I’m writing to you today to request you consider an ordinance that would outlaw the use of wild animals in circuses and traveling shows in Northern Ireland.

I believe it’s time for our community to prioritize the protection of public safety and to support only humane treatment of animals. These kinds of shows create a risk to public safety. The handling and confinement of wild animals for use in entertainment creates potentially dangerous situations. These performance animals have been known to lose it and lash out at their trainers, and in some cases escape confinement and go on destructive rampages. In the last ten years alone there have been over 100 instances of performing wild animals getting loose and attacking their trainers or the public, sometimes with fatal results.

It takes a tremendous amount of cruel training to break the wild animals to get them to perform the tricks seen at circus performances. Nursing animals are taken from their mothers and put through the painful procedure of “breaking.” To dominate and create fear in performance animals, they are bound and beaten into submission, a process so traumatic that they will certainly obey their trainers the rest of their lives or suffer the consequences. Performing wild animals will then spend eleven months out of every year confined, on the road, and traveling from town to town. They are only freed when they are put in front of crowds and forced to perform unnatural tricks that cause their bodies to prematurely age.

Attendance to circuses and similar traveling shows is on the decline as the majority of the community have come to realize that this kind of treatment of wild animals is simply wrong. Circuses that only use human performers prove that the humane, non-animal circus model can be successful. Those circuses have proven to be popular and draw larger crowds than the antiquated model that uses wild animals. We should welcome only those performances that do not use wild animals.

I urge you to have our area be a leader on this issue and outlaw the use of wild animals in circuses and traveling shows in Northern Ireland.