Elephant Parade in DC
Today at 12:30, a parade of elephants will mark the return of the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus to DC. Beginning at 2nd & D St. NW and finishing at the Verizon Center, the parade will likely tie up traffic in Chinatown in the early afternoon. I fully expect PETA to be out in force and fairly upset about the whole thing, and I expect a bunch of people to be surprised by the general spectacle.
The Circus is at the Verizon Center Thursday through Sunday and tickets are available online via Ticketbastard.
Good timing for an elephant parade, what with DC’s gun ban being just declared unconstitutional.
Indeed, now that you can USE your elephant gun…just in time!
How truly sad, to parade intelligent, endangered species! This is not the way to teach and show respect! Truly a sad day.
…because it’s so much more respectful to stare at them over a fence or through a window.
Anthropomorphizing animals doesn’t do anything to increase their dignity.
I look forward to the day when Ringling Bros go out of business. They treat their animals very inhumanely which most people don’t seem to care about, as long as they can take little Billy to see some clowns and elephants.
I’m not a big fan of zoos either, but they’re much better than the damn circus.
There are many reasonable criticisms of Ringling Bros. and how they treat their animals, certainly. But complaining that walking them from point A to point B where people can see them is somehow “undignified” or “disrespectful” to an *elephant* is just ridiculous. I assure you, the elephant is not concerned about its dignity in that situation.
There is a story of an elephant who was in a show for years and years, she was a grand old showgirl, and when she was retired from show biz and put out to farm to relax in her maturity, she went off her food, got angry and short tempered and generally made a ruckus about everything. She wasn’t sick, the vets and keepers didn’t know what was wrong, so they tried putting her back in the show. Once she was back on the road she was the happy elephant everyone knew and loved.
These elephants are born in sanctuaries, they are raised among other working elephants, they have never seen Africa or Asia, so freeing the elephants wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing.