Warning: This article discusses animal abuse.

Imagine you’re seven years old and at a fair. After going through tents with baked goods and carnival games, you enter one with a small animal circus. You see pigs racing and an elephant giving rides. You’re mesmerized by the adorable animals and want to join the circus more than anything to be with them. This story may sound familiar to some of you.

Unknown to you, as you leave with the crowd the performance animals are whipped, beaten, and crammed into small cages. Oddly, just as you would do anything to join the circus, the animals would do anything to get out.

I once was that little kid, too. That was until I learned about the horrors that go on behind the happy facade of animal entertainment.

Animals have been exploited for entertainment purposes for thousands of years. As early as 2500 BCE, rulers and aristocrats had animal enclosures called menageries to showcase exotic animals. Entrepreneurs noticed the audiences the enclosures attracted and started traveling menageries, or traveling circuses. Today, circuses exploit animals to make a profit. There is no federal law in the United States that prohibits animal circuses, but I urge you to enact one to eliminate the environment that leads to significant abuse of animals and threatens the safety of circus employees and the public.

A ban on animal circuses is necessary because it will eliminate an industry that inflicts monstrous harm upon animals. Animals do not naturally ride bikes or stand on stools, but through negative reinforcement, they are trained to perform these distressing and unsafe acts. The abuses include horses being viciously choked and stabbed with pitchforks, and elephants being beaten with bullhooks and shocked with electric prods. A leaked video exposed former Ringling Brothers Circus’s elephant trainer, Tim Frisco, using similar abusive techniques on endangered Asian elephants, while yelling, “Hurt ‘em. Make ‘em scream … When you hear that screaming, then you know you got their attention.” This environment causes many animals to develop abnormal behaviors and depression; some even resort to self-harm. Animal circuses travel thousands of miles each year, resulting in their being crammed into extremely hot, poorly ventilated, and unsanitary tractor trailers for long periods of time. Once at their destination, animals are forced to defecate and urinate in their cages. Since 1992, 25 elephants from the Ringling Brothers Circus have died due to these conditions.

As moral creatures, we instinctively recognize merciless harm towards other living things as unjust, so we know that the entire concept of animal circuses and their abuse of animals is unacceptable. Although laws like the Animal Welfare Act, which regulates the treatment of animals in exhibitions, are in place to protect animals, they are regularly ignored by circuses; a ban, however, would eliminate the environment where the abuse occurs.

Banning animal circuses is also necessary to protect animal circus staff members and the public. Due to constant abuse and confinement, some animals act out violently or try to escape. This often results in human and animal casualties, as well as property damage. One notorious example involves an elephant named Tyke. In 1973, Tyke was captured as a baby in Mozambique, as many circus animals are, and sold into an abusive circus where she performed for decades. On August, 20, 1994, Tyke was put in front of a sold-out show in Honolulu, Hawaii to perform after a long transport to the island, but she instead rebelled in response to her mistreatment. Tyke fatally crushed her trainer and severely injured her groomer before escaping. The police ended up killing Tyke by shooting her 87 times in the street, where she fell and squashed a car.

Although the trainer and groomer hurt Tyke, they shouldn’t have been seriously injured and killed as a result. Animal circuses should not be permitted because the mistreatment of animals is a virtual certainty, which is the real cause of this incident and others like it. Not only did the two workers suffer physical trauma, the audience who saw the two men being stomped on and the public who witnessed the bloody killing of Tyke were certainly emotionally injured also.

At the beginning of this writing, I asked you to visualize a youthful, happy memory about an animal circus. Now I ask you to visualize yourself in the stands of Tyke’s final show and the horrific scene you would have witnessed. Animal circuses have been in the United States for far too long, causing harm to animals, circus staff and the public. The time has come to free the shackles of these imprisoned and abused animals. I understand that it takes effort to make a change, but the effort is not great compared to the harm suffered by these voiceless animals. Circuses don’t have to go, but the abusive animal acts must.