Confusing Animals is Cruelty

The shout "The circus is in town!" is bound nowadays to bring up an assortment of reactions from people, ranging from excitement and anticipation on to boredom and apathy, and finally to outrage and indignation. I tend to be one of the bored and apathetic, having come to the conclusion that the heyday of high quality circus shows has long passed us by. But an increasing number of people are concerned that the animals in circus acts, like elephants, tigers, and lions, are being abused or at least being treated in an undignified manner. The presumption is that they are wild animals and should be "in the wild", not under the domination of people. I would agree with them to the extent of how the animals were procured in the first place. Were they taken from the wild or were they born and raised in an already domesticated environment? Also, I tend to wince at anyone using a whip on any creature, human or beast, wild or domesticated. It not only riles me to see a lion tamer do this in a circus act, but also to see a jockey whipping his horse in the final stretch of a race. And then being showered with flowers and honors if his horse wins. Disgusting!

That having been said, I am having a problem with those well-intentioned people who try either to sustain captured and at least partially-domesticated animals in a wild setting or to try to train them to return to the wild (even when they were born into captivity). Take a couple of examples.

I recently heard on NPR radio the story of a woman who had cared for several chimpanzees and tried to release them into the wild in an uninhabited (by people) tropical island in western Africa. One chimp, Lucy, was especially fond of her and refused to break the strong personal bond between them and adapt to the "wild life". Finally, the woman, after staying on the island with the chimpanzees and experiencing the frustration that they just wanted to be around her, decided to leave and come back after a year. Upon returning, she discovered the chimpanzees to have adapted somewhat to the wild, although Lucy still remembered her enough to give her a strong, affectionate hug. After another year, she returned again only to discover Lucy's skeleton, with signs that poachers had killed her. Apparently, Lucy had boldly approached them as she hadn't the fear of humans which, as a truly wild creature, she would have carried as a crucial survival trait.

At Sea World in Orlando recently, a known-to-be-unpredictable killer whale pulled a trainer from out of the water down and to her death, violently thrashing her about in front of horrified spectators to as if she were prey. Officials at the park acted clueless as to the cause of this attack, even though this killer whale had long been considered too dangerous for anyone to be in the water with.

Although the last example is very tragic in that it ended with a person's death, the only objection I see is that the people working at Sea World tended to apply human models of behavior to killer whales: this person is cranky so we'll give him his "space" at work; that killer whale is cranky so we'll deal with him the same way and just give him his "space". When domesticated animals go into deviant, violent behavior patterns, their human caretakers need to exert exponentially greater caution with them, whether they be dogs, chimpanzees, killer whales, or another type. Instead, this killer whale had been kept on as part of the show! Foolish!

Of the circus, horse race, and chimpanzee examples, which are the cruelest? I say that taking already domesticated chimpanzees, who had even been taught intricate SIGN LANGUAGE COMMUNICATION with humans, and then throwing them back into the wild to fend for themselves, even if done gradually, is much worse than the traditionally rough treatment that show/sport animals like horses, tigers, lions, bears, or elephants typically receive. Once an animal has been either taken or rescued from the wild, or even born into captivity, it is an obligation on the part of those people responsible for that captivity to bring up that animal with compassion and discernment in its adopted environment, not to throw it back into the wild, grossly unprepared for survival. It is not enough to try to gradually try to train the animal for its new "life" by introducing new foods and abandoning it for stretches. Moreover, it's cruel to do this to animals as they have feelings of their own. They have already formed their own deeply ingrained views of what life is essentially about, only for some "do-gooders" to then decide that it's better to confuse the hell out of them to the point where they don't even know which way is up! Massively disgusting!