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Cruelty In Circuses

For many, the word “circus” suggests imagery of popcorn, candy, "wild" animals, and fun. However, behind the glitter and the glitz of the circus lies a cruel world of untold animal suffering. Animals used in circuses are reluctant members in a show that endangers their health and mental well-being and the lives of the audience and entertainers.
 Circus trainers use force and pain to teach these animals to perform tricks that have nothing to do with their natural behavior. “These unnatural acts range from a tiger jumping through a flaming hoop to bears riding bicycles. Animals are sometimes injured while performing: tigers, who naturally fear fire, have been burned jumping through flaming hoops” (Circus Facts). Training these animals to do these tricks that they are unwilling to do often requires the use of an ankus, whips, tight collars, muzzles, electric prods, and other torturous tools. An ankus is a long wooden stick with a sharpened end that trainers use to make elephants cooperate the way they want them to. Circuses claim to use “positive reinforcement” to teach the animals tricks that reenact their natural behavior in the wild. However, the use of torturous tools suggest otherwise. 
Another torture that circus animals must endure is traveling from town to town. They travel by eighteen wheelers or trains and are kept in small areas for long periods of time. “During transport and between performances, tigers, who in the wild would secure seventy five to two thousand square miles, are kept in cages with barely enough room to turn around. Elephants, who walk up to twenty-five miles a day with their families in their natural habitat, are shackled in chains by their front and back legs so that they can't take a step forward or backward” (Circus Facts). 
Circus' try to convince the public that watching the animals is educational, when in reality, they do not act as they would in their natural habitats. The tricks, containers, and social interaction is not natural to what they would normally do in the wild. Circuses are merely used as a means of entertainment, and diluting one's self to believe that  it is educational is wrong.