The Circus is Still in Town
Those wacky MOCs (Members of Congress to you) may be gone on recess this week (how quaint that they call it that, so kindergarten of them), but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a circus still in town.
Today at 1pm you can see actual elephants trudging along the “Pachyderm Parade” on the Hill, disembarking from a special circus train at Union Station and heading up to the DC Armory as part of the Ringling Brothers sojourn there this week, and then next week at MCI-I-mean-Verizon Center.
Now I was seriously traumatized as a child at the Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus (“Hey, that isn’t a real unicorn! It’s a goat! Whaaaaaa!!!!”) but if you are fine with the spectacle of real elephants on the Hill instead of the usual kind, head on over.
Please take a moment to consider the conditions by which these captive animals are forced to live, simply for the purpose of entertaining people. For more information, see:
http://circuses.com/
Please consider only attending circuses that feature human performers exclusively.
Ringling Bros. has a questionable track record of animal “care.” I encourage you to learn more about it.
Indeed. The problem is not only with animal-based circuses, as recent press on our own National Zoo shows.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/17/AR2006031701671.html
So if you are not fine with the spectacle, you could go and protest today as well. Readers’ choice.
nooooo! don’t go to the circus except to protest.
elephants are intelligent, emotional animals and suffer immensely from circus life. go to the circuses.com site. many municipalities have made animal circuses illegal, including takoma park.
i’m no fan of the zoo, but life in the Ringling Bros. circus is much worse than life at the National Zoo.
there is no justification for supporting such wanton cruelty simply for one night of entertainment. we all have fond memories of the circus from when we were children, but now that we are adults and recognize how inhumane it is, we can choose to make new memories that don’t involve wanton cruelty.
Let’s see.
We have on the Hill… caged animals taunted by trainers and leashed by society into behaving a certain way….
And then there are circus elephants there today.
Sweet.
HAHAHAHA … good one tom.
There’s a Gitmo joke in here somewhere too…
Wouldn’t it be amazing if the elephants revolted? Trampling their trainers and going out in a blaze of glory, rampaging through the Hill?
Actually, I feel the same way whenever I see pony rides for kids. I want the downtrodden horses to rear up and gallop away, amid the ensuing screams.
I do not, however, feel the same way about MOCs… let them stay confined.
Actually something like that happened in Northern Virginia back around 1905. A pack of circus elephants escaped and ran wild in NOVA for almost a month.