Animals on Stage
by Lee Hall / January 8th, 2008
This was to be the year Britain ended the centuries-old custom of the animal circus. With its elephants made to stand atop one another in pyramids, horses decorated like ice cream parfaits, swaggering lion tamers, and ringmasters directing tigers through hoops, the animal circus is one of the most arrogant displays of human dominance ever developed. In reality, big cats prey on primates; anthropologically speaking, Homo sapiens are on the traditional lunch menu.1 Even today, in their natural habitats, the nonhuman great apes are vulnerable to leopards and lions — as are the human ones.2
But we humans don’t like anyone else getting the upper hand, claw or fang. Wherever our industry advances, predators are conquered, pushed to marginal lands, kept behind fences, domesticated, used by the elite as lifestyle accessories, paraded down streets and on stages.
Ruth Gordon, as Maude Chardin in the delightful film Harold and Maude, observed in 1971, “Zoos are full, prisons are overflowing; oh my, how the world still dearly loves a cage.” Gordon has since passed away. Cages, and the world’s love for them, remain.
And yet, polls taken today do show most of the public opposing animal circuses — at least in Britain, and at least when it comes to non-domesticated animals.
Fewer thahttp://www.dissidentvoice.org/
by Lee Hall / January 8th, 2008
This was to be the year Britain ended the centuries-old custom of the animal circus. With its elephants made to stand atop one another in pyramids, horses decorated like ice cream parfaits, swaggering lion tamers, and ringmasters directing tigers through hoops, the animal circus is one of the most arrogant displays of human dominance ever developed. In reality, big cats prey on primates; anthropologically speaking, Homo sapiens are on the traditional lunch menu.1 Even today, in their natural habitats, the nonhuman great apes are vulnerable to leopards and lions — as are the human ones.2
But we humans don’t like anyone else getting the upper hand, claw or fang. Wherever our industry advances, predators are conquered, pushed to marginal lands, kept behind fences, domesticated, used by the elite as lifestyle accessories, paraded down streets and on stages.
Ruth Gordon, as Maude Chardin in the delightful film Harold and Maude, observed in 1971, “Zoos are full, prisons are overflowing; oh my, how the world still dearly loves a cage.” Gordon has since passed away. Cages, and the world’s love for them, remain.
And yet, polls taken today do show most of the public opposing animal circuses — at least in Britain, and at least when it comes to non-domesticated animals.
Fewer thahttp://www.dissidentvoice.org/
