalie.

  6. I never attend circuses because I know what they do to these animals. Animals are not our slaves and do not have a role in serving any of us humans because they share this world with us. They should be allowed to live in the wild, free to enjoy their own lives within the animal kingdom and not isolated into our pathetic society because people want to make money off them.

  7. See – you’ll laugh and be sick at the same time. This website, known as “The Center for Elephant Conservation,” is a website describing how the owners are “devoted to the conservation of the Asian elephant.” This site is run by… Ringling Bros. Not only do they torture their animals, but they have the absolute GALL to create a website that says how good they are to their elephants. Ha! The hypocrisy is astounding.



  9. Hi, I strongly agree that ALL animals should be kept out of circuses. Elephants are mistreated and beaten to perform tricks and people should be made aware of this and ultimately they should boycott circuses. You might want to put this up on Facebook. There are a lot of people who would rally to this cause and I’m sure would sign PETA’s petition against this. Put pressure on Ringling Bros. to make them stop. Posting this on Facebook would be well worth your while. Thank you and good luck!!! bsta

  10. There’s nothing wrong with an animal being taught to do a trick, but when they’re FORCED to learn the trick, there’s something wrong. These people torture the innocent animals, and it’s horrible.
    If they taught them some cool but easy tricks using treats and encouragement, then sure, i’d love the circus, the animals wouldn’t be free, but if their needs were fully required, it would be okay.
    but the needs aren’t required, and it’s just plain cruel.

  11. that is not fair for them animals to to therew that every doy i think that is bull. i think people that make them animals suffer bydoin that that we should do it to themm right and see how they like it.

  12. hi i didnt read the hole thing but i think it is terably crule to abuse any animal in any situation.I love manatees and there endangered so i was wondering if you could help prevent them from going extinct so if you dont alredy recycle please do that i would be soooooooo happy


  14. I was at the 1993 circus when Tyke went on a rampage in altoona. He did it again 3 months later in dakota then killed his trainer and some other people 6 months later in honalulu. These animals can only take so much before they break. No Circus is safe when there are WILD animals. They call em WILD for a reason. I would never attend another circus again. [last statement edited by moderator]

  15. You people are one sided with your reporting of Circus Animals. Sure, there are some people who are cruel, who works elephants and perhaps a little strong with the bull hook. For the most part however, the handlers and trainers are very compassionate, and have a tremendous love for the animals the work with. The owners of the animals want the best of care for their animals, because number one they have a huge investment in them, and many are replaceable.

    I have been around some of you PETA folks in previous years, and many of you have a lot to be desired when it comes to honesty and integrity. Why not be honest with your readers, and just tell the truth. We all love the animals, be it domestic or circus animals.

    Elephants have a very thick skin, this is the reason for the elephants hooks. They use them in India, and other native Countries where the elephants are born and run wild. The Indians have used the elephant for centuries, as a beast of burden.

    Many of you PETA people are opponents of the Chicken processing plants, but most of you eat chicken. Many of these animals in the circus, especially the elephants are better off in the circus than they are in the wild. They don’t have to worry about some sicko taking their life, and they are well fed.

    It would be nice if you folk would tell the WHOLE STORY, and not just the bad parts of the story to the people who don’t know all of the facts.

    1. You are off-base in so many ways, it’s hard to know what to address first. I’m even quite reluctant to do so at all, based on the hostile opener “You people.” Let’s just say anyone who sets up a straw man like “most of you eat chicken,” when you don’t know us, is evidently prone to making things up for the sake of argument. (The author of the article is a vegan; I’m sure that will end up counting against her in some way, too, right?) Elephants do not have thick skin any more than you do, at least not thick enough that they can be snagged with hooks without injury. Where do you think the documented injuries from bullhooks came from? The fact that you use language like “elephants are used… ” and that seems quite normal to you shows what you think of elephants. Elephants are better off in the circus because they don’t have to worry about some sicko taking their life? What “sicko” is that? Captivity and exploitation by a whole slew of “sickos” is not better than a life in the wild. Besides, you are arguing that because free-ranging elephants are subject to being harmed and injured by humans, their being held captive and made to perform is A-okay. That’s just illogical.

  16. I cant believe what people are doing to animals its sick, ide like to treat them the way their treating those poor animals.

  17. I hate to see animals like that and im only 12 years of age animals should rome freely not to put on a show in less they want to do it so now how about act like animals in the circus how u feel about that

  18. im only 13 and a huge animal lover and i do think animals could serve us but we dont have to work them to death for crying out loud

  19. I’ve done several months worth of scientific research into keeping elephants in captivity for entertainment purposes. It is neither good for them to be kept in captivity, nor for them to be used for entertainment in any way. They do not think the way humans think, because they are wild animals. Dogs were domesticated over many thousands of years, and cats are still not as well domesticated as dogs are, because cats have not been domesticated equally long as dogs. Hence elephants, who have been kept in captivity on a smaller scale and for an even shorter period of time, are essentially wild animals.

  20. @ Samantha: Animals enjoy serving us? Really? And you know this how? In what capacity does the goat serve you? Sounds like a spoiled pet to me; not a forced performer chained, screamed at, billhooked in it’s most tender places and God knows what else. I don’t think you’re a cruel person, but ignorance can be just as destructive. Research and learn what abuse entails.
    As for tricks, captive animals NEVER and I respect my dog/cats too much to use them for my own vanity, and I won’t even! get started on clothing and accessorizing pets! Lol!

  21. why do people feel the need to go to circuses anyways?! I have never been to one and I do not plan on it… these animals should be able to live without having to please us and being treated horribly!!!! this makes my stomach hurt and makes me vey sick that people actually wake up and say, “hey why don’t we go to the circuis today!!!!” I hope these people don’t know what they do to these beautiful cratures but I bet if they did they wouldn’t even think about going!!! or maybe they are just like those cruel ugly and disgusting people who don’t care about their feelings…animals do have feelings and they DO feel pain…

  22. aniamls beign abused is wrong on so many levels!!! im only 12 and when i see any animals i automatically feel what it feel expecially with horses

  23. How do you know that the animals don’t like being in the circus. You can’t get inside of there head. You can’t ask them. SO HOW DO YOU KNOW? Animals are sometimes in the circus because they CAN’T live in the wild because they are too small or they have something wrong with there health.

    1. We don’t have to read their minds to interpret that animals don’t like living in terrible conditions and being whipped with chains. And circuses are not sanctuaries. If the animals in circuses have health problems, circuses don’t offer a respite from them. Instead, they are very often the cause of those problems.
      For example:
      When allowed out, these animals are trained using extreme “discipline” such as whipping, hitting, poking, and shocking with electrical prods.
      You can read more here.
      -Michele, AFA staff

  24. animals shouldn’t be in a circus…They should live they’re normal lives with their freedom and not be kept in a cage they are important too. the animals are good to watch and it takes a lot of work to train but they shouldn’t be that way they could be in a Zoo maybe to be taken care of and pet but the circus isn’t fit for these animals.

  25. I hate seeing animals in the circus. It’s cruel. As a kid I begged my mom to take me to the circus, and she said no. I asked her why, and her response changed my perspective. She said she didn’t want to see animals in conditions like that. It makes me angry what animals have to go through.

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