Sir, - In recent months I have visited circuses where elephants are chained to the floor, unable to take steps or turn around for up to 23 hours a day. If elephants were shackled like this at Dublin Zoo there would be a public outcry for the Zoo to be prosecuted for cruelty; yet circuses routinely get away with chaining elephants like this. I have also seen numerous tigers and lions cramped in converted trailers; monkeys locked in tiny cages; and, most surprisingly, a giraffe, rhino and hippo all in pathetically small, barren pens.
Presumably a licence was granted to import all these animals under the Wildlife Act. Is this licence granted with reference to how animals are housed? When circuses arrive, do the Department of Agriculture the wildlife service or local councils inspect the animals' accommodation? It would be unforgiveable to issue a licence without taking responsibility for what the licence allows, but even more unforgiveable if the circuses' treatment of animals is considered licence-worthy by these authorities.
Circuses make money from audiences ignorant of animal suffering or indifferent to it. Keeping large and potentially dangerous animals in squalid confinement for cheap laughs and spectacle is degrading to audiences, to the authorities allowing this abuse and to the animals themselves.- Yours, etc.,
Killiney, Co Dublin.