blogcutter

I remember when I was about seven, the Moscow Circus came to town. I was enthralled by the whole thing. But the highlight for me was the performing bears. There were bears on bicycles, bears on roller skates and at the end of the performance, one bear came and presented another one with a bouquet of flowers. It's all very politically incorrect these days, so much so that many folks (including Ottawa Humane Society director Bruce Roney) suggest that we ought to boycott any circus that uses ANY kind of non-human animal in its acts: elephants, monkeys, seals, whatever.

Now, I eat a vegetarian diet - no dead animals except, I presume, the occasional bug that makes its way unannounced into my salad or the uncountable submicroscopic organisms that regularly make up part of the human ecosystem - so clearly I have given some thought to the ethical treatment of animals. I do use animal products in nondietary ways - leather shoes and boots, for example - so I would never adopt a holier-than-thou attitude towards fur-wearers or meateaters. But it seems to me that if animals used in circuses, or on farms, or in zoos are well-cared-for and humanely treated, we don't need to have a cow about it. Most likely, they are going to enjoy longer and healthier lives in captivity than they would in the wild, where they are likely to have both human and non-human predators to contend with.

Animals in scientific experiments? I haven't entirely made up my mind on that one. Certainly I hated high-school science classes where we had to dissect various kinds of animals and where one of my teachers joked about using "this bit of an old alley cat" to rub an ebony rod and generate static electricity. When that same teacher tried to "voluntell" me to dissect an animal at open house, I quickly assured him (somewhat before-the-fact) that I had already volunteered to sell books at the book table - perhaps that had something to do with my becoming a librarian and not a veterinarian, which was one of my career ambitions at one time! But when would we have discovered insulin, if Banting and Best and What's-his-name had not been allowed to experiment on dogs? We didn't have the kind of computer simulation or virtual reality capabilities in those days that we have today. And even today, I'm not sure what kinds of constraints the available technological tools and techniques place on medical research.

I do regard certain features of old-fashioned circuses as being quite barbaric. For example, I have no desire to go and gawk at people who just happen to be extraordinarily fat, thin, short, tall, deformed or conjoined to each other. But I think with reasonable controls in place, animal acts can still be quite defensible.