Animals used in traveling shows and menageries are often subjected to severe abuse in order to force them to provide “entertainment” at county and state fairs, shopping malls, theme parks, schools, flea markets, nursing homes, birthday parties, and trade shows. Typical acts include “performing” baboons, donkey basketball games, pig racing, and pig diving. At some events, members of the public can pay to have their photographs taken with tiger and lion cubs. The variations are limited only by the imaginations of the exhibitors, who are looking to make an easy dollar. Baby animals are continuously bred for and then discarded from these shows.

Training, Transport, and Display Are Harmful to Animals
Rigorous training methods involving electric shock, beatings, and food deprivation are used to force animals to perform acts that are unnatural and confusing to them. Some trainers starve animals or surgically remove their teeth and claws.
 

Pig races at fairs are all too familiar, and they’ve taken on a new twist at events in which potbellied pigs are “swum” in pools. Pigs are not aquatic animals by nature, and according to one pig caretaker, “a pig in the water is almost completely helpless and extremely stressed.”(1) These highly intelligent, sensitive animals are also stressed by the constant travel and the large, boisterous crowds.
 

Every year, schools, civic clubs, and recreation departments use donkey basketball games as fundraisers. During these games, donkeys are dragged around a court and mistreated by participants who have no animal-handling experience. “Uncooperative” animals are often punched, kicked, whipped, and screamed at, and many animals are prohibited from eating or drinking before a game to prevent “accidents.” It is not uncommon for riders to become injured when they fall off the donkeys’ backs or when frustrated animals lash out.
 

Animals used in traveling acts are almost constantly confined to tiny transport cages or trailers. They suffer in extreme temperatures and are not provided with adequate food and water. The Zoo, a traveling animal exhibit run by Robert Engesser, has been repeatedly cited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for inadequate animal care practices, including failure to provide proper diets, veterinary care, or environmental enrichment. On one visit, the inspecting veterinarian reported algae in the water buckets, a lion cub who was being fed inappropriate milk replacers, and a baboon who was being kept in solitary confinement and who was rolling her head and pacing, behaviors that indicate extreme mental distress.(2)
 

Without exercise, animals become listless and prone to illness, and as a reaction to stress and boredom, many resort to self-mutilation. Three 11-day-old tiger cubs who were being used for photo opportunities by a traveling zoo called Perry’s Exotic Petting Zoo became listless, nauseated, and dehydrated while on exhibit in Thornton, Colo. They died without receiving veterinary care. The USDA inspector investigating the deaths wrote, “Transportation and handling stresses cannot be ruled out as contributing to their failed health.”(3) Undercover video showed that after the Amarillo Wildlife Refuge forced a tiger cub named Ziggy to work a six-hour photo shoot in the sweltering parking lot of a Sam’s Club store in Texas, the cub developed painful blisters on his paws from standing on hot pavement all day.
 

Like all nonhuman primates used for entertainment, baboons do not “perform” unless they are forced to—often through intimidation, abuse, and solitary confinement. Baboon Lagoon tours the country with six female Hamadryas baboons who are forced to perform ridiculous, uncomfortable, unnatural acts such as riding a motorcycle. According to Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya, who has spent more than 20 years studying baboons in a national park in East Africa, “Training most baboons to do tricks of the sort displayed is not trivial ... it is highly likely that it required considerable amounts of punishment (physical or otherwise) and intimidation.”(4)
 

Incidents of animals attacking spectators, especially children, are common. Children have been attacked by tigers traveling with Bridgeport Nature Center, which has been repeatedly cited by the USDA for unsafe handling practices.(5) Please visit WildlifePimps.com to find out more about these incidents and to see the track records of other traveling exhibits, which indicate improper care and dangerous handling of animals.

Licensed but Not Regulated
The Animal Welfare Act (AWA) requires that animal exhibitors be licensed by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. This is supposed to ensure that exhibitors meet the AWA’s minimal requirements regarding animal care. In reality, the USDA cannot effectively regulate or enforce the humane treatment of animals who are continuously on the road.

What You Can Do
While taking part in photo shoots with animals and watching them perform may seem like harmless fun for kids, it is anything but. Dr. Mel Levine, founder and director of the Clinical Center for the Study of Development and Learning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, cautions that “children should not encounter experiences in which living creatures become publicly humiliated” and that they “should see adults treating animals with dignity and respect at all times.”(6)
 

When you hear that an animal show is coming to town, you can take the following steps:
 

• If you have advance notice, voice your concerns to the fair organizers, shopping mall manager, or other promoters. Give them the facts about behind-the-scenes abuse and stress the risk of injury to spectators. Have your friends and neighbors do the same, and make it clear that the fair, mall, etc., will be boycotted if the show is booked. Take your concerns to the mayor or city or county council. Ask your local humane society to use its influence to ban the show.
• If the show is booked in spite of your efforts, be on the scene when the animals arrive to look for violations of the Animal Welfare Act as well as local and state cruelty laws. Watch the animals for signs of poor health, such as listlessness, sores, missing hair, lameness, or self-mutilation. Make note of sanitation conditions, cage size (by law, cages must be large enough to allow animals to stand up, lie down, and turn around), and food, water, and shade availability. Take photographs or video footage of the animals and cages. If you see possible violations, try to get a sympathetic veterinarian to verify your findings, and report your observations to your local animal warden or humane officer, the state department of agriculture, and the USDA. Insist that the animals and their living conditions be examined and that violations of the law be corrected.
• Organize a demonstration. Notify the media in time for them to cover your protest. If you don’t already know which reporters are sympathetic to animal issues, call local papers and TV stations and ask to speak to a reporter who is interested in animal issues. Five people distributing leaflets will go a long way toward educating the public, but media coverage of 20 people with picket signs is a huge success! (Write to PETA for a supply of leaflets.)
• Find out where the show is going when it leaves your community. Contact humane societies and activists in that area, let them know what you did in your area, and ask them to do the same. You can obtain a list of animal rights groups in a specific state by calling PETA’s International Grassroots Campaigns Department.
• Write a letter to the editor, urging people not to patronize animal shows.
• Call PETA and request an “Animal Display Ban” pack for tips on getting animal acts banned in your community.

Don’t allow the promoters of animal acts to pass off their exploitation of animals as entertainment. By educating others and showing that cruelty to animals is neither fun nor ethical, you can help stop animal exploitation.

References

(1) Richard D. Hoyle, letter to PETA, 18 Aug. 2003.
(2) John Guedron, D.V.M., USDA Inspection Report 58-C-0295, 24 May 2001.
(3) Daryl Burden, D.V.M., USDA Inspection Report 42-C-0101, 27 Feb. 2003.
(4) Robert Sapolsky, letter to PETA, Jun. 2004.
(5) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, “Bridgeport, Texas, Animal Exhibitors Charged With Violating Animal Welfare Act,” USDA, 9 Jun. 2000.
(6) M.D. Levine, M.D., letter to PETA, 16 Nov. 2001.