Ringmaster Is Needed to Monitor This Debate

Tonight around 6, a woman dressed as a lion will walk around on crutches in the parking lot outside the Arrowhead Pond.

The circus has come to town.

Orange County animal-rights activists will be protesting what they consider mistreatment of animals in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus. The circus folk will sigh and say the protesters are sadly misinformed. A similar scene has played out around the country.

Don’t expect me to resolve this. I had lengthy conversations with advocates on both sides and came away not knowing what’s what.

I’m not an animal-rights type, but if I knew for a fact that animals were abused to entertain me, I’d favor shutting down the Big Top.

Convince me, I ask Kristal Parks, a Denver activist whose passion is elephants. Educated as a biologist, she recently returned from a trip to Africa where she met with elephant experts. She also appeared this week on the KUCI-FM (88.9) program “Talking Animals.”

“I don’t know what kind of misinformation they [Ringling officials] will give you,” she says, “but they will, of course, try to protect their industry and way of life and income. But I can tell you as one who has been in the wild with elephants, they don’t do those tricks unless they’ve been abused. Elephants and tigers are not like your dog, who you can train by giving it a treat. You can’t train an elephant by giving it a peanut. They’re highly intelligent, evolved, sentient.”

Like humans, they have self-awareness, they bond with family members and show compassion both within and outside their own species, she says. They’d be aware of abuse and wouldn’t like it.

Rubbish, says Ringling spokesman Andy Perez, although he didn’t use that exact word. “Unfortunately, activists often say things like this and are very misguided. There are Asian elephants and there are African elephants. We use Asian elephants, and they are much more domesticated than African elephants. They have been working with man for more than 4,000 years.”

The Anaheim tour stop will let the public see the animals up close at an “open house” where they can tour their living quarters and meet the trainers, Perez says.

“Elephants are playful creatures. They’re very smart. What you can see in young elephants, through their play, is that they like to stand on things, they climb over each other, they sit down on their butts, they lie down, they stand on their hind legs. Their trunk is amazing, they pick things off trees, they like to toss things.

“What we do is we observe them at play to see if they actually like performing. They tell us what they want to do. Our training is repetition and reward. We take their behavior and reward it and put it into sequence, add lights and it’s a show.”

Parks dismisses Perez’s argument about the difference in elephants. Besides, she says, elephants are chained when not performing, and confinement alone is “almost like putting a human being in a jail cell.”

That prompts another sigh from Perez. “They get more exercise, better food, better water and care than they would in the wild,” he says.

Perez says Ringling has never been found at fault for abuse. It has, however, been targeted. This week, a Humane Society of the United States website calls for boycotting the circus and notes that three animal-rights groups are suing Ringling Bros. for alleged mistreatment of elephants.

Like the elephants, the debate goes round and round.

Perez says Ringling Bros. will never stop using elephants and that 80% of circus-goers come to see them.

Charlotte Gordon, a member of the Orange County People for Animals group that will demonstrate tonight, concedes the public hasn’t been won over. “We need to change [the impression] that we’re trying to take something away from them. That’s what most people are thinking, that we’re trying to take away the fun. We’re just trying to take away the animals.”

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Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.