Jay Kirk: End the Circus of Cruelty

Jay Kirk is the author of the just-published "Kingdom Under Glass: a Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals."

In 1882, P.T. Barnum paid $10,000 to have Jumbo, the world's most famous elephant, shackled like Houdini, stuffed into a crate and sailed across the ocean to New York City. Barnum got Jumbo on the cheap because — unknown to him but well known to Jumbo's keepers at the London Zoo — the elephant had gone bonkers.

Jumbo had become such a hazard that his owners feared for the safety of the many children who took rides on his back. Alumni of such rides included an asthmatic Teddy Roosevelt, who, perhaps traumatized by the experience, would later go on to kill four elephants in less than five minutes while on safari in British East Africa. (You can see two of these unfortunate beasts still posing for eternity in the Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History.)

Jumbo was so traumatized by his travels at sea, confined to his crate, that his handler had to get him stinking drunk. Because beer was already part his regular diet, getting the elephant to swill a few pails of whiskey was no major chore. Three years after Barnum got his prize elephant, Jumbo met his end in a head-on collision with an off-schedule locomotive. Maybe he was drunk. I hope so. The accident happened while they were boarding the animals onto the boxcars to make the next city. A traveling circus is nothing but headache. Especially when you're using stubborn, unreliable beasts like lions and elephants. Left to their own devices, they'll just loll around doing squat....

The training of circus animals is an effective and long-standing tradition, albeit conducted in secret, presumably under the assumption that it's more fun to watch an elephant put on a fez or do a headstand if you're not burdened by the knowledge of how that elephant came by such magnificent and unnatural skills. But now, that may all change. With the Traveling Exotic Animal Protection Act, or TEAPA, a bill introduced in Congress in November, exotic species would be banned from traveling circuses....