Letter to the Editor  Circus Oversight-  It won’t help elephants

A Sept. 5 letter encouraged a ban on the use of wild animals in circuses, and highlighted the plight of circus elephants to illustrate the need. Two members of the Minneapolis City Council responded in a Sept. 6 opinion piece that a ban would not improve the lives of circus animals, but strengthened oversight might.

Sticking to the example of circus elephants, it's time to be brutally honest. It is impossible for elephants to have anything remotely approaching a happy life as part of a circus.

Provide all the site visits, regulatory oversight and health checkups you like and the elephants will still be miserable. Elephants are highly social, astonishingly intelligent, and very sensitive -- they visibly mourn their dead, stroking the bodies of the fallen as they grieve. To chain them up and force them to perform tricks for the amusement of spoiled humans is barbaric -- a relic of a less enlightened age. Elephants belong in only two places -- the wild, open range of their native territories, and, sadly, due to human predation and loss of habitat, in sanctuaries large enough to allow them to roam and live naturally.

The members of the City Council may hope to salve their self-proclaimed progressive consciences by throwing a few bucks toward "oversight," but their motives are dishonest and transparent. Indeed, they admitted as much in their opinion piece, when they came to real heart of it: They want the revenue associated with putting on a circus show, and they're going to get it. But let's not let them obfuscate the truth: The money comes at the price of torturing creatures who cannot speak for themselves. Council members, look in the mirror and repeat that three times.
Then go ahead and collect your circus revenue. To hell with the elephants, eh? They don't vote anyway.

LANCE GROTH, APPLE VALLEY