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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I've got a lot of mixed emotions about this. It was interesting that CBS aired a story on Friday about the 'first female ring master'[1] and then it drops that the show is closing.

An acquaintance of mine from grade school has pretty tirelessly crusaded against circuses for their mistreatment of animals. And for them, even the notion that you could "take excellent care" of an animal in your care that your raised from birth is an abomination if that animal is not allowed to run free in their original habitat (not that they would survive at that point but still...) But I've always enjoyed people pushing themselves to the edge to see if they can. As a result high wire acts, trapezes, and even the clown routines are fond memories for me.

If I'm honest with myself though it is just nostalgia for a different time. That time is past, whether or not there is a circus to go to.

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ringling-brothers-woman-ringmast...

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I'm also against circuses massively, pushing people to their limits is fine and great if people are up for it, animals taken from their environment just to entertain us? Less so. If we want to "enjoy" an animal it should be on their terms.

We have Circu De Soleil now though, right? They don't use animals and do some amazing things. I'm not sure what there is to morn.

> animals taken from their environment just to entertain us?

Funny thing-- it's not too much of a stretch to extend this to pet ownership, as well. I have mixed feelings about all of it, honestly, but since these are essentially intractable problems at this point in time, I believe it comes down to how each individual animal is treated.

I certainly think it's quite possible to have a large, 'exotic' animal who is trained to perform from birth to be happy and have a decent quality of life, just as I think the same is possible for that puppy or kitty adopted by someone you know. It seems clear to me that neither is ideal, but there are plenty of examples of better and worse situations. It's not black & white.

Regardless, in my view, anyone concerned enough to protest the treatment of animals in circuses and/or zoos is being hypocritical if they're not working just as hard (or harder) to end the suffering of all the other sentient creatures we subject to 'unnatural' conditions on a vastly larger scale. Right now, the best we can seem do is keep saying "spay and neuter" like we have for at least half a century, and too many people still don't even seem to be getting that utterly basic message.

> Regardless, in my view, anyone concerned enough to protest the treatment of animals in circuses and/or zoos is being hypocritical if they're not working just as hard (or harder) to end the suffering of all the other sentient creatures we subject to 'unnatural' conditions on a vastly larger scale.

It's unreasonable to expect someone to solve all problems at once. If you went to work and your boss complained you weren't working on enough problems, you'd likely tell them that you need to focus on the most pressing or solvable issue first, and yet you're saying the opposite about this group of people.

Making a decision to focus on one element of the problem in order to move towards a solution is what practical people who solve problems do. Calling them hypocritical for not solving the (massive) related problem of animals as a human food source isn't reasonable.

From an engineering perspective, the 'best' long term approaches are those which produce either the largest number or largest percentage of desired outcomes. Also, getting people to change their historical mindset is a big part of effecting progress. To me, if you get people treating their pets and food animals better, 'performing' or 'display' animals would follow course.

Singling out one species with a tiny number of members in a very unusual and rare use case may be great for splashy awareness campaigns, but unless whoever you're making more aware is also likely to carry that over into their treatment of other animals, I feel like you've fundamentally failed to begin to address the biggest part of the root problem.

> From an engineering perspective, the 'best' long term approaches are those which produce either the largest number or largest percentage of desired outcomes.

Given that activists have been working on this for several decades, what would you have done differently, and how would it have been more successful given the same resources?

> Also, getting people to change their historical mindset is a big part of effecting progress.

Would you say that getting people to change their historical mindset such that they no longer countenance animals being used for circus entertainment progress?

Surely you don't mean dogs! Long history of evolving from grey wolves living alongside people in mutually beneficial ways.

If you consider the use of elephants for profit-driven entertainment to be the same as cats or dogs, or even cows and horses, you need to learn the history of domestication.

My point is that they could all be treated better, and it's absurd to draw arbitrary lines between species when you're talking in general terms. A huge variety of creatures are very trainable when raised by humans from birth, and while selective breeding has made some more 'tame' and useful than others, it doesn't make them all that different from the less shepherded ones in ethics terms.

Yes, you can argue that for-profit display is a little different than decorative or companion animals, which is a lot different from utility animals (much fewer of these are necessary in modern environments) or food animals (technically none of these are necessary), but they all have brains similar enough to ours that they think and feel, and the ones with the largest populations which suffer the most (arguably mistreated cats and dogs) deserve every bit as much concern - if not more, due to their sheer numbers - as animals used for profit (some of which are treated better than others, which is a hard thing to categorize).

You are not listening. It is not absurd.

Elephants are wild animals. They probably are smart enough to qualify as minors, - so they can and do adapt to a wide variety of conditions, - but it does not change the fact that to express the fullness of their being they need to roam free with a pack of their own kind.

Pets and other domestic animals are different in kind. They have been bred over many generations to form a symbiotic relationship with humans. Their natural environment is a human controled environment, and you would do them a diservice by releasing them in the wild. Again, some of the most intelligent (pigs and dogs come to mind) would probably cope and eventually revert to their predomestication baseline (over several generations, though). But that does not change the fact that they need a human element in their lives in order to express the fullness of their being.

I wont argue your ethical points, because it is ultimatelly a matter of personal values. But if you want to start a discusion about that, you need to get the facts straight... and the facts say that different species of animals do have different needs, regardless of their feellings and inteligence.

"an abomination if that animal is not allowed to run free in their original habitat"

So I'm abusing my kids if I don't air drop them in the Rift Valley in Africa and hope for the best.

That is of course the logical extreme of the argument. I too don't agree with it, and wonder what will happen when we discover a species that has evolved to live only in EPA Superfund sites, do we destroy its habitat by cleaning up the pollution or do we preserve the species and leave the planet polluted?

Both arguments speak to the futility of arguing staticism in an evolving world.

No, because humans were not meant to be cut off from their community and dropped in the wild. Human children, in particular, are less prepared to cope with the dangers of being isolated early in life, compared with the way other mammal species are.

Your example is about as accurate as saying that the circus owners are abusing their animals by not paying them a fair wage.

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