Dude, where you been? IT’S DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME right now.
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I used it to kill hitler and someone keeps putting him back. I think I know who it is now.
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I try, but is hard when you are parked at makeout point and there are 20 other clowns in the backseat cramping your style!
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I haven’t been to a circus that I enjoyed even a small fraction as much as Pierre Bidon’s insanely entertaining “Archaos”. But sadly, he and it are no more. 
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Oh man wrong side of the country but looks like fun stuff!
Typo: supposed to be 2018.
Makes me pine for the good old days, when after they’d killed one another with nets and tridents, the survivors would be fed to a bear.
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I honestly cannot believe that boingbboing has published an article endorsing the circus. I went to the circus as a child and even then I knew there was something wrong with the elephants being whipped and prodded to stand on their hind legs, or the lions jumping through hoops. I am proud to say that I fought hard with fellow citizens to have the circus banned in Clatsop County. All we had to do was ban the painful bullhooks, electric shock prods and whips and that ended the circus.
I encourage everyone to do just the opposite of this article skip the cruel Ringling Bros. Circus and find ways you can help to ban every circus that uses animals. Let us put the welfare of all the wildlife imprisoned, tortured, starved, and beaten to make them perform a priority! https://youtu.be/ECspj0daAlE
That’s the circus! A baby elephant ripped from his or her mother and then beaten into submission. “Teach your children well”
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Richard I find it hard to believe that an educated person such as yourself would urge people to quickly get to the circus to see the animal abuse before it’s finally shut down. How do you rationalize the suffering in your mind to be worth it for your entertainment?
The circus may be fun for you but what about the elephants? Today science has proven what highly intelligent beings these creatures are. I just don’t understand how we as humans can rationalize sacrificing their lives for a trip to the circus. If anything I hope you can learn from many comments that the circus can’t end soon enough.
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Richard you are ignorant to promote the circus.
Elephants in captivity go insane, they have all sorts of psychological problems and aggression from being abused. In captivity they step from one foot to the other because they are chained up. It’s no way to live. There have been instances of mother elephants in captivity killing their babies, because it is no way to live.
They are social animals who live in matriarchies in the wild, a grandma living with their daughters and granddaughters and cousins, etc. They can travel 100 miles in a single day. They are highly intelligent creatures with long memories, they mourn their dead for years after revisit old bones. Here is a story of elephants who came to mourn the passing of a man who had saved their lives: http://ssnarendrakumar.blogspot.com/2012/12/are-elephants-more-emotional-than-humans.html
Elephants are empathetic and have altruistic behavior. They are emotional and have been seen crying.
Please remove this pro-circus promotional post. It’s gross and will teach your kids that animal abuse and slavery is ok.
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This is akin to griping about how the neighbourhood has gotten gentrified and how it’s a shame the dive bar you used to visit got cleaned up by those hipsters, really. We all remember the metal toys of our youth and forget the lead paint that adorned them.
I will not mourn circuses passing, as they had their time. They merely hung on longer than vaudeville did, but so many of them were crap that I find it more humane to let the artform go the way of minstrel shows.
Outrage at his glibness aside, it’s not unreasonable for someone not to know something. So in the best tradition of the internets, and primarily for Mr. Kaufman’s benefit,
I’m just gonna leave this here:
Elephants aren’t all animals. And while I’ve also heard good arguments against big cats in the circus full stop, I think performing horses, dogs, etc. aren’t necessarily being mistreated unless their trainer is simply cruel.
Also, Ringling Bros really isn’t all circuses. I saw the Big Apple Circus every year when I was growing up. There were plenty of special effects in the TV I watched, but I could still appreciate the transporting realness of a live show. And the Big Apple Circus has a much different animal philosophy from that of Ringling Bros, as represented, for instance, by a small crew of trained dogs adopted exclusively from shelters - I’m sure it can’t be alone.
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The point being there are plenty great clowns, magicians, acrobats, buskers, dancers, musicians, etc etc. The circus, as described in the article, does not have some sort of “zomg see it before it’s gone” lock on human entertainers, or pomp and circumstance surrounding the same.
Yeah, but by that same token, there is plenty of great music out there, and record stores don’t have a lock on it either- But it’s heartbreaking for an aficionado to see the end of a knowledgeably and lovingly curated collection when one of the few remaining stores closes.
@Jorpho: And also how little would have been lost just watching the whole thing on TV captured with expertly-wielded video cameras.
No, a LOT is lost when you put things on a screen. There’s a detachment which leaves the viewer less invested in the performance, and more importantly, it’s a major loss of livelihood- Take a look at the album sales vs touring numbers for musicians, and multiply it by a factor of 10- There’s way too much investment in that sort of act to do it once on film and expect to have any kind of payout. It HAS to tour.
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I’d like to see the animals treated better, but we have people right now who live their entire lives without ever seeing a live animal that isn’t a pigeon or someone’s pet. Circuses and zoos provide an experience these kids will never get anywhere else. It makes those animals real to them in a way that TV and books can’t.
And I can’t help think of how many of those kids will grow up to be veterinarians or park rangers or dedicate their lives to preserving an endangered species because of that experience.
Before? You don’t know any circus hippies?
Cirque de Soleil has as much to do with the circus experience described here as your favourite local pub has to do with some pretentious upmarket cocktail bar.
I love the circus and I hate Cirque de Soleil, not least because of the appalling way artists are treated (this I know from reliable sources). Cirque de Soleil is a cocaine fuelled ego trip without spirit or soul, while the circus we knew is an experiment in communal living and working. Very different.
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Where in the world does one need to live to never have the opportunity to see a wild animal? Even in ultra urban places like New York City or LA there are rats, birds, the occasional squirrel, mouse, or confused coyote.
I was forced to go the the circus with my family (my dad was in childlike awe, so no wasn’t an answer), and I can honestly say… I didn’t get it. It was loud. It was crowded. The clowns were boring. Everything was expensive. And, being older and wiser, the animal acts were completely unenjoyable. Sure, there were some neat tricks… But they were the minority of the acts. My mom is an animal activist, so I never went to the circus as a child, so I suppose I never got the nostalgia needed to find them enjoyable.
This article is horrible. Telling me that I should be nostalgic for animal cruelty is reprehensible. Also, the real circus, or at least the big ones, aren’t what I expected them to be (full of showmanship, carnies, and strange people), it was just another way to get parents to part with huge sums of money to make their children shut up for two hours.
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I used to live less than a mile walk from the Phoenix zoo, and visited almost every weekend. Zoos are not perfect for animals, but they do serve a purpose, such as this anecdote.
They have an enormous, quite nice elephant enclosure with three elephants. One of them was born in the sixties and lived most of her life in the Ringling Brothers circus. Still she stomped and killed her ‘trainer’.
She was rescued by phx and has a better life, but she will still stand in one place and sway as if she was still chained up. When the elephant attendants told me, “this is what an abused elephant acts like” I wanted to cry.
I’ll take modern, well managed zoos even with their problems. Fuck circuses.
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