Circus animals - Outdated tradition

Yesterday’s decision by Cork County Council to take what is the first step towards banning the use of performing animals by circuses is a welcome one.

The area of animal rights is one of today’s political correctness battlegrounds but the lifelong exploitation of any animal in a circus environment for mere entertainment seems harder and harder to justify. It seems a relentless life, one of confinement that imposes a life utterly unnatural and disrespectful. It seems an idea from a different time when exotic animals were fascinating because they were mysterious and unknown. That fascination has, thanks to television, long passed.

The circus community must know this, just as we know it is not beyond their imagination to renew their great traditions without exploiting animals.