Animal News

“Do you think that most kids would want to go to the circus if they knew that the elephants were shocked, prodded and punctured with bullhooks in order to make them perform?” writes a woman who protested at a Ringling Bros. circus performance on behalf of API. “I think that if most kids had any idea of what goes on behind the scenes at Ringling Brothers, they would end up in tears, which, in my opinion, is the natural human response to learning about circus’ animal barbarism.”

Free the circus animals
Emily Bragonier
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Weekend Feedback

The international trade in exotic pets such as monkeys, crocodiles and rats must be stopped if human beings are to be protected from global pandemics, a leading microbiologist has cautioned. Online comments on this news story include one from API’s Monica Engebretson.

Booming trade in exotic pets ‘could cause a pandemic’
Melanie Reid
The Times (London)

After living nearly her whole life in Alaska, Maggie the elephant was loaded and locked into a special metal crate Thursday at the Alaska Zoo and transported in a C-17 cargo plane to Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield. Her new home will be the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) in San Andreas, where she will have 30 acres to share with nine other elephants.

Maggie the Elephant is making way to new home in Calaveras County
Associated Press
San Jose Mercury News

Other Maggie stories:

Air Force gives Alaska’s only elephant a lift to warmer climes
Associated Press
Boston Herald

Air Force agrees to move elephant on C-17
Bruce Rolfsen
Air Force Times

Alaskan elephant finds her place in the sun
Dan Glaister
The Guardian

You can no more save a species by breeding it in a zoo than you can by retrieving DNA from a museum specimen, or implanting embryos of wild cattle species into domestic cattle. A mammoth recovered from DNA (if it can be) is no longer a mammoth, a tiger bred in a zoo is no longer a tiger.

Rattling the cages
David Horton
The Huffington Post

All the evidence indicates that for the last 14 years TB positive and TB infected elephants have been traveling the country and performing in closed arenas full of little kids holding cotton candy and squealing with delight. People with compromised immune systems and the elderly are circus patrons. It's a family tradition in some homes to go to the circus when it's in town.

Idiocracy: Why the Media Is Not Protecting the People
Leslie Griffith
The Huffington Post

The Siberian Tiger Conservation Association, an Ohio “sanctuary” exposed in 2006 by investigations by API and ABC News 20/20, has gone out of business. The owner of the facility, Diana McCourt, had been operating the facility in violation of USDA regulations and federal law and was recently evicted from the property. She left behind two lions and four tigers, which are now being relocated to accredited sanctuaries where they, and the public, will never be put in danger again.

Animal Groups Rescue Abandoned Lions and Tigers From Ohio Woman
PRNewswire-USNewswire

Residents of Florida’s Isles of Capri face the consequences of a former exotic “pet” released to the wild. Feral iguanas, a species classified as “threatened,” not only eat native flowering plants and fruits, they also burrow next to seawalls to lay their young, causing damage and destruction to the retaining walls. And because they prefer to defecate in or around water, iguanas have been known to take uninvited swims in private and community swimming pools.

Iguanas visit Capri
Ann Hall
Marco Island Sun Times

Some Beacon Hill lawmakers say they want to protect elephants from mistreatment. Circus officials contend the characterizations are misguided and passage of such a law would mean the "Greatest Show on Earth" would no longer travel to Massachusetts.

Elephant safety bill vs. the circus
BostonNOW