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The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will put on its last show this month, after more than 140 years in performance. Many factors led to the demise of the so-called “Greatest Show on Earth”—growing costs, shrinking attention spans, the rise of other forms of entertainment, the effect of local transport legislation on a show that still rides the rails. B
ut one of the loudest arguments in recent memory concerned the show’s animal performers, which came to appear more retrograde than entertaining thanks to an evolving dialogue on animal rights. Following a damning 2011 Mother Jones investigative report and ugly multi-year litigation over elephant care, the circus’s parent company Feld Entertainment retired its use of elephants at a performance last May.
The showman P.T. Barnum, who died in 1891, takes a lot of heat as the original architect of the circus; he’s ostensibly the man who created callous demand for performing tigers and dancing elephants in the first place. Though there’s truth to this view, a look at Barnum’s career also reveals his surprising involvement with a movement that would, over a century later, cheer the end of his circus. Through his unlikely friendship with the prominent early animal-rights activist Henry Bergh in the late 1800s, Barnum found himself in the thick of the debate over the care and feeding of Victorian animal entertainers. In fact, the animal-rights movement might not have survived to exist in its modern form and breadth if not for the media exposure Barnum lent it in its fragile infancy.