Animals in entertainment

Majority of us grew up taking family trips to the circus, zoo, or

the marine park. Seeing animals held captive for human amusement
was part of life. We had never questioned it. If all humans, unless
they have committed crimes against society, deserve freedom, we
should ask ourselves, what have the animals in a zoo or marine park
done to deserve their jail sentences, or the elephants in a circus done
to deserve lives spent mostly in chains?

If humans are locked up, they might spend their days reading, or
watching television or socializing with inmates. Non humans which
are locked up, who should be spending their days swimming or
walking with their families, or hunting or grazing and playing, often
go mad from boredom.

Each of the forms of human entertainment that employ animals

have specific inherent cruelties:

Circusus

Circus animals are kept in cars or tied in chains when not

performing tricks in the ring. When most people are seeing tigers
jumps through hoops of fire, or elephants stand on their heads, they
never had a single thought about what is behind those unnatural acts.
The circus would like us to to be convinced that the animals are
trained with positive reinforcement. If that were true, then we should
see trainers in the ring with bags of treats. However, we often see
them carrying whips and bullhooks  --sticks with sharp metal hooks
on the end. The animals obey in the ring just because they remember
how those instruments of torture felt during training sessions.  If you
visit the wonderfully informative website www.Circuses.com, you
will be able to learn much about what circus animals endure.
Zooz

In all the zooz, including those ‘best’ zooz in the world, there
are still animals living in small cages. Although animals in a zoo
might cherish the bonds they form with their cell mate, but zoos swap
animals back and forth for breeding programs with no concern for
long-term or familial relationships. In August 2003, an article in US
News and World Report, headed "Cruel and Usual," revealed the
pitiful fate of older animals dumped by large popular zoos, where
lively adolescents are more popular with visitors. They often end up
in tiny and dirty cages at roadside zoos across the country, or in
canned hunts, where hunters pay large sums for the guaranteed kill of
an exotic trophy animal. It has shown that dumping animals is the big,
respectable zoos' dirty little secret.

Marine parks

In the Seaquarium in Miami, you can watch Lolita, an Orca who

has been there in a small tank for thirty years, do tricks to amuse the
crowd. If you visit http://www.SlaveToEntertainment.com you you’ll
be able to read about Lolita's story and watch a film on which you'll
see the horrifying footage from the day of her capture in Puget Sound,
her mother being killed trying to prevent her baby's kidnapping. Lolita
is the last remaining live Orca captured that day. Her family is still in
Puget Sound, although the Seaquarium had been offered one million
dollars by generous humans for her freedom, the Seaquarium still
refuses to let her go. 

There is a leading French animal protection group, "One Voice",

which has shared a horrifying account of the annual dolphin slaughter
in Japan, as thousands of dolphins are rounded into a bay and hacked
up with machetes. One Voice has succeeded in videotaping the
horrifying scene as dolphin trainers drove a pod of more than 100
bottlenose dolphins into the killing lagoon to select the ones that fit
the desired criteria for public display. The trainers killed at least four
dolphins in the selection process. Meanwhile, the dolphin trainers let
the fishermen kill all the dolphins they didn’t want. There were
several very small babies in the pod. They still depended on their
mothers‚ milk for survival and were too young to train. So the
fishermen killed them, and the dolphin trainers did absolutely nothing
to help them. The dolphins cried in agony as the fishermen slashed
them with hooks and knives and the lagoon filled with their blood...

Many theme parks and aquariums claim that they do not buy
wild- caught dolphins. But that does not mean they do not support the
dolphin slaughter/capture industry. No matter what the history of the
particular animals, the price of admission at a marine mammal theme
park subsidizes a horrifying industry. 

http://www.dawnwatch.com/entertainment.htm