That sounds like entitlement to me.
Just because you are a human and top of the food chain, doesn’t mean you have a right to treat other animals like crap because “you deserve to be able to”.
Other animals are not alive purely for the enjoyment of humans/human children. They are not toys. Take your kid hiking in the morning, you will see lots of deer or whale watching. It’s a joy and a treat to see animals living “in the wild”. If you wanted human kids to see more animals, maybe humans shouldn’t have killed all the animals off “because they deserve to be able to”. It’s entitlement over animals that got us into this mess of there being no more animals. We made our beds and now live in a time that is called the 6th great mass extinction.
Yellowstone, the Monterey bay aquarium, and the Tonto National Forest should all be viewing requirements.
And take the kids to see the bullfights, the cockfights, and Sea World before all those get shut down too, because your children should experience firsthand humanity’s heavy-handed subjugation of the natural world for our ephemeral entertainment, before we end it once and for all with Climate Change…
You’re welcome, kiddies!!
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The Phoenix Zoo has some very strong things going for it… Some of the enclosures are massive, and they try to keep things as humane as possible. Though I always feel terrible for the primates. Compared to a lot of the zoos I’ve been to (I try to hit the zoo in every city I go to), the one in Phoenix is very good, even when held up to zoos in “real cities”
People generally don’t realize that zoos are also rescue, preservation and science operations, as well as existing for public entertainment.
As a long time Arizona resident, and a fan of the wilds of the Sonoran desert… I have to admit a bit of confusion on the inclusion of the Tonto National Forest on that list. Perhaps I’m just jaded from living within a quick drive of it for 30+ years. Though I suppose, in its entirety, it does give a very nice vertical slice of the Sonoran Desert, and would help dispel the annoying “the desert is a wasteland made only for exploitation” crap.
Though, if anyone is going to heed your advice, I’d tell them to just start with the Boyce Thompson Arboretum.
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Another good, easy place for some light birding is the Desert Botanical Garden I’m March and April.
Roadrunners, cardinals, humming birds of all kinds, butterfly’s… It can be pretty magical.
If you like larger birds of prey, the McKenzie river and Waldo lake almost always has osprey, eagles, and hawks. (Can you tell I like animals?)
Bobcat in my front yard. Never got pics of the packs of wild pigs.
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Interesting and valuable statements all around. Thanks for your comments!
I thought the piece might be controversial (I haven’t read the comments on the original article in the New York Times, but they likely echo those here), and thus its focus is on nostalgia and purposely avoids the argument of whether having elephants in the circus is cruel to them or not. It’s entirely up to you whether or not you take the opportunity to share something that is going to be lost (whether you think it’s good or bad) with your kids. You could, for example, take your kids to the circus and then give them a lecture about how terrible it is to have animals (**any **animals) in a circus.
The circus of my youth is not the circus of today, nor will it be the circus of three years from now. You are free to go or not; to criticize my piece or not. But the happy memories of my youth are immune from criticism–they are mine, and formed at age 5 or 6 when one’s life is still capable of innocent happiness.
It is possible to have happy childhood memories of something that one does not endorse as an intelligent adult.
Regarding zoos, not all are created equal. And at the rate poaching, big-game hunting, human encroachment, and various other factors are decreasing the population of wild animals, zoos are one of the safest refuges for them, and eventually may be their only refuge. The question then becomes, would you rather that animals cease to exist because they have been eradicated in the wild, or allow some animals to still exist because they are protected in zoological parks?
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You need to go to one of the small all human shows like I and others mentioned earlier. They are great. Even Circus Flora while they had an elephant for a while her part in the show was minimal and she didn’t do many of the standard circus tricks and they explained how those tricks were physically bad for the animal she mostly just walked around the ring and got to be part of the story narrative for the show. Flora mostly was outside the tent and gave rides to the kids. Flora is a rescued orphan and is now at a sanctuary.
There is a lot of good stuff out there just that it isn’t Ringling Brothers.
Certainly. I accidently went to a Cirque de Soleil once and it was breathtaking. Just glad I didn’t have to pay for it.
(Late dot com boom sales event, the company I worked for rented Cirque de Soleil. Neil Armstrong was the keynote speaker. It was cray cray)
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One of the first things to go was the Side Show. Misguided folks forced it out of the circus and only succeeded in ruining the livelihoods of the performers, throwing them out of work.
this makes me think that in the “good old days” I might pay to see Peter Dinklage sit around and be small. And now there just arent as many opportunities for people like him to be exploited based on their looks. Such misguidedness also cut down on child labor too. What fools we were!
I have memories like that, too. However I do not think I could choose to forget what I have learned since then. I do not believe that I could enjoy it now and the old memories would only make it harder. Sure, a little child would not care, but given the choice I would rather give that child memories that can be treasured without cognitive dissonance.
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I would rather force humans to coexist with them in their cities! Non-human animals have at least as much of a “legal” right to be there as humans have. And since humans are over-populated, the few unfortunate losses of human life are far more statistically acceptable than those of other animals which would be otherwise extinct.
[quote=“MikeTheBard, post:55, topic:69589”]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[/quote]It’s pretty easy to cultivate a sense of detachment when you’re up in the nosebleeds.
[quote]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.[/quote]Are you not aware that Cirque du Soleil figured it was worth having a go at it? The effort was readily criticized for its questionable narrative.
I don’t want a complete intermingling, if for no other reason than it isn’t healthy for wild animals to eat our trash. But when I lived in Fountain Hills AZ and Coburg OR, you just didn’t have a choice about animals coming into your yard. 
Bears are one of the more problematic, since they are smart, lazy, and big. Bears need bear habitat not shared habitat. Most of the rest around here are just fine.
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I saw that Jim Rose Circus Sideshow a few times… it was okay, no animal cruelty to speak of depending on how the performers refer to themselves.
I’d say that if it qualified as a Circus (sideshow) that there will always be an audience for that stuff.
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No one seems to be discussing the mention of the sideshow. This line is cringe-inducing:
Misguided folks forced it out of the circus and only succeeded in ruining the livelihoods of the performers, throwing them out of work.
People in the ‘freak show’ style sideshows deserve actual jobs, not people gawking at their deformities.
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Oh I got a ticket to NIN specifically because they were an opening act.
It was not a sideshow in the freak sort of way but a lot of stunts and such you normally would not get to see.
I was disappointed that St. Louis didn’t allow Mr. Lifto to do his full act.
I lived on the edge of Tonto, and if you want to hike and see lizards, pigs, weird ass geological formations, mountains made of boulders, Tonto land bridge, Four Peaks, verde river greenway, that one insane park directly east from fountain hills on the salt river (coon bluff campground?), bird after bird after bird…
It’s just huge.
I spent a lot of time there since I was alone and bored 
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Definitely this. And yes, Cirque shows are pricy, but that doesn’t mean all acrobat shows have to have Cirque prices and be in Vegas. This is like when people post videos of terrified belugas trying to scare away children and think that they’re ‘smiling.’
All of the elephants packed their trunks
And waved goodbye to the circus
With a trump trump trumpety trump
They marched to their lawyer’s office
And filed a multibillion dollar class action suit
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