After glancing at the pamphlet, I asked the woman whether she had seen the show. She said she had not. Had she spoken with any of the animal trainers on the show to see how they care for the animals? I said. Again, she said no. Did she picket all circuses, I wondered, or only this one? She said they picketed all places where animals are cruelly treated. As we were speaking, Doug appeared at the edge of the lot and looked at me with harsh, disciplinary eyes. He gestured for me to follow him. “I’m only speaking with them,” I said when we met at the top of the stairs. “There’s no harm in that, is there?”
“Just don’t pay any attention to them,” he said. His voice wasn’t angry, only firm. “The people on the lot get all excited. The best thing to do is ignore them. They’re all vegetarians and don’t respond to reason.”
We nodded goodbye and I returned to my camper.
Back at home I continued reading the pamphlet. NO FUN FOR THE ANIMALS, it said across the top. “Colorful pageantry disguises the fact that animals used in circuses are mere captives forced to perform unnatural and often painful acts. Circuses would quickly lose their appeal if the details of the animals’ treatment, confinement and training became widely known.” To support this claim the pamphlet listed five alleged abuses.
1. Animals are forced to travel thousands of miles with the show for 48-50 weeks every year. Although the length of our season was only thirty-four weeks, the fact of the travel was accurate. 2. Tigers live and are transported in cages only 4? × 5? × 6?—barely enough room to turn around in. This statement was also essentially true (even though the cages were slightly larger), but it failed to mention that the size met USDA regulations. 3. Animals perform unnatural acts like balancing on one foot and jumping through flaming hoops only under threat of punishment. While the animals on our show did perform some unnatural acts, most of what they did were natural behaviors, and in any case they didn’t do them under the threat of punishment, but in the promise of a reward. 4. Elephants are chained in filthy railroad cars which are often left in the sun in 90 to 100 degree weather. Our show did not have railroad cars, and the animals were never left in the truck on hot days but kept under canopies. 5. Elephants are beaten across the eyes, on their trunks and on the backs of their legs with “bull books” and whips. Elephants on our show were not beaten across the eyes, and in my experience were not beaten at all, although they were prodded and slapped frequently in the other places mentioned.
All in all, I was left with the feeling that the pamphlet was overstating its case and was ultimately not very convincing. This came as no surprise. After several months on the show I had gleaned enough about the animal rights movement to realize there were two camps: first, a moderate camp that doesn’t mind animals in circuses as long as they are well treated; and second, a more radical camp that doesn’t approve of animals in entertainment at all. The picketers from PETA belonged to the latter group. After observing them in Winchester, as well as two dozen locations around New England, I was left with the distinct impression that they were more interested in stirring up controversy than in engaging in a dialogue with the circus to address their concerns. While their lobbying in Washington has at times been extremely effective, their grass-roots efforts around the show were ineffective at best and often laughable. In Ithaca, a group of PETA protesters appeared on a nearby bridge during a heat wave to claim that it was too hot for the elephants (who are from Southeast Asia, after all) to work. After twenty minutes the protesters themselves got so hot they gave up and went home.
As for the circus, its treatment of the animal rights issue seemed just as bad. While the circus has many points in its favor—many Americans clearly like seeing animals perform; circus animals often exercise more and live longer than their counterparts in zoos; circus animals, by and large, are in fact well treated—circus people have generally ceded the platform to the protesters. Instead of reaching out to moderate groups and inviting them to inspect the animals (as the USDA does several times a year), circus owners and animal trainers alike have treated all concerned people as irrational rabble-rousers and refused to engage them in any reasonable discussions. As a result, public sentiment is slowly but steadily moving in the direction of keeping animals out of circuses altogether. It was a widespread assumption around the lot, for example, that if the show itself survived for another ten years the number of animal acts would be severely curtailed if not eliminated entirely.
In Winchester, meanwhile, the first arrival of the protesters prompted all sorts of agitation on the lot. Khris Allen, who after all called himself a “cat choreographer,” was the least ruffled of the trainers. “I actually consider myself more of an animal rights activist than most,” he said. “I’m actually doing something for these animals. If any protester wants to see how we care for our tigers, I have a standing offer that they can travel with us for a week. We’ll even pay their way. But they don’t even come and talk with us. They’d rather stand in front and picket.”
Dawnita Bale, whose father was a cat trainer and who with the aid of her sisters cared for and presented the horses, was less sympathetic. “These protesters have nothing to say to me,” she insisted. “These horses are my livelihood. Why would I want to mistreat them? Sure, there are some bad trainers. There’s one bad apple in every bunch. But I make sacrifices in my life to make their lives better. And what bothers me is the unprofessional attitude of these protesters. Why don’t they get current information? Their pamphlet is the same one they’ve handed out for six years. They’ve got a picture of one of Gunther’s elephants and some outdated information. Remember, these are people who wear leather shoes. They eat at McDonald’s. They wear perfume, which, after all, is tested on animals. Why don’t they do something about the cat and dog populations in their own hometowns? That is a problem they can have an impact on, not circuses.”
Venko, of course, was more blunt. “These people piss me off,” he said. “They come on a beautiful morning, with sunshine and everything. Then as soon as it starts raining they leave. Why don’t they stay when the goddamn tornado is coming, or a big windstorm. We have to be with the animals all the time.”
“Is the problem getting worse?” I asked him.
“It wasn’t this way ten years ago. Now they’ve started making rules. The people who make the laws know nothing about the animals. Somebody sits at his desk, gets letters from the animal rights activists, and says, well, we have to make bigger transportation cages. This is goddamn crazy. If you have bigger cages, as soon as you hit the brakes the animals will fly from one side of the cage to the other. As it is, the animals have to exercise every day. They practice in the morning, they have the shows in the afternoon. The rest of the time they sleep. Also, they enjoy it. When we go to work they like it. As soon as the music starts they jump all over the place. For them performing is play.”
For all the huffing and puffing about animal rights activists, in the end they had little immediate impact on the day-to-day operation of the circus, except for one dramatic showdown halfway through the season on Long Island. Instead, the circus faced a greater immediate threat from the activities of naïve animal lovers. This was the cause of the most tragic event of the year, in Fishkill, New York. And this was also the source of the most shocking event of the season in West Barnstable, Massachusetts.
“I finished my act in the four-thirty show,” Venko recalled about that afternoon, “and returned to my trailer. Usually one of us will watch the bears, but in this instance we all decided to change clothes as quickly as possible. I was changing into my blue Ringling coveralls, the ones I wear when I do my welding, when suddenly I heard someone shouting, ‘Help, help!’ As quickly as I could, I went running toward the cages. I was wearing only my socks and saying to myself, ‘God, please don’t let anyone be hurt.’”