Stop Animal Circuses!

Touring circuses may cover thousands of miles a year, carrying animals from site to site in transporters and cages on the backs of lorries known as beast wagons. Moving location each week means they spend most of the year in temporary accommodation.

The animals may be confined for hours, even days, in their traveling cages.

Yet traveling circuses in the UK have recently included such diverse animals as lions, tigers, dogs, domestic cats, reptiles such as alligators and snakes, camels, llamas, parrots, ducks, budgerigars, horses and elephants. In Europe, you can find polar bears, rhinos and hippos.

In the wild, elephants are extremely social, living in large groups or herds and travel on average 25kms per day. In the circus, they spend most of each day chained by a front and a hind leg, standing on a wooden or metal board in a tent.

The chains on their legs mean they can only shuffle a pace or two backwards or forwards. If they are lucky, they will occasionally have access to a grassed electric fenced enclosure, but this will depend on the circus site.
Thus circus elephants spend almost their entire day barely able to move, let alone being able to perform natural behaviours such as foraging, bathing, traveling and socialising.
It is not just wild animals that are frustrated and severely confined.

Horses and ponies are gregarious animals - extremely social. After being unloaded from their horse boxes or transporters they are often confined in tents, separated from their companions by stalls, which do not allow socialising or mutual grooming. Often horse will be tethered or kept in tiny pens for the entire time they are not performing or rehearsing. If exercise enclosures are provided, these are generally very small - it is unlikely a horse would gallop or really exercise in one.