Elephant-free circuses — and it’s about time

Make entertainment humane, writes Delcianna J. Winders.

This weekend, the Royal Canadian Circus is coming to Ottawa for the first time. Also for the first time, this circus is elephant-free.

For years, the Royal Canadian Circus, put on by the U.S.-based Tarzan Zerbini Circus, has featured elephants who are kept chained and forced to perform under threat of punishment.

Endangered elephants can only be moved across borders legally if doing so will help the species. Shackling elephants (who evolved to roam great distances and suffer life-threatening foot and joint problems when confined), forcing them to perform unnatural tricks, and beating them when they don’t obey hardly helps conservation. In fact, studies show that such performances likely undermine conservation efforts.

But under a dubious scheme set up by the U.S. government dubbed “pay-to-play,” Zerbini obtained import-export permits in exchange for promising to contribute a small fraction of its profits to conservation.

Once it had the permits in hand, Zerbini didn’t follow through on this promise. As a result, the circus’s permits to transport elephants between countries were recently suspended.

This isn’t the first time Zerbini has run afoul of legal requirements. Together, Zerbini and Two Tails Ranch, a Florida pseudo-sanctuary that the circus partners with and uses to warehouse elephants, have been cited for more than two-dozen animal-welfare violations, including keeping an elephant in chains indefinitely with no reprieve.

Circus workers have also admitted that the elephants are beaten. After a witness in Ontario reported one such beating, a handler with Zerbini admitted to “disciplin(ing)” an elephant who had attacked someone.

Beating elephants is known to provoke aggression, and that animal went on to rampage three times, injuring more than a dozen spectators and killing a handler before she was gunned down in Honolulu.

Other elephants with Tarzan Zerbini have also caused injuries. An elephant trampled a handler to death following a circus performance, elephants sent at least two other workers to the hospital, and at least a dozen additional members of the public have been injured.

Zerbini has also exhibited elephants who have been exposed to tuberculosis. Elephants carry the human strain of tuberculosis, which is airborne and easily transmissible. Seven people were recently diagnosed with the disease after exposure to elephants at a zoo. Zerbini has a history of violating laws intended to prevent tuberculosis transmission.

After Ontario officials learned that Zerbini was giving rides to children on tuberculosisexposed elephants, they ordered that the animals be quarantined, then removed from the country. Is a few fleeting moments of entertainment really worth this suffering, harm to conservation, and serious risks to public health and safety?

More and more, circuses are evolving to offer safer and more humane shows. The Saskatchewan Shrine Circus recently announced that it would no longer feature wild animals.

When Ringling Bros. Circus recently retired elephants from its shows, it noted that the circus “has always been about changing with the times.” Zerbini itself stresses that its “show isn’t designed around the elephants, (it) is a worldrenowned show about tradition and families performing for families.”

Let’s hope this year marks a new, safer and more humane era for Canadian circuses, an era of elephant-free shows. If so, the Zerbini elephants should be retired not to Two Tails Ranch, which, like the circus, chains elephants, but to an accredited sanctuary where they can finally be elephants.

Delcianna J. Winders is Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Fellow.

Is a few fleeting moments of entertainment really worth this suffering?