Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: No, pigs don’t fly, and they don’t jump, not even those who perform at the circus. They do elicit squeals of delight from crowds, though, and are at least as smart as the dogs they star alongside for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s “Legends,” which opens at the Consol Energy Center Wednesday.
4 comments:
I am happy to hear that animals are being seriously taken care of in the circus, though I still do not know how to feel about the use of live animals in productions. Before I began school, I worked for a company that at first seemed to me over-advocating. Throughout my two years of employment I gained a serious appreciation for animal rights, and testing. Though the circus follows all guidelines, and is open to examinations it's blurry.
I think that even if animals are being well-taken care of and were rescued I am unsettled.
On the contrary, I loved that the circus and acts were kept in the family... What a fun family tradition! Dinner's must be quite the spectacle.
I think it is also fun to fantasize about the spectacles that circus' offer audiences. I am excited to explore all the different avenues that studying design will allow me. Circus' provide a canvas for artists to explore fun and exciting new ideas, while also paying homage to the traditional look and feel of the "circus" that audiences expect.
I'm glad that the Post-Gazette touched on the animal rights issue that is bound to come up anytime a Ringling production comes into town, but I'm just still not convinced that Ringling is doing the right thing. Domestic animals, fair. Ringling is still actively using wild animals in their acts, and supporting that business is supporting more acts like those. They're really going to start struggling when the animals in entertainment overhaul hits, as it has started to in California with the changes in Orca law surrounding Seaworld controversy. At the end of the day, animals are just not for our entertainment. It's a form of exploitation, and I personally think it's a very harmful form of exploitation when it comes to larger or more wild animals such as the kangaroos mentioned in that article. Kangaroos and other wild animals just don't belong in a circus environment, at any time, regardless of the fact that their trailer is climate-controlled.
So I've always been against animals in live performance for various reasons, most of which have been eradicated by the current animal rights law and protests and group efforts. As such I am much more conformable with animals in performance as long as the companies are meeting the guild lines set by the governments and so long as they guild line meet appropriate health and safety standards. I also prefer to only see animals who natures and physical ranges of motion would align with such activities. Dogs and Pigs are incredibly smart creatures, pigs arguably more so. As such they enjoy stimulus in the form of learning for rewards and I'm sure many of the tricks provided that stimulus. Horses are also intelligent creatures and enjoy learning, however many of their required feats include "walking like humans" or laying on their backs, things they were not biologically build to do and as such suffer great injury from it. It is these acts that jeopardize the safety of the animals that I am against.
My sister is an animal behaviorist, meaning she studies what animals do and why they do it. She has told me so many times how smart pigs are. They can learn so much and are really a lot like dogs. It’s so crazy how our perception of pigs is usually that they are kind of gross farm animals, but really they are super intelligent.
The extra line about how the animals are treated was comforting to hear. So often animals aren’t taken care of properly because the people who own them don't see them as living animals with needs, they just see a means to get money. Just like how I was talking about how intelligent pigs are, you can’t go around neglecting animals. Just because they don’t speak doesn't meant they can’t communicate. I’m still leery about this circus using kangaroos, and to an extent llamas, because these animals need a lot of space to be able to live. It’s not even about what they need to thrive, it’s what they need at a minimum.
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